The first week of 2020 has already finished! It went quick, didn’t it? Tomorrow most of us will need to go back to work again after a long x-Mas break. If you still have a day-off tomorrow due to six-Kings, congrats! One more day to sleep longer!
Having said that, let me introduce, 🥁, 5-bullet Sunday to you 🍾🥂🎆
5-bullet Sunday will be a weekly blog post with 5 topics that were on my mind this week related to Financial Independence and Dividend Growth Investing or something that fed my curiosity.
It can be for instance about something that I’ve read on one of the other blogs in the community, it can be based on a conversation that I had and it can be based on something that I read in the news. In the end it’s about something that made me think or inspire, hence kept my mind busy 😉
Why 5-bullet Sunday?
I got my inspiration from the 5-bullet-Friday email newsletter from Timothy Ferris that he sends out every Friday and I just love his newsletter!
Heck, why not doing something similar, but then for the FIRE/Dividend Investing community?
Therefore, without further ado: hereby my list of 5-bullets with things that kept my mind busy this week.
🌟Define goals for the next decade
Jillian Johnsrud from ChooseFI made a podcast in which she inspires us to define three goals for the next decade. I just published my 2020 goals after which I listened to her podcast and it made me think quite a bit whether I’m setting my goals well. Let’s see, I might need to write a new post with some longer term goals 😉
🌟 Top investment picks for 2020
Roadmap2Retire released his yearly list of top investment picks from the FIRE community again. I really enjoyed the list and there are definitely some great picks out there which I’m going to do some further research on. I also provided my own top-pick for 2020. Visit his blog post to find out what it is 😉
🌟 Financial troubles at 60 years old is cruel
This week I had a 2 hour conversation with someone whom is quite dear to me. This person is married and both are approximately 60 years old.
We did some budget planning together for the upcoming years and this person was very grateful. The outcome however made me quite sad…
They know now already that they might not make it to pay off their mortgage at their retirement age of 67. This creates quite some anxiety for them, because they will have to make some tough decisions that most of us would like to avoid ever having to make.
Their income, due to some unfortunately events a few years ago, is also just above the poverty line. It will also be very hard for them to increase their income looking at their current skill set and how difficult it is for people above 50 to find a new job where an employer is willing to invest in them.
I don’t want to go much further into details now, but I am considering a future blog post about it as there are so many lessons to be learnt from.
At the moment I am at least a little bit happy that I was able to help them with some financial advice. Hopefully this will avoid future economic unwise decisions.
🌟 Omega Healthcare Investors valuation
Dividends4Life has done a nice analysis of estimating the fair value of Omega Health Care Investors. It’s a stock that I own myself and I have sold 1/3 in October to do some profit-taking.
I bought it at the “cheap” back in 2017 as a value play and it has done me well. It’s paying me some good dividends, but my position-size became too big last year according to my allocation strategy. For that reason I felt that I had to trim it down and take my profits.
Great that D4L confirmed my valuation conclusion as well. Confirmation bias? Sure! I’m also human 😉
🌟 Changes of behavior at the start of a new year
2020 has started! We had a really nice New Years eve party and it’s always great to spend such time with our best friends.
The day after there was a lot of discussion going on online about whether this was the start of a new decade or not. Honestly I don’t care that much, but I do find it funny though. At the start of 2000, we all called it the start of a new millennium. Nobody that I knew at the time was questioning whether it was really the start of a new millennium. Most people were just afraid of the potential impact of the millenium bug 😉
Anyway, what was really on my mind this week is how interesting it is to see that just the switch of a calendar date, in our case the start of a new year, can really change people’s mindsets. Suddenly it’s all about setting goals, planning holidays and cleaning. I am not an exception to that!
At home we have been already extensively discussing which country to visit this year. We have also been using the last few days to make some order in our basement and lastly I’ve set a dozen of goals myself already.
So why is it that our behavior changes so suddenly?
Unfortunately I haven’t really found a satisfying answer to it which explains it from a psychological and academic point of view. Therefore this question is still in my mind. If you have an answer to it, please let me know 🙋♀️ ! You would really feed my curiosity.
That’s it! My 5-bullets from last week. I hope that you found it interesting!
I am aiming to post my 5 bullets every Sunday.
I would love to hear from you 🙂 If you have an answer to my question or any other feedback / comments, then please let me know via the comment section!