November 2011 Budget

Hey guys, I know I haven't really been posting lately, but that's due to the crazy workload that school decided to drop on me. I actually have a couple posts I want to do so once midterms are over you can bet I'll be putting up some stuff.  I actually have a midterm on Halloween, and one the following day. Who does that?! How am I going to go Trick-o-Treating to Halloween parties?

Anyways here's November's budget. I'm going to leave it the same as October's because I haven't tallied up everything yet but I'm sure I'm pretty close to the budget (other than one purchase I didn't expect, but I guess I should have). Also because I'm lazy I have no time. Ugh, I keep making typos (hopefully this won't happen on my tests)!

Happy Halloween!

-the Paperboy

Canadian Oil Sands Position

Sigh. I made a mistake on Wednesday. I sold my position in Canadian Oil Sands (COS.TO) for an 11% return (plus one dividend distribution). That may sound like good news to some of you, but I didn't intend to sell! The company still seems like a good play to me; I actually wanted to set a stop-loss to protect the profit but I wasn't paying attention and instead I sold the stock. Goes to show you that when it comes to investing, it's best to be vigilant. Hopefully this doesn't come back to haunt me!

-the Paperboy

How I Plan to Use DRIPs

Last time I talked a little bit about the pros and cons of using DRIPs in your financial plan. Now I would like to talk about how I plan to implement DRIPs to help me achieve my financial goals. Since my main concern with running a DRIP is the fact that I can't choose when to purchase more shares (it's automatically done for me), I decided that I would have some criteria that would have to be met in order for me to DRIP a stock.

Sun Life Financial Position

On Monday Sun Life Financial (TSX: SLF), one of the largest insurance companies in the country announced their estimates for their third quarter. They expect to report a loss of $621 million dollars. For me, that's great news. I took the opportunity to increase my position after the stock tumbled 9%. I now have enough shares to generate one share with the dividends that are distributed every quarter, which sets everything up for a synthetic DRIP. This is especially attractive because Sun Life Financial offers a 2% discount with their DRIP. Now all I have to do is have a little chat with my broker and the compounding machine will be ready to go.

-the Paperboy