Today's thoughts and research and ideas

General Reading (books or audiobooks)

I finished listening to Robert Kiyosaki's audiobook, Your First Step To Financial Freedom, this evening.
I am about to start listening to Peter Lynch's One Up On Wall Street now.

Progress of the Financial Statement - aka "Finding out where we are now"

Yesterday I got in touch with a guy who does Financial Planning and general Accounting/Bookkeeping training - we used him to get our business in order last year, and he proved to be very amenable to our goals and our needs. I have an appointment with him, to be held in my kitchen, on Thursday July 7, to start the process of getting our spending documented into the form of a financial statement.

So, today I spent a bunch of time going through our online account information and documenting the activity over the past three months. Right now the spreadsheet I've put together in Excel is a mess because it's just a big list of "things" we've purchased, and I've probably broken down the detail too finely for what we will ultimately do. That's okay, it's a starting point and it's meant to be very honest.

This evening I found a PDF entitled the Home Account Book which seems to help someone do exactly what I'm doing, so I've forwarded the 40 page document to where I have a working printer. I look forward to seeing how it all fits together, despite the fact that we spend too much on doodads and basically nothing on investments since about 1999.

Investopedia Online Stock Trading Simulator - aka, "Practice"

I am taking part in two games:

• Game#1 will be left to ride for a week, at which point I will dump the initial stocks I bought that have been doing nothing but going down. Then maybe I'll just leave what's left and see what it looks like after a month.
• Game#2 has a lot more share-buying capacity, but I've already used up the USD component. I'll buy more CDN stock as I research them and find them interesting. I guess I should dump the initial stocks that are moving nothing but down after a week in this game too.

Investopedia Reading - aka, "What I'm Learning From Investopedia"

My husband and I have investments already, and they're Mutual Funds. I don't know much about the fund, however, as our online interface is pretty generic at this time. It looks like there might be another tab to get a username/password for, in order to more closely view our investments. I will investigate this further, as maybe one of my goals should be to build a successful portfolio that will replace the mutual fund.

Then again, it's an RRSP mutual fund, so I don't know how the RRSP would be affected... more to research and get back to you on ;)

Rich Dad Forum Discussions

Boy oh boy do I love reading those forums. They're exciting! Full of interesting information! Full of stock chatter about companies I've never heard of before. Full of people who are truly interested in getting out of the rat race and spending more time alternating between building wealth and enjoying it.

Today's impactuous thread was the Beginner's Challenge, to take $40 and turn it into $400. Reading what others have done to meet this challenge was very inspiring and informative! I will have to think about this more before I write my own goals or ideas on it, however.

Local Market Reading

I did, however, go and purchase a newspaper today (first one in who knows how long), so I could take a peek at the houses for sale and the businesses/franchises available for purchase/investment. One house listing actually had a price and the fact that it had a tenant renting already, and what the tenant was paying for rent, so I took that information and figured out how much cash flow the property would generate at that rate, with a 10-yr mortgage at just over 7%. It wasn't much. I'm new to this game, however, so maybe there are things I'm missing. I don't even know what a respectable return from a house rental would be, in terms of cash flow. But... I'm not looking to BUY right now either, so I guess that's okay.

The Saturday newspaper is the one with the most listings, but this weekend I'm out of town so I can't pick one up. Maybe I should ask the 7-11 clerks whether they stash those papers for people who wish to buy them days later.

Upcoming Weekend Reading

I'm taking a break from these thought patterns this weekend as I go visit family. I reserved some books at the library before I got re-interested in passive income generation recently, so now I've got books that have NOTHING to do with what I've been thinking about for the past three or four days. It might be difficult, but it might be good for me cognitively as well. I like the idea of letting my brain calm down after all the new stuff I've shoved into it lately.

But I look forward to seeing how my current play-stocks fare at the end of July, just the same!