*New Post* What’s Matthew Been Up To

Hi everyone hope all is well with everyone. I’ve been a little quiet since my August 2019 Dividend Income post, so today I thought I would just update you on what I have been doing.

August

As you know if you read my August recap post that on the investing front I had a great and busy month with all of the buys, sells and record income (first time hitting $500 in August).  On the personal finance front I did something pretty awesome I became DEBT FREE. It’s something that I had wanted to do for a long time. I achieved this by taking a couple of my paychecks and giving them to my parents to payoff my loan to them. So once that was done I only had my car loan left. To eliminate the car loan I decided to take money out of my emergency fund and payoff the car once and for all. Even though my interest on the loan was under 1%, I felt I needed to pay it off because of the job cuts that were going to take place in Sept.

September

Personal Finance

September has been an expensive month for me. Every year there is a personal finance conference I believe it is usually held every September or October called FinCon. FinCon seems like a lot of fun and I tried to read as many recap blog posts as I could. I almost attended this year’s event in Washington D.C., however next year I have made the decision to attend which will be my very first time attending the event. Next year the conference is being held in Long Beach, California. As soon as I made the decision to go I bought my ticket for FinCon ($200 USD) and booked an AirBnb. So September spending has been crazy.

On the savings side I have been putting all of my money from my paychecks into my savings account to rebuild my emergency fund. As of September 20th the account is back up to where I had it in the summer. This was important for another reason, I may have to dip into my emergency fund soon as my union maybe going on strike with the government. For those of you that don’t know I’m a custodian and work for a local school board, how contract ended at the end of August. I won’t go into the details of what the government has offered us other than to say it’s pretty bad. We held a strike vote a couple of weeks ago and all support workers in Ontario voted 93% in favor of striking. Fingers crossed it doesn’t come to that!

Investing

Since all of the buys and sells in August I have been very quiet on the investing front. I have not made and buys or sells, I have been sitting back and collecting my dividends. Thanks to the drip program I have been able to drip new shares of some stocks. Also I have received some juicy dividend increases from Microsoft and Texas Instruments. Last week I was able to put $500 in my TFSA account and I thought I would be able to start making more contributions but I may have to hold off on that with the work situation.

Well folks that is what I’ve been up to over the last couple of months. Next week I will have a new post recapping the dividend income from September.

Thanks for reading!

Matthew

 

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