Before diving into the 2023 Dividend Totals, I’d like to thank all the 25-ish people that showed up during the last FIRE meetup in Leiderdorp! I had a blast, I hope you did too. We even got to the point that the last 6 of us pretty much got kicked out of the La Place as it was about 30min past closing :-). Plan is do do it again, likely around April. Location and date are to be confirmed. Keep you posted! Anyhow, what did our dividend growth share do in 2023? Here is a quick overview. Dividend Income Due […]
Personal
And… back to Koos Werkeloos
Welcome to 2024 (better late then never)! First post of the year and it’s one with a bang. I lost my job… And… back to Koos Werkeloos! Job loss The story is as follows, last year we cleaned out our cash reserves in an attempt to upgrade our money pit into a home. Albeit not finished with said money pit, I did start to look for income to infuse our cash position last yeat. I was fortunate to find a decent job, on rotation basis and abroad, on an interesting project. Fast forward to 2024 and due to tightening of […]
Fun , Real Estate
Should you buy a Castle?
Me and Mrs CF just spent a night in a large manor close to Haarlem. It was a surprise “date night” by Mrs CF. She really knows how to make my heart go a bit faster 😁. I love castles! We did a FIRE meetup once in one. But we could never make one work financially for ourselves. We could probably buy one, but it would likely bankrupt us in the long run. So here is a post I wrote a few years back if you should buy a castle (note that some of the numbers and linke might not […]
FIRE Meetup
FIRE Meetup
When we had one of our FIRE buds over for dinner a few weeks ago, we got to the topic of FIRE meetups. We organized about 7 of them plus a Castle weekend. Albeit a lot of fun, they take a lot of work and effort to organise. I’m very lazy by nature, so this naturally works counter productive. We both agreed thou, that it would be great to have a FIRE meetup again. But one without all the hassle (and thus also without presentations or cheap food and drinks). We came up with the following plan, we would meet […]
Personal , Real Estate , Taxes
Not dead yet!
Nope, we are not dead yet! Albeit we are now over halfway our lives (statistically speaking), we are not planning to call it quits just yet. Life has been good but busy. Financially we are making steps forward once again too. Working really does miracles! Only major downside is that you have a lot less time to do fun stuff. Me no likey. Life update Quick summary, we bought a house that was too big, too expensive and needed a shitload of work. We call that a money pit. Said money pit is slowly improving, albeit not completely finished yet. […]
Personal
No Longer Koos Werkeloos!
Quick service announcement. I really suck at this whole FIRE thing, seriously no idea what I’m doing. We first bought a million euro plus money pit and now I go back to work! So, I’m no longer Koos Werkeloos. One does relate to the other… Despite the fact that we could live in the money pit on one income. We have depleted our cash reserves quite a bit due to the renovations (which are still under budget, surprisingly) and lack of income from my end the past year. It got so bad that we only had about €4-5k left on […]
Dividends
May 2023 dividend update
May is typically one of the slower months of the year from a dividend perspective. But we still received a total of €556 in dividends for the month. No complaining here! Now that we also sold a lot of our real estate, one of the considerations is to start buying a few more dividend generating shares. Anyhow, here is the May 2023 dividend update. Dividend Income No major changes or dividend modification this month. Nice and boring, but again more dividends than the year before! We reached our $1000 threshold again in cash, and bought some BCE (Bell) shares. We […]
Real Estate , Taxes
From Landlord to Lender
As of today, we reduced out real estate holdings significantly. We now only have one more rental unit, instead of the 6 we still owned last month. Rather than being landlords, we are now acting as the bank, as we provided the buyer of our real estate with a mortgage. So we went from landlord to lender. Why? Why did we sell most of our real estate holdings and turned lenders? There are quite a few reasons to be honest. It was also a process that took many months to culminate. In no particular order: The Deal What deal did […]
Dividends
April 2023 dividend update
Oh boy is our money pit taking up a lot of time and effort! But progress is being made and we have a new roof, windows and the outside is being improved at the moment. Hence, didn’t have much time (or energy) to blog. But fortunately the passive income continues to flow in! Love dividends. Here is the April 2023 dividend update. Dividend Income April is typically a pretty good month. However, the year over year growth limited this time, which had it’s primary cause in AQN slashing it’s dividend by 40%. It hurts a bit, might have had to […]
Dividends
February 2023 Dividend Update
Welcome to March! February was pretty uneventful for us. Not a bad month perse, but just not a lot going on. The home renovations are progressing slowly, but are still progressing! Our dividend portfolio did the same, no major movements but still a steady climb year of year on monthly basis (special dividends not taken into consideration). Anyhow, here is the February 2023 dividend update. Dividend Income February is typically a slower month. But looking at this past month, a “slow” month is now providing more income than a “good” month a few years back. Isn’t organic dividend growth great? […]