Exercise and nutrition.

Well, this is not really about exercise, and barely about nutrition unless maybe you are in the bulking phase of a body building plan.

My daughter came up with this little notation while thinking about her workout a few weeks back. I thought it was cute.


Jeff.

Spring is in the air,

... Or at least it was last week.

Typical of February we managed to get a cold weekend and some heavy snow when everyone is starting to set their minds in spring mode..

No matter, spring has been in the air, unseasonably, since December sometime. Each week in January we spent some time above freezing, which is very unusual.

I took some time to get some of my fair weather things out to play with, here are two shots.

Jeff.

Silly dog video... this is really just to test the video imbedding option.

As I type this, the video is uploading so I don't even know how this will work. I think it is about 45MB and taken using my iPhone.

Jeff.

BMO Chart followup

Here is a chart of Bank of Montreal (BMO) for the period that I wrote about in my last blog entry.

I bought my first share, as I mentioned, in January, 2008. Since then the price took a bit of a dive but has stabilized nicely.

If I were actively trading this one I would probably be sitting aside, but seeing as it is a DRIP there is no selling. Also, DRIP investment uses far less charting, in fact almost none, other than to do some tracking. Even then most people don't follow the prices of the stocks in any way other than to determine how much to send in for the OCP.

In the case of BMO, it was a no-brainer first choice. Right from their own investor dividend page:

"BMO Financial Group is the longest-running dividend-paying company in Canada. BMO’s policy is to pay out 45% to 55% of its earnings in dividends to shareholders over time."


This is one of the primary indicators to buy into a DRIP, longevity in dividend payments and stability in the fact that they have been around for a long time. Another factor is a history of increasing dividend amounts over time and a discount to buy shares with the re-invested dividends, 2% in BMO's case and they allow for up to 5% in the prospectus..


I'll get into my other holdings later.

Jeff.

BMO DRIP, the real deal.

When I go into a book store to buy a book, or just to browse, I have a tendency to end up buying the first book that I pick up. As often as not, it ends up being the book that I seemed to need at the time even if it was not the book I went in for.

As it turns out, my trading plans could have been handled in the same manner. Although unlike books, where I know what the other books have to offer, trading plans are not so predictable... I just had to try them all.

My original was the Dividend Re-Investment Plan plan. I had charted long term growth potential based on a few presumptions, forecast best and worst case scenarios and plotted everything for over 30 year periods. The goal was not to create a profit through capital gains, although that would be nice as well, but to produce an income stream based on dividends and eventually through incremental dissolution of the shares if needed. This requires patience and a dogged determination to continually contribute to the plan as it is a long term retirement strategy.

I still have my original holdings for all of the DRIPs that I started, the first being Bank of Montreal, (BMO). In January of 2008 I bought my initial share and promptly sent in my first Optional Cash Payment (OCP) cheque for $300 and registered for the DRIP.

Now that I have some data from this DRIP I can go back and do a performance comparison, which I will do for all of my companies eventually.

My rules were simple. Contribute $300 per month into at least one of the company DRIP plans. Usually the company will purchase shares on my behalf once per month, but plans vary in when this is done. In all cases they use a particular closing figure for the cost and in some cases they may discount re-investment purchases by as much as 5%, (BMO is currently 2%). In order to produce a best and worst case scenario I took the monthly share prices and applied them to my purchase spreadsheet twice. Once was to use only the low values and the other was to use only the high values.

Keep in mind that an active trading plan involves buying and selling where the worst case assumes buying high and selling low which produces a loss right away... even buying and selling at break even eventually erodes the trading account due to arbitrage and commissions. There must be many trades that profit either more frequently than loose or profit much larger than the losing trades. It's not easy to stick to a plan in those cases.

Here is a chart showing the effectiveness of both the best and worst case scenarios for BMO over the last four years.

In an active trading plan the worst case is that all the initial money is lost. In the case of this DRIP, the worst case is a 10% variance in the un-realized gain of the plan overall. This gain is not the primary goal. The real difference is in the regular recurring dividend payments or yield. The overall difference in yields vary by less than 3% (21.4% difference in yields) and the current payment varies by 0.25% (18.1% difference in yields).

It would be reasonably safe to assume that the result would be somewhere in between these two results.

Considering the long term span of this sort of plan it isn't difficult to extrapolate 30 years of similar data. Assuming worst case from above and the current payment of $204 per quarter that is generated after 4 years and applying some simple linear math, the payment could easily be $1,500  per quarter ($6,000 per year). The thing is that this is not a simple continuance as the shares, OCPs and re-investments build on themselves in a non-linear fashion.

Jeff.

iphone data usage while away.

I am heading to Florida on a bit of business next month and will extend it by a few days to take in some sun and surf, which leads me to reviewing my iPhone and it's data and voice plan for US travel.

It turns out to be pretty expensive to operate an iPhone outside of Canada... at least a Canadian phone. $1.45 per minute (soon to be $1.75) voice, $0.60 per text and $3 per MB of data (soon to be $5). Ouch! At least there are no separate roaming fees, although now they are included in the per use fees and likely end up costing more as a result. I am certain that making roaming fees "included" makes the mobility companies more money in the long run or they wouldn't have done it.

There are a couple of levels of plans, of course. $10, $20 voice and text plans and a text only $40 unlimited plan. and a $10 dataplan. I ran a quick bit of math to see where the break points are with various plans. Voice is just plain expensive no matter the plan, so I figure that I will just skip it altogether and make calls on a calling card from wherever I need.

Text plans, other than the no fee pay per use, all cost the same at the 100 message mark, $40. At this point it makes the most sense to opt in for the $40 unlimited. If I end up gone for a week there's no way I'll use less than that.

The next kicker is the data usage.

I've checked my usage and found it not out to lunch, I have 6GB per month and barely use 1GB. I pared that down in the last few days to see what I might expect in a minimalist usage mode and I can get about 500KB-1MB per day. At $3 per MB, and $5 per MB next month, that adds up fast enough yet. If I need it, well, I need it... but how much is need and how much is convenience? Opting for the $10 plan to get $1 per MB makes perfect sense. Although I MIGHT be able to keep usage down to 1MB per day that still runs $30 in fees for a week (the $5 rate kicks in while I am there) compared to $17 cost with the plan. Of course I may end up using more.

I went through a check list of items that use data, whether I intend to or not, then added the peripheral usages that are automatic and intentional then added the straight browsing and imessage texting etc.

There's a setting that sends usage data somewhere, location settings that do the same thing to "optimize" the various applications, maps, siri, compass etc. I left all off except for the location service for the camera. It sends about 2KB per picture to mark date time and location for the picture... seeing as I might like to mark various shots while in Florida I will leave that on. I am planning to use a real camera as well so the phone shots will be a few spur of the moment to catch something quickly shots.

Some automated data might be various apps updated themselves when opened or edited. ToDo, calendar and mail apps do this but have settings that can be set for manual only... except the calendar as it is a Google calendar but I don't think it uses much data unless I make a change, or someone sharing a schedule makes one perhaps.

Then there is browsing. Even just doing a simple map lookup and zooming in to get main street names will use 5MB. Better to buy an area map or take some screen shots of areas that I know I will be in ahead of time or while on hotel WiFi.

I found that even just checking the usage without doing anything else runs 2 - 4 KB per check.

Of course all of the cellular data can be shut off in the general heading in network settings and WiFi is the only data channel.

Time to go old school and use the phone as a communications device rather than a computer replacement. It's amazing how quickly we (I) become accustomed to just pulling out he phone and looking up things. It does save time as opposed to opening the laptop or sitting down at the PC.

Jeff.

The first to leave the nest.

Our eldest daughter has, tentatively, left the nest. Perhaps unexpectantly as well, perhaps not. She turned 18 in August and has pushed the "I'm 18 now..." card around enough that we shouldn't really be surprised about much of anything.

We raise our kids to be independent thinking people and are surprised when they use their ingrained independence in ways that, well, ways that we might expect them to if we thought about it. This is almost a clique now.

The funny thing is that we have seen our daughter not really respecting our home or family and then we see and hear how she is while at others' homes or at her job. Polite, respectful, cleans up after herself, and considerate to a fault. Is this our daughter? It hardly seems possible.

Regardless, push came to shove one evening and I gave her a few words of wisdom for her to really think about her interactions with her family now and in the future and to show the respect that is due. A day and a half of sulking resulted in her moving out, of course without so much as a word to us about her plans (that darn independent streak rearing it's head). At least she is with family, cousins her in town.

I suppose that my "words of wisdom" may have easily been interpreted as giving her a choice or ultimatum of sorts, an "or else" undertone that was not voiced but could easily have been taken as implied even if it was not consciously intended that way. One thing that I have always been sure of is that what I say is taken seriously. It might appear that what I didn't say was taken just as seriously.

As much as we think that she may come back home, my gut tells me otherwise. She is planning to go to school in the fall in Nova Scotia so she would be moving out sooner of later anyway. This at least gives her the opportunity to practise a level of independence before being on her own all of a sudden. In the long run it is probably a good thing.

Now, what will we do with the extra room?

Jeff.