Main Takeaways

Markets made a reasonably noticeable turn towards the positive side and the following portions of my portfolio definitely saw some benefit from it.

• Retirement Fund
• 529 plan

I did take advantage of some down days in the market and boosted my investments to dollar cost average some of my mutual fund investments (another post on this coming up on how). But, October has been a super busy month for me, including a couple days spent in the hospital for a freakish accident of cause unknown. So, I am happy to see a positive gain without putting in any serious effort…..the precise definition of passive income 😉

The passive income portion of my portfolio is chugging along nicely. I am aggressively funding my passive income portfolio and (try to) make use of every down day in the markets. My funding sometimes is as low as $100 and as high as $500. Most of the days, I have gotten lucky and dollar cost averaged down my mutual funds….a tiny bit, but hey, each bit matters right 🙂

Passive income for October 2015 continued the winning trend vs last year.

• I compute Passive Income per month as (total passive income in this year) / number of months completed this year.
  • Total passive income is a sum of dividends + capital gains distributions.
  • October Passive Income = (total passive income in this year) / 10 == $492.51  pm.
• Doing it this way keeps the monthly passive income more realistic because I can instantly know which of my monthly expenses are covered by this amount. I keep a separate tracker for this which I will write about at a later date.
• I did take advantage of the down markets and added to my investment in VDIGX , VTMFX and VTMGX (developed markets ex-north america). All these investments have hovered around their respective 52 month lows These new investments will contribute towards dollar cost averaging my holdings.
• November will be a slow month for me as usual…but looking forward to December for the next big dividend income month.