Is it April already?!

It would appear so! SPRING is finally here!

And with spring comes yet another update from yours truly. Since February was a pretty dark month (pun intended) in terms of our investments, I’ve not been paying that much attention to the market in March – but as most of the vegetation in our garden are now starting to turn green – so has our investment account(s).

In fact, we’ve reached a major milestone in the Total Balance household; We’ve doubled up!

The month in review

In October 2018 we started our journey with €53.333 (the profit from selling our summer house). And as of the end of March 2021 our Total Balance is now a whopping €107.537!

Our Total Balance has grown more than $5.400 in a single month. Corresponding to a growth of more than 5%. So, how did that happen?

Well, first and foremost we added a little extra to our savings this month. As every Dane knows, the government has decided to payout our OWN “vacation allowance” (the first 3 weeks was paid out in October 2020 – these are thus the remaining 2 weeks). These funds were supposed to be “frozen” till the day of your retirement. But due to the whole Covid-19 situation, the government felt obliged to give the economy a bit of a boost. Hence the early payout. This is not a hand-out, it’s just an early payout of our own money.

WELL, the joke is on you, dear government! I will not be spending as much as a dime of this money – it’ll all be invested 🙂 – Well, eventually. For now it’s just sitting in the bank (but not for long!…).

So about half of the growth this month came from our savings deposits – the other half was pure investment growth! The major mover this month was Shaw Communications. My “least favorite” dividend stock – up until now.

A merger with another company was announced (Rogers Communications announced their intent to buy Shaw at a 70% premium!), making the stock jump more than 40% on a single day. That was a fun day 🙂

The merger has yet to be approved by the authorities, so currently I’m holding a bit of a lottery ticket. Since the stock is now “only” up about 50%, it seems the market believes that there is a 20% chance that the merger is going to fall threw. If this happens, I assume the stock is going to return to its previous price, but it’s uncertain what will happen then. I could sell it now and take the profit, but I’d like to see it threw. Let me know what you would do?! 😛

On top of that, the last couple of months has seen a positive development in the CAD:EUR exchange rate. And since all of my current dividend paying stocks are in CAD I get a couple of extra “BONUS” EURs in my latest dividend payouts. This feels extremely good, as it is not a coincidence that I’ve chosen to invest heavily in CAD. I believe that the CAD continues to be undervalued, so I’m happy with my current allotment. However, for any future dividend stocks I have my eye set on a couple of EUR stocks, so I probably wont be adding to my CAD portfolio anytime soon.

On the personal front we started a long overdue project in our house. It has taken the better part of the month, but we finally got around to give our “storage/workshop” room a major overhaul. I got myself a brand new (well, pre-loved as they call it these days) workbench for all of my tools. The wife painted the room and we laid down a completely new floor. The room now feels like a place we’re you’d want to just hang out, where as before it felt like a place you’d want to leave as quickly as possible. Dark and cluttered it was! Now bright and light it is 😛

It cost us a good €2.000, so the “house project savings account” is now pretty much empty (I don’t include this account in my Total Balance). I wanted to only use 2nd hand (pre-loved) furnishings, but I failed pretty miserably at that…You can’t win them all – sometimes you just have to make the wife happy, and buy new shit *HAHA*…

While it’s a bit stressful to be doing projects around the house, while still working a fulltime job and spending time with the kiddo, I really enjoy these type of projects. It was small enough to complete in a month, and long enough for me to spend some time “researching” for items for the new room. It’s a challenge to quit while you’re still ahead, once you get started on the “THIS COULD BE REALLY NICE TO HAVE”-train…But I think we managed a pretty good balance in this project.

I know you guys probably don’t care, but here it is! 😛

The workbench was the biggest item. It ran me €600. A new one is about €1000, so I think it was a decent deal, considered it looked brand new! It was however a bit of a challenge to transport it, but we managed (just barely 😛 ).

(Yes, those white boxes on the shelves are from IKEA…). We generally like IKEA stuff, and the storage boxes are “only” €10 a pop. But it adds up when you buy 30 of them…

*YIKES!* Not very FIRE-like, I know…I spent quite some time looking for proper boxes that was cheaper. I even found some plain white moving boxes, but they were like €7/pop, so we (the wife) preferred the IKEA ones… 🙂

And you know what they say: Happy wife, happy life! 😛

The pretty graphs

As promised a while back I wanted to start including the wife’s pension in our net worth.

This month is the first month where I include her pension in our Net Worth update. This added well over €100.000 to our total net worth. That feels pretty good! We’re now well on our way to cross that magic €1.000.000. Hopefully this will happen sooner rather than later 😉

 

The boring income statement

Platform	Invested	Transactions	Last month	Current value	Monthly income
Commodities
GOLD (Coins)	€ 5.333	€ 0	€ 5.500	€ 5.500
			€ 5.500	€ 5.500
Stocks (Dividend portfolio)
Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS)	€ 1.000	€ 0	€ 1.116	€ 1.254	€ 0
PROREIT (PRV.UN)	€ 2.018	€ 0	€ 3.263	€ 3.745	€ 17
Shaw Communications (SJR)	€ 2.000	€ 0	€ 1.757	€ 2.835	€ 7
Toronto Dominion Bank	€ 1.000	€ 0	€ 780	€ 900	€ 0
TransAlta Renewables (RNW)	€ 2.000	€ 0	€ 2.434	€ 2.664	€ 8
			€ 9.876	€ 11.398	€ 32
Stocks (Indices)
iShares Global Clean Energy (IQQH)	€ 6.667		€ 7.652	€ 7.472
iShares MSCI World Min Volatility (IQQ0)	€ 6.667		€ 5.976	€ 6.693
			€ 13.628	€ 14.165
Properties
The-Many (Brickshare)	€ 1.333	€ 0	€ 1.360	€ 1.360
Property #1	€ 68.667	€ 0	€ 68.667	€ 68.667
Fundbricks	€ 1.333	€ 0	€ 1.333	€ 1.333
			€ 71.360	€ 71.360
Cash
Bank #1 cash (main savings)		€ 2.667	€ 1.983	€ 4.650
Bank #2 Opportunity money		€ 148	€ 203	€ 351
Broker account (CAD, EUR, DKK)		€ 32	€ 79	€ 113
			€ 1.035	€ 5.114
Total balance			€102.133	€107.537

I recovered €148 from Crowdestor and Mintos this month, so that was a nice surprise. I now have a bit of cash in my various accounts. It feels good to have a bit of a cash buffer again, in case something interesting comes along…Maybe something already has?! 😛

 

The (not so) Classic Growth Chart

As always, I include the Classic growth chart for tracking purposes:

Slow and steady the portfolio growth is getting more and more visible. That’s what I like to see 🙂

The first 3 months of 2021 has been decent savings months! I shall try to keep the pace for the next couple of months, but I think it will be tough…We shall see 🙂

In conclusion (TL;DR)

I got another payout from the government (vacation allowance) and added it to my savings.

My portfolio saw some nice growth, which was lovely after the dark (red) month of February!

Because of the CAD:EUR exchange ratio becoming a tad stronger, my dividends was €2 larger than last month. Small improvements, but hopefully the trend will continue 😉

My pension and my home equity continue to progress hand-in-hand, albeit my Pension is now finally starting to take off a bit. It’s a bit uncanny, but I’m hoping that my pension growth is going to pick up even more from here (which will depend on the market ofc).

We’ve now started to include the wife’s pension in our net worth updates, which saw our net worth surpass €600.000. That feels pretty good. We’re well on our way to that magic €1.000.000 🙂

That’s it for this months update!

See you next month!