A missed opportunity at freedom - Super 7 crash and burn

I read the story not long ago about Sharon Tirabassi and lottery Super 7 win.
Back in April 2004 she won $10,500,000! Then managed to squander it all in under nine years! The mind boggles how you can burn through that much money and have little to show for it, not even a house!

This storey just reeks of a giant missed opportunity. One can ponder why she failed to use this money wisely, but ultimately that is her responsibility and her problem. She had received this great windfall, this great gift and chose not to take full advantage of this opportunity.

This missed opportunity is what I want to discuss. I read this story and thought of what could have been.

My thinking is in stark contrast to the bank account withdrawal mentality that this woman held.  My first thought upon getting this windfall would be to set aside $500,000 for a dream house and other expenses related to spoiling my family.
I would then have bought a few sound blue chip dividend paying stocks, but for the sake of simplicity I chose to buy BCE(Note: I currently hold BCE in my personal portfolio).  Now back in April 2004 BCE was going for $27.59 a share in April 30th.  With $10,000,000 I would have bought 362,450 shares.

Now comes the fun part!  Here is a little table of the dividends I would have received every year since.

2004 = $434,940
2005 = $478,434
2006 = $478,434
2007 = $529,177
2008 = $529,177
2009 = $558,173
2010 = $608,916
2011 = $728,524.50
2012 = $804,639
2013 = $844,508.50

So for ten years I would made a nice $5,994,873.  That alone is about a 50% return on the investment and a VERY healthy amount to live on.  I can't even imagine being able to spend all that!

Now I get to the real kicker of this scenario.  The current share price for BCE is $46.48, this April 29th.  That would mean the value of these shares would be $16,846,676.00

Now you can understand why I feel sick and irritated by this HUGE error in judgement.  This life changing event could have been really life changing.  What a waste.

Real estate listings on the Internet

Here in Canada we are subjected to an incredibly slow moving monopoly of real estate listings called the MLS.

Information is basic and not uniform. Often frustrating on its incompleteness.

Today we learn that a court challenge to the Toronto real estate board was refused due to a technicality. So the real estate boards stranglehold on real estate data is further lengthened.

Interestingly, I've also learned today that royal lepage and google are in a joint venture for a new website. I dared to visit the site wondering if some nugget of data might be on offer, but I was overwhelmingly disappointed. It's just a prettier version of MLS with a google map for finding schools and gas stations! Nothing more! All this and you only see royal lepage listings!

What an epic fail.

Back from my parental leave

Well it's been well over five months now. I've been spending the first two months at home with my family helping my lovely wife with our newborn and toddler. I'm going to get back to posting now. Things were just too crazy busy but I'm going to find some time now to post. Work got hectic and just drained my energy, but I have crack on with thing!

More options, but it'll cost ya!

Once again, we Canadians are held ransom by cable providers getting deals from a government agency.  The CRTC still does not get it.
Why in heck should we pay more to get the channels we want?  There should be simple supply and demand at play here.  All this stupidity about supposedly protecting Canadian culture when these providers continually just re-package American fare is just idiotic!  This just keeps the bit media companies profitable, not competitive.

Keep out of my wallet government!

A History of dividends, 2005-2012 so far

I thought I'd look over the historical growth of my dividends over the years.  I really started to keep close records around 2005 and that was when I started to really get into investing for dividends.

As you can see I've had some ups and flat periods.  Things flattened out around 2008-2010, then I put more of my wife's capital towards dividend stocks.  We had a nice jump after that point for 2011.  Now you can see we are slowing again as far as growth goes.  With Wendy now taking care of our child, now my income must handle the burden of getting rid of the mortgage and adding to our investment holdings.  As you can see the mortgage has been winning out.
2013 is an estimate based on current dividends and some estimated increases from solid divvy increasers.

I think I'm going to have to try and formulate a plan to at least get a modest growth in dividends in 2013.

Dividends June 2012

My total dividends for June is $1,621.08 from all accounts shared between my wife and I.  The chart below shows my monthly dividend income for 2012.  The months after June are estimated.


The insignificant green bit at the top of the blue bars is interest income.  Since interest rates are so low these days, I don't hold much in interest bearing accounts.

May dividend holdings: ALA, AVF, IPL.UN, AX.UN, BA, BCE, BNS, LW, PZA.UN, STB, SU, KEG.UN, VSN


I bought some more VSN this month from some accumulated cash from various dividends over the last few months.  Another little extra bump to my dividends to come in the next few months.


I've been looking to take advantage of the downturn in the markets, the VSN buy in June is my first buy.  I just need a bit more cash.  :-)

Vegetable Garden

I want to get a vegetable garden started.  The house renos are taking longer than I had hoped, so any real work on a vegetable garden will have to wait till next year.  Too bad.

I have though got some containers going.  I love home grown tomatoes, so I had to get something growing this summer.

Here are my little beauties.  Hopefully they will save me a few grocery dollars this year.