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Happy Holidays from Wallet Squirrel – A Look Back at 2017

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Happy Holidays from Wallet Squirrel – A Look Back at 2017

Fun fact. Did you know there are a total of 29 holidays celebrated between Thanksgiving and New Years Eve?

So on that note, we at Wallet Squirrel, would like to wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannuka, or any other holiday you might be celebrating!

Andrew and I personally would like to thank every single one of you for an awesome 2017!

Because of you, in 2017 we saw a tremendous amount of growth of interest in our journey to becoming financial guru’s, investing ninjas, and financially free. You all have decided to join us on this journey as we all learn together from our personal experiences.

Today, I would like to take a look back at our more popular and well-liked posts of 2017. Let the reminiscing commence!

Side Hustling

We, like everyone else, love to find new ways to earn more money and to see how others are making money. This is why we started searching around the globe for new awesome ways to earn more money outside of our 9 to 5 jobs.

How Andrew made $1.88 Selling Stock Photography in 10 Days – Both Andrew and I wrote several articles about stock photography throughout the year. His about how he made $1.88 within 10 Days of being accepted performed the best. I still own the title for making the most money off of one photograph though, $1,000 and counting.

Earn Money While Working Out With the Achievement App – Achievement is a fun application that syncs up with all of your activities, including your tweets. You earn more points the more you walk, workout, sleep, tweet healthy thoughts, and so on. Let the point earning begin!

How to Sell Something on Craigslist and Make Money – Andrew was able to sell some old stuff on Craigslist. He walks us through the whole process from posting his items to meeting up with the buyer. Pretty cool!

I believe he sold his old guitar. Now that he has a girlfriend, I guess he doesn’t need to walk the streets of Denver serenading women anymore.

Investing

3 Reasons Why Monthly Dividends are Better – Andrew talks about why he believes that monthly dividends are better than other dividend stocks. He walks you through why you should think they are awesome too and how to find those stocks that hand out monthly dividends.

Come learn how you can learn extra money on top of the normal gains of investing.

Cost-Benefit Analysis Example to either Pay Off My Car or Invest? – Andrew was not sure if he should pay off his car or invest the extra money he had. Enter the cost-benefit analysis. He walks through his thought process and how to properly perform a cost-benefit analysis. Check out the article to

see what he ended up doing.

Latest Stock Purchases – Andrew informs us throughout the year about the latest stock purchases he makes. This is intended to help inform us all about new stocks that might interest you. This is one example of those articles.

You can look at his entire portfolio in the investments page.

Personal Finance

How to Pay Off Your Car Loan Faster – Paying off our car early freed up $405 a month! This money has been great so we can be more aggressive at paying off our student loans. This article walks through the different ways we were able to apply to pay off $7,000 in only three months.

How and What to Teach Your Kids About Money – A lot of us have young kids. One question I had was, “How should we go about teaching them about money?” So I did some research and this is what I found out.

9 Bad Spending Habits that are Killing Your Budget – We all have bad spending habits that we need to drop ASAP. For me, I had a lot! Luckily, I have a loving and patient wife that has helped me break most of these bad spending habits.

What are your bad spending habits?

Blogging

How to Start a Blog – I could not believe blogging was still so hot! I thought I was caught in an episode of How I Met Your Mother where Barney was only focused on his own blog. Well, the blogging world is still massive and still hot! It is time for you to start your very own blog!

50 Amazon Affiliate Website Examples – The money that can be made off of affiliate marketing is amazing! This article provides 50 examples to get the ideas flowing in your mind.

Are you planning on starting an affiliate niche website in 2018? Andrew is doing one!

An SEO Strategy – What Works and What Does Not – We saw a 1,500% in traffic growth during 2017. This growth mainly comes from our SEO strategy (also our Marketing Strategy). This is the perfect next step after you start your very own blog!

A New Year

I love the end of a year as it is a great time to look back on the goals you succeeded at and failed. This is the time of the year to prepare how you will concur the upcoming year.

For me personally, I do not succeed at every goal on my list. I am alright with that as long as I learn from my mistakes to make the next year the best year yet!

Next week I will dive more into this concept.

 

Cheers!

Adam

Latest Stock Purchase & Analysis – Cisco (CSCO)

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After seeing multiple investor friends pick up Cisco (CSCO) lately, I had to check it out. So these are the insights I looked into and ultimately factored into my first purchase of Cisco.

Why am I sharing my latest stock purchase?

Each month I try different ways to make extra money and share how much I make in my Income Reports. Every month I use this money to buy more stocks and other investments to build a $10,000,000 investment portfolio. It may take a while, but it’s done with one investment at a time.

This month I bought 9 shares of Cisco.

What is Cisco

Cisco (Stock Ticker CSCO) is a hardware and software company that designs, manufactures, and sells Internet Protocol (IP) based networking and other products related to the communications and information technology industry worldwide.

I basically just like to think of Cisco as the infrastructure of the internet. All of the highways that connect websites and databases and funny cat videos of the internet are primary run on Cisco products.

If you want to know what a company does look at their revenue. In 2016 this is where their money came from:

  • Switching (30% of revenue) – Switches connect computers, printers, and servers within a building or campus. These allow everything to talk to each other. Switches create a network of devices.
  • Routers (15% of revenue) – If a switch is a network, routers connect networks. A router links computers to the internet.
  • Collaboration (9% of revenue) – This is a general term to describe their immersive video conference software, IP telephones, software to connect the devices to talk to each other. This includes Jabber, Cisco WebEx and Spark. For example, my office uses Cisco WebEx to coordinate all of our in/out video conferences.
  • Data Centers (7% of revenue) – Data Centers allow large scale flexible computing. This can be from storage to computing power.
  • Wireless Infrastructure (5% of revenue) – These are the base stations and infrastructure for Wi-Fi. Think of hotels, casinos, grocery stores, airports and any building that provides Wi-Fi. Most of these devices are Cisco related.
  • Security (4% of revenue) – These are the firewalls that block out Russian hackers and malware from accessing their infrastructure and their client’s servers/computers/Internet of Things.
  • Services (24% of revenue) – These are the people that run these services, train clients how to use them, manage networks, operate systems and support their wide variety of products.

We can say that the other 6% is “Other”, but you get the idea they do a lot with the internet. Combined all these products and services generated $49,247,000,000 in total revenue in 2016.

Why did I buy Cisco?

When looking over Cisco, they really hit some of the key factors that I look for when buying a stock.

1. Dividend (good)- They have a 3.69% dividend that they’ve had since 2012. That 3.69% is really nice considering this is a tech stock that traditionally has lower dividends.

2. Historical Performance (good)- They say that past performance doesn’t indicate future performance, but I like the graph of the stock price over the last 5 years. It has its dips, but overall it has a progressive climb. That is a plus for me.

5 Year Graph of Cisco’s Stock Price

3. Strong History (good) – I’m not a big fan of crazy risk, so I like to invest in proven companies. Cisco has a market cap of 161.702 Billion, they’ve been around since 1984 building the internet. I want to make sure that the company has been tested long enough and a strong times interest earned ratio that they know how to manage market downturns.

4. Reoccurring Revenue (getting there) – Cisco has traditionally been a hardware company, but they are transitioning into more of a software company and one that wants to focus on a subscription model. Their CEO, Chuck Robbins even mentioned in their 2016 Annual Report that they are “working to move more of our revenue to a software-based and subscription-based model”. I am a huge fan of reoccuring revenue, so when I see a company of this size transitioning to that business model, I can get on board.

Since I liked what I saw, I bought 9 shares at $31.89 per share for a total of $279.09.

Why did I buy now?

In honesty, I probably rushed into buying Cisco because I wanted to buy their stock before their earnings call on August 16th (yesterday). I thought the stock would increase after the earning call, but it dropped a bit after coming short on revenue. F*&K.

The stock price has dipped about a dollar since then. I failed.

I will continue to hold Cisco because I think they are in the right direction, but it just sucks that I bought it right before the dip. This will probably teach me not to rush into anything when looking at future stocks.

Conclusion

I like Cisco and look forward to following them, but will be hesitant into rushing into any future buying just because a earnings report is coming up and everyone else is bullish on a stock.

If Cisco continues to invest more into their subscription-based business model, I’ll likely add more to this position.

Get a free share of stock from Robinhood for New Signups & Referrals

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Robinhood App now offers a free share of stock for New Signups & Referrals

Robinhood App the free stock trading app that I’ve used for my portfolio and reviewed last year has a new promotion making some unique headlines. Now for every person you get to sign up with the broker Robinhood, both you and the person who signed up, get a free share of stock.

What Stocks Do You Get?

It appears to be a randomized assortment of stocks from the messages posted on social media. Robinhood states that the stocks range in value from $3 – $150, so you could technically get a share of Apple (AAPL) randomly if you sign up now, or you help a friend signup.

What Are Your Chances of Getting $175?

Depends, how lucky are you? Like REALLY lucky. You have a 1% chance of getting a stock valued at $175. Reading the fine print on their website you’re most likely to get a $2.50-$10 stock.

Here are your chances for a free share of stock when you sign up.

  • 98% of getting a stock valued at $0.50-$10
  • 1% of getting a stock valued at $10-$50
  • 1% of getting a stock valued at $50-$200

Thanks to Social Media, we have an idea what it looks like.

So get all your friends to sign up?

For everyone you get to sign up, both you and your new sign up friend get a free share of stock. All you need to do is use the referral code that Robinhood gives you.

If you’ve been with Robinhood for a while, this is the same referral code you’ve always had. Now there are just perks for you to refer a friend to Robinhood.

Here click on my referral code to see what it looks like. You don’t have to sign up.

Robinhood Referral

However, if you’re someone like Kim Kardashian who can get ONE MILLION people to sign up, you won’t get $1M free shares of stock. You’ll be capped at $500 worth of stocks no matter how many people you refer. Lame I know.

Is this promotion available to anyone with Robinhood?

It started off a few months ago. I was NOT one of the early testers for this. However earlier this week I saw on my Robinhood App that I’m NOW able to this. I’m not sure what changed. If everyone is able to do this now or what (I’m not special). They must have just opened this up to a much wider pool of users.

If you’re curious if this works with your Robinhood referral code. Go to your app and if you can’t find “Free Stocks” in your sub menu. You’re not in the program yet. Maybe send the Robinhood App people a tweet (@RobinhoodApp) and say “Hey, can I join this super cool referral club like @WalletSquirrel”. I’ll retweet for you.

 

Should you feel comfortable referring friends to Robinhood?

If it helps, I refer all my friends to start investing with Robinhood. It’s a great broker to start off with (one I personally use) because there are $0 fees to start buying stocks and all of their securities customers are insured up to $500,000 by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).

Also keep in mind that Robinhood recently raised $110M in Series C round of fundraising, which they’re valued at $1.3 Billion. Some of the investors working with Robinhood are Google Ventures.

These guys are growing and they have the support of some major players in the game.

This promotion makes Robinhood worth considering

If you’ve ever considered the stock market, you should do some research on Robinhood because not only are you going to get free trades while using their app, you’ll start off with a free share of stock that could be Apple.

This isn’t on our list of ways to make money, but maybe it should be.