Boring money stuff..

So, I had something of a epiphany – for me – today. I know this is obvious, and I don’t know why I didn’t get it before.

I’m currently trying to reconfigure my (admittedly small) stock portfolio to generate some income via dividends, and also to grow said portfolio until it generates a meaningful amount of income. At the moment I can’t really do anything about this, since I’m broke.. (though occasionally I take some money that I should be using to pay off credit cards and stick it in the stock market instead)

However, it occured to me that I’m using the wrong strategy.

Instead of buying little bits of stock.. (I finally made myself not buy less than $300 of stock in any one transaction, because the commissions were eating me alive), I should be sticking my money in a savings account, watching for signs that the current economic meltdown is at its worst, and then buying whopping sums of stock at that time. I don’t know how one predicts when a economic meltdown is going to reverse, but I’m thinking there’s probably some momentum that keeps things plunging – or climbing – for a while after the input conditions no longer should dictate them doing so, so probably I’ll have several days of oppertunity to buy in. That is, of course, assuming I have any money to buy with. 😉 Still, I will try and put aside a small amount of money each paycheck towards the goal of buying a bunch of stock when the economy is worst.

You all already know why I’m doing this, but let me explain, for myself. Dividends are paid on a per-stock basis. Therefore, the cheaper you can buy the stock, the ‘cheaper’ the dividends are. I’m not interested in capitols gains or losses at the moment, only dividends, and they’re paid out very infrequently and are very small compared to the price of the stock, so there’s no reason to think that I want to rush owning any particular peice of stock so I’ll make any particular ex dividend date.

I keep figuring out little things about playing the stock market.. I should really buy one of those idiot’s guide to the market type books and read it. I’m never going to be a big-time invester guru, and I mostly play for fun – it’s kind of like a very slow game of monopoly – but I would like to be a little more aware of some of the strategies I should be using.

In other news, I now need to shut down this computer so I can vacuum it. Yes, really.

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