The new year is a good time to set goals. Here are my overall priorities for 2017.
Add another rental
Our experience with our existing rental has generally been a good one. Given where stock market valuations are currently at, I’ve been actively thinking about diversifying our portfolios away from equity exposure and directing some monies to property.
My wife and I have been actively looking at adding another rental to help us further diversify our investment portfolio in 2017. In 2017 I’d like to make significant progress on our search for another rental either through making a substantial commitment towards saving up the deposit and perhaps even isolating the specific area in which we would like to purchase.
Who knows if things progress sufficiently well we may even be able to complete a rental transaction in 2017 itself!.
Further extend my option strategy
I was relatively pleased with how my options experiment progressed through 2016. It’s something that I aim to extend and do more of in 2017 I am planning on sticking with the same strategy of writing slightly out of the money put options on high-quality stocks that I’d like to own for the long-term.
This experiment last year generated close to $6,500 in premiums. Of course I expected some of the stocks may get put to me over the course of 2017. However by and large most of the options that I’ve written are now significantly up from when they were initially written.
I expect that I may be slightly more aggressive in terms of the strike price that I write the options at and maintain a slight discount to current market price rather than a more significant discount which I did for 2016.
I will likely also look to write longer-term options contracts to maximize the initial premium that I’m deriving from these options.
Continue maxing out the 401(k)’s
Making a maximum contribution towards my 401(k) was the strategy that worked really well in 2016 given the rapid rise of markets through the year. My wife and I are now sitting on a substantial accumulated sum in our 401(k) that’s difficult to ignore.
Maxing out the 401(k) has now become an effortless undertaking. In fact I don’t even notice the money leaving my paycheck and being invested into the 401(k). My aim is to continue down the path way of maxing out my 401(k) through the course of 2017. Of course market returns will not likely match what was seen in 2016, however the tax benefit on contributions plus the long-term compounding of amounts set aside into the 401(k) will no doubt make this a worthwhile endeavor when looked at in 10 to 15 year’s time
Do nothing
For the most part, 2016 for me was a period of more frenetic investment activity towards the start of the year when markets moved into a tailspin and very little activity in the latter part of the year when markets consistently rose.
In 2017 my aim is to literally do nothing. I don’t wish to make any purchase transactions at current market prices. If markets happen to experience a sustained decline (which I’m not betting on), then I may revisit this.
Similarly I don’t want to have to sell anything. I really just want to leave things alone and give my investments the chance to grow and prosper over the course of the year. The way I see it, I have now done the hard work at the front-end with respect to investment selection and execution. Now is going to be more a time of letting those investments grow and the best way to do that is to not make any active investment decisions, particularly sales of any investment.
Better tracking of finances
My wife mentioned to me that she’d like to create keep a close a tab on our spending and specifically where our money is going. We have fairly good tools to help facilitate that including our Personal Capital accounts which help accurately show expenses and specific categories of spending.
However to be frank we haven’t really paid close attention to where specifically our moneys are going and what is being spent. So for 2017, I would like to make a more concerted effort to understand exactly where our money is going. Of course that may be easier said than done!
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