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April 2024 Financial Update

Hello again! We are pretty late publishing our April 2024 financial update blog, but for good reason. We made the cross country trip from Utah to Pennsylvania so that we could attend our son’s college graduation! It’s crazy how quickly four years flew by and we are so proud of him! He the first person to graduate college from my side of the family and he did it with honors to boot. Obviously he gets his smarts from Mrs. RVF’s side of the family.

Thankfully, he already has an amazing job opportunity lined up starting in the fall. There’s also a good possibility that he will not be too far from our new house during a good portion of his onboarding time. So that might be a very nice bonus! In the meantime he will be taking a well deserved trip across Europe, which we are very jealous about. As for us, we will be mooch docking in his apartment until he gets back home. Then we will make the journey back across the country to Utah.

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February 2024 Financial Update

Oh, where to begin! Another month in the books and it’s time for our February 2024 financial update.

However, before we get to the numbers let us bring you up to speed on the adventure that is our life. We knew that building a custom home would be a new challenge that would take a lot of patience. In our update last month we were in the process of trying to get permits and approvals for our plans. The good news is that we have cleared all of those hurdles. The not so good news is that there are a whole new set of hurdles to jump over.

It’s not a real big deal and we are making progress, but our timeline keeps getting pushed back. It would have been helpful to know about these things months ago as we could have probably taken care of them. The problem we have is that this is all new to us. We don’t know what we don’t know. Then something comes up in conversation and we have to figure it out. It’s all part of the experience I guess!

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February 2024 Dividend Portfolio Update

It’s time for our February 2024 Dividend Portfolio Update! February isn’t the most exciting month for dividends for our portfolio. However, it is the month where we get a distribution from our largest holding which is Abbvie. Outside of dividend reinvestments we haven’t added to this position since 2021. Since that time it has been one of our top performers and has grown to almost 16% of our dividend portfolio. It just goes to show what consistent dividend growth and reinvestment can do over time with a good company.

Now, we know a lot of people will scoff at holding this large of a position in one stock. We wouldn’t recommend it either. However, this isn’t our only investment portfolio so we take a larger view when making decisions. While Abbvie is the largest holding in our dividend portfolio, it is less than 1% of our overall portfolio. So we are ok with letting one of our biggest winners keep on winning.

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January 2024 Financial Update

Welcome to our January 2024 financial update. As you can imagine there is a lot going on in the RVonFire household. It feels like everything is up in the air as life is continuously evolving.

On the home front not much has changed or progressed. We agreed on terms with a new builder and visited the property to discuss a few things. Now we are in that phase of trying to get permits and approvals so we can get started on the build. For me this is the worst part of the process as I hate waiting on people, especially government types. Although we can definitively say that South Dakota and Texas government folks are much more courteous, helpful and respectful than the human debris that occupies California government entities.

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January 2024 Dividend Portfolio Update

And just like that we are off and running in 2024! Welcome to our first dividend portfolio update of the new year!

At the end of 2023 we set a lofty goal of trying to hit $1,000 in PADI by the end of 2024. We finished 2023 at $837 so we will need to add $163 this year to reach our year end goal. This might prove difficult as most months we add less than $10 to our total. We are also trying to be more selective with where we put what little funds we do have.

For the most part we have done pretty well in our portfolio. But, like most investors we have made some mistakes and that has cost us. We don’t fret over it too much because mistakes are a part of investing. The important thing is to learn from those mistakes and make better decisions going forward.

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December 2023 Financial Update

Welcome to our December 2023 financial update blog! We are a little late getting this blog published. The new year has started off with a bang and there hasn’t been any spare time to dedicate to writing. 

Our first task of the new year was a planned trip back to California. This trip had been planned for awhile but turned into a dual purpose trip. The main objective was to visit Mrs. RVF’s side of the family as we haven’t seen them in quite a long time. However, in light of our purchase of a nice plot of acreage in Texas we also needed to break the news to them. Yes, we really meant it when we said we are not going back to live in California…….EVER! The conversation went much better than we expected. It’s great to have support from family and friends when big decisions are made.

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December 2023 Dividend Portfolio Update

Where did December go? It feels like we just finished November and now here we are with our December 2023 dividend portfolio update! To be honest, we are happy to have these months start moving quickly. Winter is the worst part of RV life and we have a lot going on. We also have a lot to look forward to in 2024. If you haven’t see our previous post check it out here.

The markets continued to breakout higher in December. This move, along with some steady contributions, helped our dividend portfolio to close 2023 at an all time high. On the surface this looks great, however when we dig into our individual positions we hold a lot of 2023 laggards. The pessimistic view is that we underperformed the market. This was mostly because of our REIT holdings which had a rough year.

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