January Income – $2733.20

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Here is a breakdown of my income for January.

Online Income

 $525.60
Interest

$3.64

Dividends

$12.92

Cash Back

$25.85

Job

 $2165.19

Total

$2733.20

January was a decent month for income since I did work full time for the whole month. My previous job and my current job overlapped for a week, but I just took time off from one to work the other and didn’t accrue any extra hours.   No overtime was offered at my job or I would have done better.  Now that filing has started I should be able to work a few hours overtime every week which will help my income quite a bit.

My online income was once again a little higher than I expected.  I’m not making anywhere near as much as I used to online, but it is still good money considering how little time I devote to it.

My passive income such as referral income from sites like Mr. Rebates and dividends is pretty small, but it adds up over the year.

This month and the next I need to make a lot of money from my job since I plan to take some time off for at least a couple months once the tax season is over.

 

January Expenses – $1199.65

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for January.

Household $400.00
Entertainment

$39.93

Transportation

 $399.03

Food

$120.57
Phone

$26.81
Health

$56.31
Travel

$157.00

Total

 $1199.65

My January expenses were slightly higher than I prefer.  I would have made my goal of spending less than $1000 a month if I wouldn’t have needed to get my brakes fixed.  I was hoping to just get new pads, but I was told I needed new rotors which seemed plausible since my car has almost 200,000 miles.  The brake job with the new rotors and an oil change set me back $268.  I would like to reduce my transportation expense category this year and I’m not off to a good start.

I also spent $157 on airfare for a hike I’m going to be taking as soon as the tax season is over. I shouldn’t be spending anything on travel this month or next month.  My entertainment category was abnormally low since we didn’t feel like going to the movies in January. I expect that will change this month.  All of the other categories will likely remain about the same.

My Terrible 2013 Investment Returns

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Here is a breakdown of my investment returns for 2013. Although the stock market returned about 32% for the year I managed to do much worse. I don’t think I’ve ever given any advice here on investing in stocks and bonds, but if I did I hope you didn’t take it. I calculated the returns using the portfolio personal rate of return calculator at My Money Blog. The calculator doesn’t give your exact return, but it is close enough.

I have three different investment accounts. My Roth IRA which was invested in a bond fund. My Traditional IRA which is invested in index funds and my dividend stock account which consists of individual dividend stocks. I’ll share how each of them did and why I think they had sucky returns for the year.

I will start with the worst. My Roth IRA which was invested in a bond fund managed to lose 9.09%. This was quite a feat considering the bond fund I invested in lost 8.77% for the year. Somehow I managed to lose just a little more. It could have been even worse. I bailed out of the bond fund and into a money market fund about halfway through the year and it ended even lower than when I bailed out. I’m guessing my return was worse then the bond fund’s return because the additional investments I made early in the year were when the fund had appreciated a bit from the beginning of the year. I knew the bond fund would take a big hit when interest rates began to rise and I had been thinking of switching out of it, but I waited too long to do anything. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this money now. The money market fund actually has a slight negative return after expenses so I don’t want to leave the money there. I’ll probably put the money back into a different, shorter-term, bond fund, but I am still a little wary of doing that. What would you recommend.

The second worst was my dividend stock portfolio. It managed to return 5.9% for the year. That is pretty bad when the overall market returned 32%. My worst mistake here was not being diversified enough. Part of the reason I wasn’t diversified enough was not having enough money. Since it costs $4.95 to buy a stock, I like to wait until I have a $1000 to invest before purchasing a stock. The most stocks I’ve had in the account was 10 which is still not diversified enough. I had to sell some of them in 2012 because I needed the money so for 2013 I only had seven stocks. A couple of the remaining stock positions were well under $1000 because I had sold part of them when I needed money. The two REITs I had in the portfolio were full positions and their value went down quite a bit due to the entire REIT sector going down over fears of higher mortgage rates. I stopped investing in that account last year and started buying stocks through LOYAL3 . This allowed me to diversify a little more since they don’t have any transaction fees and I can invest as little as $10 in a stock. When you have a small investment amount like I do not having to pay $4.95 to buy and sell the stock makes a difference. The big drawback to Loyal3 for me is that they do batch orders for buying and selling so you can’t be sure what price you will get. I’m holding off on buying any more individual stocks for now because I want to max out my IRA and build up my cash savings a bit.

My traditional IRA account was my best performing account for the year although it still lagged the overall stock market by quite a bit. This account returned 20.64%. The account was invested in a couple of domestic dividend stock index funds, a preferred shares fund, and an international dividend stock fund. The preferred shares fund and international fund both had small losses which dragged down the overall return. This year I’m not going to invest in the preferred shares fund. Also, the two domestic dividend stock funds have a lot of duplicate holdings so I’m just going to invest in the lower cost one from now on. Investing in both is an unnecessary extra cost.

My overall portfolio return for the year was measly 3.51%. I could make that much with a savings account. I’m hoping that with a change of strategy I’ll do better this year.

My Top 8 Movies of 2013

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movies This is a bit off topic, but it is something I wanted to write so I’m writing it. My picks for the top 8 movies are necessarily limited to movies that I’ve seen. Since I’ve only seen two out of the nine Academy Award Best Picture nominees my list will be quite a bit different from their list. I did see 48 movies in the theater last year. Adding 2013 movies I saw on DVD and Netflix I saw a total of about 60 movies during the year. These are the ones I liked best in order of when I saw them.

1. Identity Thief
2. The Heat
3. The Way Way Back
4. We’re the Millers
5. The Spectacular Now
6. Gravity
7. Bad Grandpa
8. This is the End

This is a top 8 list because that is how many movies I felt deserved to be on my top list. As you can see, I’m partial to raunchy comedies, but a couple of serious movies are among my picks. What do you think of these movies? What would be on your top movies of 2013 list?

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Possible Plans for 2014

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CAM00206 It has been a while since I’ve put up a post on this blog. I’ve decided to just post when I feel like writing a post and lately I haven’t felt like posting much. I even thought about quitting blogging completely, but I like having a record of my thoughts and finances. This blog has always been more of a journal than a magazine/advice type blog and now that will likely be even more so. I’m not setting any blogging goals for the year right now. I’m just going to blog when I want to blog.

I’m actually not making any yearly goals right now. I did fine on the two yearly goals I made last year, but this year I want to make some non-financial goals. I’m thinking those goals will be monthly goals so if I get off track one month I can get back on track the next month. The areas I need to make goals for are losing weight/getting in shape and (non-blog) writing. This month my goals are to take the steps at work and to spend less on fast food than I did in December. I’m doing fine on those goals so far this month and I’m thinking I probably made my goals too easy. I can set harder goals next month. Of course, I can also improve on my goals this month as well.

There are also a couple of things I would like to do this year that are not goals. They are just wishes at this point. I’d like to spend at least a month hiking. Based on my previous experiences, that isn’t likely to happen. At least not a month of consecutive days hiking. Nonetheless, I am going to try again. I plan to get in better shape before I start my hike so the hiking isn’t such a shock to my system. Also, I’ll be starting in April rather than July so the weather shouldn’t be nearly as hot.

The other thing I’d like to do is take a road trip across the United States. This is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I read “Blue Highways” when I was in high school. That was over 25 years ago and I never got around to doing it. Since I should finally have both the time and the money, this year seems like the time to do it. I’m not sure how long the trip or where all I’ll visit. I’d like to at least visit all of the lower 48 states that I haven’t yet visited. The states I haven’t visited are mainly the Northwest and Northeast states. I just haven’t had much inclination to visit those states since I’d rather go south where it is warm. The northern states should be warm enough in summer though and I might even make a short trip across the border into Canada as well. I’ve probably been to Mexico about 50 times so I should probably visit Canada at least once.

I will give more details when these events come closer to happening. I’ll also let you know about any new goals I set.