Weekly Update

Within the last 2 weeks, I spent $600 outside of my monthly budgeting. $150 of it is deemed necessary; the remaining $450 were potential savings opportunities, as ironic as that may sound. Can you blame me for spending $350 (and saving roughly the same amount from retail prices) to buy 2 complete suits from designer labels, when years ago, I easily dropped $500 on a house-brand suit?

The remaining $100 was spent on a very compact, silent, DeLonghi HEPA purifier bundle (unit + filters) which fits within my tiny, mixed-use bedroom / office, silent enough to sleep with it on, and frees up my larger, much noisier existing Hamilton Beach HEPA purifier for our living room. On any surface in my bedroom, I'm noticing copious layers upon layers of particles and dust perhaps from all the remodeling that happened before we moved into the unit. It got so bad my computer keyboard felt sandy and gritty every time I used it.

I'm still working on extensively learning how to use Excel as it's intended to be used. The more I work with Excel, the more I can see the widening differences between Google Spreadsheet (which is a modified, web-ified version of OpenOffice) and Excel. It's cool stuff.

For the Retiree Portfolio, I used some money market funds to purchase the following equity position:

"
VISVX - 5% - 100% (5% allocation of total portfolio) into the traditional IRA account.
"

I'd like to build up the rest of the Total US Stock Market and Total International Market positions but my market-timing alter-ego that I *should be ignoring* is reluctant to take the jump.

I'm going to keep my eye on VTSMX, VGTSX, and VGSIX for entry opportunities to flush out the following, remaining positions:

VTSMX - 25% - 100% (9% unallocated portion of total portfolio ) into the taxable account.
VGTSX - 25% - 60% (15% allocation of total portfolio) into the taxable account, 20% (5% allocation of total portfolio) into the Roth IRA account, the remainder 20% (5% allocation of total portfolio) in the traditional IRA account.
REIT - 5% (I *might* eliminate. Need further analysis.) - 100% (5% allocation of total portfolio) into the traditional IRA account.


I've sold off the 1998 BMW M3-- I'm putting a stop to the Teutonic maintenance hemorrhaging bill. I'm stepping up efforts to find a replacement for my own, personal car ASAP so I can give up the SUV I'm "borrowing" from my mother so we can ween her off her 20-year old Volvo. And put a stop to me burning up her warranty.

Our Winder Court property apparently has collected significantly lower-than-market median rental rates since we acquired it a year ago. Now after a year of trouble-free ownership, my business partner and I have decided we've been rather gracious landlords long enough and have decided to raise the rent-- *to slightly-below-median local rental rates.* Much to my surprise, this means we'll net a total of $800 / month based on full occupancy (before tax refunds). Even if we experience 25% vacancy with our new rates, we'll still net $100 / month-- which is $100 more than we're raking in now. I can't foresee Winder Court doing much worse than that. To still gain $100 / mo. even while experiencing a 25% occupancy is well worth the risk to me. There are barely any rental units in the area, there's some "path-of-progress" effect underway, and there's some breathing room for upward rate adjustment. So far, it's almost as ideal of a rental income property as any small fry like us could envision owning.

My business partner did discuss going into other different types of investments. Although I momentarily have insufficient capital, I have brainshare, and we've been working hard on planning and analysis to come up with some streamlined process model. There are a couple other things in the works as well.

If my business partner wishes to become as liquid as possible for his new ventures, we've already preliminary discussed my potential purchase of either his share of Winder Court, or equal partnership in his other property.

So, in contrast with some other real estate doomsday blogs, we're actually doing quite well with ours. This is probably the first time in my life that strategic execution has been in my favor. Chalk it up to being open-minded and finally having some luck on my side.

I really need to look into MS Money or Quicken to upload my budgets up here.