December Budget 2011

Hey guys, I'm back with the December budget. Seeing as it's the holiday season, I increased the budget to accommodate for all the gifts and events. Hopefully I stay under the budget this time because I gave myself lots of room to work with! I'll have an update on the November budget up soon.

-the Paperboy

Millionaire Teacher Giveaway At MyOwnAdvisor!

Seems that everybody is giving away prizes this time of year. This time around, over at My Own Advisor is giving away a free copy of Millionaire Teacher. Go and check it out! While you're over there, I suggest reading up on all the great posts about dividend and index investing along with all the articles about DRIPs.
 
-the Paperboy

Corus Entertainment Position

On Monday I grabbed some more shares of Corus Entertainment. Growing up, everybody I knew watched television. At school the next day, we would talk about shows we saw the previous night. Every kid I knew would watch YTV. Even now, 10 years later, my little sister watches it religiously. Not only does Corus own YTV, but it owns Treehouse, a 50% stake in Teletoon and Teletoon Retro, a handful of other channels, 37 radio stations and Nelvana which creates some of the shows on these television channels. I'm trying to increase my position in Corus to get my synthetic DRIP going but I have to invest a lot more because of the monthly distributions instead of the quarterly distributions so this means I need to get more dividends in order to cover the price of one share. However, once it gets started then I'll be receiving one share every month!

-the Paperboy

Tax-Free Saving Accounts

Awhile back I talked about which vehicles I would use for certain investments. One of the key accounts to my plan is the Tax Free Saving Account (TFSA). We all hate paying taxes so today I want to go into a little more detail about TFSAs and why you should take advantage of them.

The DividendGuyBlog giveaway!

Hey you may have noticed that there's a list of blogs that I put up. They're all great resources to further educate yourself in the investing world.

I plan to do a little post about the sites soon, but until then, over at the dividendguyblog.com an iPad giveaway is happening! Go check out the site to learn more about dividend investing and maybe you'll win an iPad (but hopefully I win it ;).

-the Paperboy

Canadian Oil Sands Position: Part II

Remember a couple weeks back when I sold my position in COS.TO by accident? Well the following day, the stock continued to rise and I was a bit disappointed that I was missing out. However, earlier this week, the stock took a dive and was actually lower than my previous entry point. Needless to say I happily picked up some shares for less than the first time around.

To be clear here - I got lucky; there was no way that I would have known what would have happened to the price in such a short period of time. I wasn't planning this move in any way shape or form. I still believe that buying strong companies with solid dividends and holding them to take part in their growth is a great plan which I intend to stick to. Flipping stocks is risky business and you may not even come out ahead of a solid dividend or index approach.

That being said... I'll take luck wherever I can get it (especially when it helps cover up my mistakes)!

-the Paperboy

October Budget 2011 Review

It's been a couple days since October has passed so I knew I had to get this done. This was the first month that I tried to keep track of my spending and I don't think I did that bad. I went over the limit on food & entertainment by a little bit. The reason that the item purchases amount was so high was that I had to buy a textbook for school.

I didn't take into account that I kind of need books to learn. This is another situation where a little foresight would have helped with preparation and that's something that can be applied not only to other areas of finance, but to life in general. Oh well, what can you do? If that was factored out then I would actually be under budget!

Since I don't plan to buy another textbook anytime soon, I decided to keep the same numbers for November's budget and hopefully this time I'll be able to do it. I know for a fact that I'll have to adjust the numbers for December because of the holiday season but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

-the Paperboy

Waste Management Position

Some of you may have seen a truck like this rolling around in your city. Progressive Waste Solution owns BFI Canada (which provides services in 6 provinces), IESI (which provides services in 10 states in the U.S.) and Waste Service Inc. which was acquired just last year. Progressive Waste Solution (BIN.TO) is the third largest non-hazardous solid waste management company in North America, serving commercial, residential, and industrial customers.

I picked up some shares earlier this week when BIN got caught up in the free fall that almost every stock took when the Euro crisis resurfaced. BIN seems to be a solid company and I'm happy to add it to my portfolio. Besides, everybody needs to put their garbage somewhere right?

Remember, one man's trash is another man's treasure...or in this case another man's reason to own a waste management company.

-the Paperboy