Main Takeaways

I am going to wrap up a little early in this last month of 2015. I want to gain some time to plan for 2016. There is both good news and bad news in this last month of 2015. Lets tackle the bad news first.

• Retirement Fund
  • Lost almost 0.5% of my portfolio this month.
  • In the same interval,
    • S&P 500 lost 0.16%
    • DOW Jones lost 0.29%
  • Nevertheless, looks like there is no Santa Claus boost for my retirement fund this month. The astute reader may notice that there are  still 3-4 market days left in December…miracles can happen you know 😉
• 529 plan
  • Last month, through my kid’s graciousness, money set aside for the birthday party went unused and that went into the college fund. Inspite of that, the 529 barely eked out a positive gain. So, overall, no Santa Claus rally for this investment too.

Now for the good news.

• Dollar Cost Averaging
  • Around Dec 21st, DOW had a nice dip of 300+ points. I took advantage of this and boosted my investments to dollar cost average VDIGX, VHDYX and VTMGX.
• Passive Income Streams
  • Passive income for December 2015 continued the winning trend vs December of 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.
    • December Passive Income = (total passive income in this year) / 12 == $621.24
    • 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.
  • My final goal for passive income is $4000 pm. This is going to take a while. So, my intermediate goal is to get $1000 pm in passive income first.
    • At the end of November, passive income was at $515 pm.
    • A nice amount of dividends from Dec 2015 has led me to $621 pm.
    • Assuming a 3% dividend return and 0% dividend growth, it will probably take me at least 3 more years to reach $1000 pm with a chunky sized investment each year. After reaching that, I plan to pretty much leave the investments on auto pilot. Wish me good luck 🙂