As it seems to be customary for most people - as we get older - real life continues to fly past at an ever alarming rate. Another two years have just about passed by since my last post and again, the challenges and changes have been considerable.
Most notably of all the big changes - my wife and I had a baby! After 6.5 years of trying diligently, something finally clicked and we were able to have a child of our own, a baby girl, in 2021. Now over a year old, we are expecting another child due early 2023!
Never in our wildest dreams did we think that we would get pregnant, let alone twice. When we were first dating, we dreamed about having 5 kids and after our challenges with infertility, we thought those days were over. But, here we are - and we couldn't be more excited!
Secondly, we bought our first rental right after that last post two years ago. My grandfather was a big real estate investor buying homes for $2000 and selling them for $4000. Unfortunately, life got in the way for him as well and he sold out of his real estate holdings before the first big real estate market explosion in the 90s. He continued to work and live a modest life, never really amassing much wealth. But, I asked him one time while visiting him in the nursing home - "Do you have any regrets?"
As someone who sold his investment properties for $4000 and within 3 years watched them sell for $50K I surely thought he would have said yes. But his answer surprised me. Without hesitation, he said "No." Ever since that time, I started to think of money and life a little differently. I suppose money just makes life a little easier but you shouldn't wait to have money to be happy. Most people will never achieve happiness if that is the case. So, my wife and I have spent more money, went on more trips and tried to enjoy life a little bit more. Now we get to do those things with soon to be FOUR kids!
Unfortunately, it wasn't long after this conversation that my grandfather passed away. My dream was always to buy his house as my first rental, and that's what I did.
But since this is still a money blog - the numbers work out roughly as follows:
Mortgage: $1000
Rent: $2000
Profit: $750/month (taking out repairs and vacancies)
So there you have it - our "dividends" have jumped by roughly $9000/year because of this purchase.
However, in order to buy this house, we sold some shares of companies and for our last big change....
We bought another house!
However, we sold more shares to pay for this house.
Good news though - we are going to rent our old house which should (fingers crossed) cover the mortgage and then some of our new house! Bought the house for sale by owner for relatively cheap (in our area) with 10 acres of land! Might start a small farmette to raise our own food and teach our kids good moral values. Should be fun! We were gifted a ford 2000 tractor and purchased a small four wheeler for the boys for their birthday. What a blast they are having on that!
We still own over 1000s of CVS and now over 1600s of MO (strictly through reinvesting dividends over two years)
Our dividend totals now stand currently at:
$8,500/year for just those two companies
$9000/year for grandfathers rental
$25,000/year for new rental (old house)
$42,500/year in total income! - strictly taxable income though. There are still dividends from our 401Ks but I won't include them here.
Big challenge now is if we could pay off our new house in 5 years or so, you are talking about no expenses and $42,500 coming in before any manual labor.
It's honestly odd watching the dividend community progress over the past 4 years since I stopped actively reading and writing about it. Checking in on the more well known bloggers going up over $25 or $40K per year in dividends while I have simultaneously done the same thing with arguably less money (more risk I suppose when adding in mortgages) and have come out at the same general income levels. I was worried I was falling behind but instead it appears I'm just going about things differently now and that's okay!
Looking forward to enjoying our new home, getting it paid off and just maybe slowing down on the manual labor dollars in the next 5-10 years.
Most likely I'll check back in another 2 years and see just how far I've progressed at that point!
Keep Investing everyone! And for the younger kids out there - stocks are looking better and better everyday as they keep going down! Those growth stocks have really come down a lot! I like AMD, TROW, O, BMY (still), and many more!
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