Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Paycheck plan for 2006

I won't have an internet connection for at least a few weeks. I just ordered the kit and it takes up to 10 days to arrive....but I did find a nice cafe down the street with free wireless so I'll be able to go online (and post here).

This cuts into the time I wanted to spend looking for new investments since it's hard to concentrate while at a cafe. I have been adding to my list of stocks to look into. Some have been beaten down, but I still want to research them a bit. I've been looking into the food sector (chicken companies are getting hit, PPC, SAFM), and various other food related companies: KFT, CAG, CQB, HSY, and a few others but my list is at work. Some of these have been going through tough times (PPC, CAG), but it might be worth a look especially if they have strong cash flows. Most of these have decent dividend yields as well. I also might look into tanker stocks again, this time dry bulk shipping. I made some very good returns in 2003/2004 off oil tankers and now I'm going to look at a few others (DRYS and DSX). I might also add to my SFL position because it's being treated like a tanker, but it's more of a leasing company (so the yield might be safer).

I'm going to use ING to help with my savings plan. I originally stated my goal is to have a savings rate of 40%. This might be a fairly high number, but I think I can accomplish this.
Rather than just letting my paychecks sit in my bank account until I figure out what to do, I'm going to transfer a portion of each paycheck to ING. The money will sit in ING until it's ready to be put to use and I figured I can always buy on margin for a few days since the margin interest will be low (to give time for the money to transfer over from ING to my brokerage account).
So starting with my next paycheck I'm going to follow this plan. Every two weeks I'm going to have ING automatically take out 40% of my paycheck. This will total about $570 every two weeks and about $13,680 for the year. I'm going to try this out for awhile and see how it goes.


NO DooDahs said...

Why so hard to concentrate at the cafe? Are the waitresses cute? Where is this place?

Good to see you back posting!

Andrew said...

Just curious, why do so many people use ING instead of PayPal? ING's return is 3.80% and the 7-day yield on PayPal's money market fund is currently 4.25%.