The Brain Dump

It might be misleading to hold a stock for a long time and then check the stock profile to see the current dividend yield to get an idea of what a current holding is paying out.  The power of compounded interest has been hashed and re-hashed over the years but it's worth looking at compounded interest on dividend reinvestment  in terms of the growth of effective dividend yield. Let's take for example one of the stocks in my dividend portfolio. Universal Health Realty Income Trust (UHT).  I've held this stock since 2015 in my retirement account when I purchased 700 shares for about $49 per share. At the time, they paid a fairly juicy 5+% dividend yield but as the stock price has risen over the last 4 years the dividend yield has fallen to about 2.69% (still nothing to sneeze at with the rates banks are paying these days). Just for clarity, dividend reinvestment (DRIP) is when you own shares in a company that pays a dividend and when the dividends are paid out, the ...

My daughter recently graduated and started her first job out of school and I thought some of the things we helped her figure out during her first week of work would be helpful for other young professionals who are venturing out into their first step into adulting. Most kids coming out of college have grown used to living on the bare minimum and should leverage that minimalist life style to great advantage.  My daughter once mused to herself that if she could live on less than $500 per month while going to school, what was she going to do with $2,500 a month? Save! was my simple answer.  Your future self will thank your younger self, even if you don't see or understand why today. Life Rule #1: The earlier you start saving and investing, the more money you'll have when you are ready to retire. If you started saving your summer job money and didn't use any of it for college, it's a great head start, but you're not done yet! It's important to get enrol...

I've had my lawn mower for roughly 5 years. It's a front wheel drive push mower and I never imagined that wheels could wear out just from mowing a lawn but I have 2 bald tires. This current adventure started when I went online shopping for replacement wheels. I found a part that looked like it would fit but after paying $25 to get it delivered, I discovered that the part was only for 1 wheel. I'm not paying $50 for 2 wheels so I went looking for alternatives to get some traction.  I just replaced the tires on a bicycle with smooth city tires and thought these knobby tires would be great on the lawn mower and they're replaceable when I have 2 bald tires in another 5 years. So here we go Need a heavy duty cable cutter to cut the bead on the tires, but a sharp knife can be used to cut just the tread for our project. Trimming the side walls because we only need the tread area Measure, cut and line it up.  A couple of self tapping screws to...

I've struggled with weight my whole sedentary adult life (currently at ~234) and when I hit the age of 50 I also became diabetic.  I've seen the ads for various types of bariatric surgery, some more invasive than others but they all basically attempt to reduce the volume of food that can go into your stomach before you start feeling full. There is no magic. The key to weight loss and all the associated maladies such as painful knees, high cholesterol, raised blood glucose and diabetes, to name a few, is to burn more calories than is eaten. Many overweight people don't want to sacrifice anything such as the ability to eat their favorite foods when-ever and where-ever but there can be no progress without some effort regardless of what needs to be achieved. Intermittent fasting has come to my attention and the idea seems to make alot of sense for people with weight problems as well as people with Type 2 diabetes. What is Intermittent Fasting? Intermittent fasting...

Most iPhone users will most likely tell me that the answer to my search is to bite the bullet and find an iPhone but life would be too easy if I jumped on that particular band wagon. Trying to conform to my life's goal of spending as little money as possible without feeling that I'm missing out on what the latest technology has to offer, my journey started out with a Samsung Galaxy S1 purchased used when the Galaxy S4 was the hot selling phone. I kept it going with new operating systems and finally retired it when it could no longer run the latest operating system out of cyanogenmod. I found a prepaid phone plan called Puretalkusa which allowed me to keep 4 smartphones with voice only for only $35 per month total (ie for all the phones) at a time when people were paying upwards of $100 per month for just one phone for voice + data. In attempting to stay low cost, I went through a Blu Studio and a Blu Studio Mini C in the span of approximately 1 year before settling into a...

Last year I mistakenly recommended to my daughter to buy an inexpensive HP Stream 11 notebook for her first year of college.  With all due respect, it has been a great machine but the insufficient storage is a negative.  I was not aware that it did not have expandable storage (the eMMC hard drive is embedded on the motherboard and a technology I haven't seen before). When I tried to upgrade her machine from windows 8.1 to windows 10 I had to jump through multiple hoops in order to get the upgrade to happen due to insufficient storage (ie: removing the 8.1 preventing downgrade, removing unused applications and using an external hard drive). Flash forward a few months and there was an update to version 1511 but nothing I tried allowed the update to progress due to a bug with the update not handling external drives properly. No matter how large the drive I had attached was, I got an insufficient disk space message. I discovered a few KB articles that addresses that particular i...

At the end of last winter, I found a red seedless grape vine (and a pear tree) for sale at the local tractor & farm feed store and decided that I would purchase them before they died under the fluorescent lighting.  I knew enough to buy the ones that were still dormant or just showing signs of breaking dormancy to ensure they don't waste any energy to begin blooming too early. Just before a snow storm was due to hit our area, we had a warm spell that lasted long enough for me to get both items in the ground and get a jump start on the spring growing season. Although the pear tree bloomed just as expected, the grape vine stayed dormant for another month and a half before showing any sign of life (grapes tend to do better when it's warm).  I left the grape to grow wild so that the root system could establish itself and this season will build a trellis so that I can start to train the vine. My first plan of action was to purchase 2 heavy duty "T po...