138 - From Lump Sum to Monthly Cash Flow: Our $150K Investment Plan

How We Invested $150,000 for Monthly Income | Dividend Portfolio Breakdown

In this episode, we break down exactly how we invested a $150,000 lump sum across 2 portfolios with one primary goal: reliable monthly income without reckless risk.

We walk through how we structured the portfolios, why certain stocks and ETFs made the cut, and how we’re building a dividend stream that functions like a paycheck — with flexibility, downside protection, and upside optionality.

What we cover:

• How we split $150K across income and our conservative fallback portfolio
• Why undervalued dividend growers matter more than yield chasing
• Using covered call ETFs responsibly for income
• Preferred shares, utilities, packaging, semiconductors, banks, and data centers
• Turning DRIP on and off strategically based on valuation
• How we’re targeting $2,500+ per month in dividends in our income portfolio
• Backup cash flow plans if our income portfolio underperforms
• Where excess cash goes when there’s nothing to buy

If you’re trying to understand how dividend income actually works in practice, this episode lays it out step by step.

Questions? Email Tim at debrine9@gmail.com

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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

Episode music was created using Loudly.

Transcript

Welcome to roaming returns a podcast about generating a passive income with dividend stocks so you can secure your finances and liberate your life. 
Today is full breakdown recap of what we did with the $150,000 condo proceeds, and more importantly why we did what we did.
The goal wasn’t to swing for the fences or chase hype. The goal was monthly income, built conservatively, with multiple backup plans if things don’t go perfectly.
We walk through how we split this money across portfolios, how we’re generating a reliable dividend ‘paycheck’ using high-yeild ETFs without blowing up our portfolio, and how we’re favoring undervalued dividend growers.  
Even if you turned into our youtube live streams, we have more data on the thoughts behind the buys. 
Hello, hello. This is going to be a recap of the live streams that we did. Yes.
In case you didn't listen to them. In case you didn't want to listen to that. So you know what the heck we invested in with the $150,000? We didn't invest the full $150,000.
Spoiler alert. Did you just spoil alert? Spoiler alert. But this actually goes back to the question that a lot of people do have is if you come into a lump sum, do you invest the entire thing or do you kind of do that dollar cost averaging thing everybody talks about? Well, the answer really does depend on the market situation.
When we just go by based off numbers, valuation. Right. It really depends.
When something's a buy, it's a buy, it doesn't matter. And if it's not a buy and you're in a situation where you're coming into the end of the year, because this is like a prime example where normally tax loss harvesting, people will sell out of things by the end of December. And then they have to wait 30 days before they can get back in their investments to lock in like tax benefit.
I just read about that today. Isn't that the wash rule? Yeah. Yeah.
The wash rule. That's if you get back in in the 30 day period into a equal or likewise. We did do an episode last year about tax loss harvesting.
I just read an article about the wash rule. I was like, well, that's boring. And we actually did lock a loss in.
We actually did lock a loss in for a portion of our Cony experiment to just knock our taxable profits in for dividends or knock it down for the end of the year. We're not planning to get back in that. So it doesn't really matter.
So we. But that means that usually January has better prices, right? For certain things. A lot of times.
Yeah. So with the amount that we invested. Like the end of January, because you have the Santa Claus rally that goes through the first couple of days of January and then like it'll stabilize and then probably go down a little bit in January.
So you could probably everything that we bought. And if you're interested in buying it, you could probably get it like 5% cheaper, like the second or third week in January. But you are not getting dividends while you're in that waiting period.
So there are trade-offs. It depends if you want to be in. If you don't want to be in.
It really just depends on a lot of different things. Macro climate. Touch my balls.
Touch your balls. Oh, they're fluffy. It's a ball.
What a hat. It's Lance Armstrong hat. He only has one ball.
Oh, OK. It's not funny if I have to explain it. You have to explain anything that is pop culture reference.
You know this, right? I just don't pay attention. OK. The first thing that we bought with our newfound riches.
Should we should we break that down? I think we did hint at this, but again, we'll reiterate. So we had $150,000 and we wanted our income-driven portfolio version to have $30,000? $32,000. $32,000 to bump that up to about $50,000 for our actual income that we're going to be spending as soon as we leave in like a week.
And then the rest of it is going to go. So the main portfolio went down to like $80,000. And then we added $120,000 left to invest on top of that.
So we had $120,000 on the main portfolio side. And then that $32,000 on the income-driven side. So we're going to start with the main portfolio.
We basically have three portfolios now. We have the retirement portfolio. That's my mom's, though.
We have the van life income portfolio, which is all the high yield and ETFS that we're going to live off the dividends for. And then we have the main portfolio in the van life, which is all the good stuff. Which is kind of like our retirement portfolio.
So if any of the round hills and the yield maxes go belly up, we will not have to go back to work. That's our fallback. Right.
And you'll see what I did with some of that here. So he's going to start with the main portfolio. This is the main portfolio.
The first one that we bought was Sunoco, but not the Sunoco you're thinking of. It was SON. It's the paper packaging Sunoco, not the gas fueling Sunoco.
I love that they're like the same freaking ticker. So SON, we bought 92 shares at $43.43. The reason that I like it is because the experts have a target price of $53.25, which is okayish. You know, 10, what is that? 18% or something like what the experts expect it to gain in the next 12 months.
I expect it to actually go higher than that. I put mine a little bit higher, like $55. So a 27% potential price growth is what I'm thinking on this one.
Plus dividends. The projected 12-month revenue growth for SON is 6%, so that's not too shabby for like a multibillion-dollar packaging company. The reason that we're into packaging, we actually got into two packaging ones.
Regardless of how you feel about the environmental consequences of packaging. And trust us, that is a moral rub for both of us. Just in America alone, it's like over 80 million pounds of packaging every year is used.
So this is a very lucrative sector. Disgusting. The current yield on SON was, when I typed this up, it might be a little bit lower than that, it was 4.89%, and it has a 49-year dividend growth streak.
So that means for 49 years, it's raised its dividend every year. Its forward price-to-earnings ratio is 7.65%, whereas the sector average in the packaging area is 30.56%. Oh, wow. I do like that it has a 10-year dividend growth rate of 5% and a payout ratio of 33%.
Now, the 10-year growth of 5% might seem a little low, but you have to understand this is like a... Dividend grower. For a 49-year dividend growth streak, that's pretty good. Yeah, next year it'll be a king status.
Check that out. I didn't even ever even heard of this one. It's a pretty good one that's undervalued.
It's sense went down a little bit, so you actually get this a little bit, I think it's like 42-something right now. You could probably get this a little bit cheaper than we got it, but like... Which is a perfect example of turn the drip on. For a retirement portfolio, though, or like a fallback, if it's a fallback retirement portfolio, however you want to... I feel like that's what we should call this, our fallback portfolio.
It's a really good pickup because you're like, this one, the price should at least trade sideways, all the while you're accumulating more shares of a dividend grower. So I'm okay with this. Even if this one, say, was 45 at the end of 2026, I'd be cool with it because we gained 5% more in dividends.
And what we're doing with the fallback retirement portfolio is we're literally just turning the drip on and off, depending on the valuations. And I actually figured something out this week, so I feel super smart. I actually figured out that I can actually input in my spreadsheet certain commands and it pulls the price off the interweb every 20 minutes.
So now I can pretty much just glance at my spreadsheet every day and be like, ooh, that one had a rough couple of weeks. So that's pretty sick because it actually... My spreadsheet now has the current price updated every 20 minutes and the current year-to-date return, plus our current total return on the investment. So I'll be able to just glance at it now and be like, we can put more money in that one.
Because before, when we had cash laying around in the account, I had to pick and I had to go in and research which one's undervalued. And now that I actually have the autoprompts, it's pretty sick. That's pretty hardcore for him, considering he's super tech illiterate or Gen X-er growing up without tech.
Figured it out all by myself. I know, I'm so proud of you. Now I want to create an AI robot that pulls all the stuff off the interweb.
We'll get there, we'll get there. We got a guy we're going to stop by on the way out. If I can actually create that, it'll actually be something that all of our listeners can actually have access to.
You just download this app and grab what we have. Just copy our spreadsheet. So that's the first one.
The second one is in the tech sector. It was Skyworks, S-W-K-S. Basically, they produce microchips.
They're like a chip producer, chip conductor. Kind of like AMD, but not quite. They have a different clientele than AMD does.
We got 81, was that 61? 61. 61 shares, that's 64.89. The reason I like this one is because it is just grossly undervalued. The 12-month expert target price is $83.63, whereas I think it's actually $90 to $100.
So you have like a 40% potential price growth in this one. The 12-month revenue growth is projected to be 14% in this one. The current yield is 4.4%. It only has 11-year dividend growth streak.
But... Still not going to sneeze up. Yeah, whatever. It's a tech one.
You're not really going to have like a high yield plus a consistent dividend growth streak because they actually need to actually have money for research. R&D, yeah. The for price earning that ratio for Skyworks is 14.50 versus the sector average of 50.64. You have to remember semiconductors generally have a ridiculously high PE ratio.
And it has a 10-year dividend growth rate of 15.8%. So that's really good. The payout for this one is a little high, but it still covers the dividend. Its payout ratio is currently 90.67%. I'd like to see that number a little bit lower, but for the price and with the potential 40% price growth.
I don't even care if they really are diehard like a lot of the dividend ones. A lot of the ones we'll talk about, the first thing they do when they sit down at the board meetings, how can we extend our dividend streak? I don't even care if they didn't raise their dividend at all and they just pay me 4% to hold something that should be worth $130, $140. I'm fine with that.
We've liked this one for years. This is one of the ones we actually did years ago when we were doing the earnings report stuff. That's where I first encountered Skyworks and Ambarella.
Ambarella hasn't been as good as Skyworks, but Skyworks has been consistently pretty good. It just had a really down year because we mentioned... Is that the one that Microsoft cancelled contracts? We mentioned this one before that Apple cancelled 25% of their revenue contracts with them. So everyone thought that this one would just die once that Apple left, but they have more clients than Apple.
I'm not too worried about this one. This one's actually gone up since we got into it. So you'd have to wait for a few weeks to actually get it at a lower price than what we got it at.
But if it has that much room to grow, does it matter? No, not really. Okay. Well, just putting that out there.
The third one is a regional bank. If you don't know, I'm pretty bullish on regional banks in 2026 as opposed to in 2025 when I thought it would be the big banks. I think 2026, the regional banks will actually even out that disparity that happened in 2025.
To me, one of the best, if not the best regional bank is the Bank of Ozark, OZK. We bought 83 shares at $48.26. The experts expect this one to have a 12-month target price of 55, 56. I, again, think they're a little bit low on that one.
I think it's going to be around 60. So you have a 24% potential price growth and price alone of this one. Now, the 12-month revenue growth is lower at 5%, but that's still pretty good for a bank.
Banks generally don't have wild swings when it comes to revenue growth. The yield is a little bit smaller as well at 3.81%, but it does have 26-year dividend growth streaks. Oh, it hit like aristocrats, that is.
And it has a pretty good price-to-earnings ratio of 7.62 forward P.E. versus the sector average of 15.39. So I like all the valuations so far, but it has a really good 10-year dividend growth rate of 12.9% for a bank. That's absurd. And its payout ratio is next to none.
It's at 27.48%. Well, I was going to say the reason we got into this one is because the metrics are just outstanding. Yeah, the metrics in the Bank of Ozark are really, really good. And I do expect the regional banks to outperform in 2026.
So I'll just take one of the best call of the day. I'm done with that guy. Bring in the next one.
The next thing we dumped some money into, we dumped it into... If you've been a listener or fan of the channel for years, you realize a couple of years back, we were in ULTY, which is a... YieldMax is where they just write options on a bunch of smaller companies that you probably haven't heard of. Well, I think it's REX. ULTI is the one we got into.
I think it's REX Shares. They do something pretty much the exact same as what YieldMax does. They basically find a bunch of companies that you probably haven't heard of, and they buy them and then write options on them.
We got 103 shares at $14.67. So we had a small position before. We just added to that with some proceeds. Its current yield is 77.9% as of now, but that's always in flux.
Yeah, ULTI is REX Shares. That 77.9% is always in flux. It's always changing.
It's a weekly pair. So some weeks it'll be 77.9%. Some weeks it'll be 60-some percent. So it's a very variable dividend that's bouncing around all the place, which is fine.
I plan on using ULTY as a small paycheck in the actual better portfolio. What I'm doing with Roundhills and YieldMaxs that are in the income portfolio, I want to have a couple in the main portfolio so that I'll actually always have cash available to dump into stuff. I mean, granted, we are sitting on a pretty big sum, but I always want to even... We always want to be growing our portfolios as much as we can.
At some point, I'll have dispersed all that money, and I'll actually want to be able to have extra cash every week or every two weeks to put in. Well, as a fallback, and then if we want to grow our portfolio, because again, inflation does whatever it does. I don't see the reason why we wouldn't want to grow it if we can grow it.
We're using the historical data on this one. I'm hoping to generate around $180 to $200 each month just from this one with 200 shares that I can then dump into good stuff. I'll be taking these as dividends as cash.
I won't even touch the drift. This is just going to be coming in as cash. And the initial probably will be paid off in this one in around 18 months or so.
So like a year, year and a half, almost a year. I think it'll be less than a year and a half. It'll be more than a year.
So it'll be like between 12 and 15 months. How much did you say? What, 18, 20? So I'm actually curious because we were going to be making 44. So that would be basically reinvesting 4% of all of our income.
So if we were making money at a job, we'd be investing just from the proceeds of ULTI. There is a backdoor plan to the income producing portfolio. Like if I needed to, I could remove all my REX shares, AIPI, FEPI and ULTI into the income producing portfolio to maintain our $2,500 a month.
That's like the first goal is to have money each month to put into the main portfolio. The second goal is if shit goes sideways, I'll have something to dump into the income. What's funny to me is like we sat like we're so YOLO, balls to the wall, like taking crazy risks.
But just like we actually have these multiple backup plans. I think it might not seem like we actually put as many plans in the place as we actually do. Oh, if you guys could see my brain and like the thought process of my brain, you'd be like, what? What? What's going on there? We can't even follow each other.
It's pretty funny. Everything that we invest in, I have like at least three plans. I have three different plans depending on how it goes.
And like the ULTI is literally just to put money into our main portfolio. If need be, we can actually then put it into the income portfolio. But then the income portfolio, there's a whole other plan for that.
We'll get to that here at the bottom of this. So that's the fourth one is a preferred share. If you're not familiar or you don't remember preferred shares, basically are when a company that pays a dividend, needs money, they'll like they'll produce a lot of preferred shares that you can buy on the open market.
It's kind of like a bond without going through the bond avenue. So in this one here, DLR preferred share L, DLR itself has a 3%, 3.1% yield. I mean, if I needed to, I could get into that.
But like the fact that it has a preferred share, that's like 21% undervalued at $20 and 56 cents. Like I'll just, I'll get a 6% yield while getting 21%. At some point, it'll go back up to 25.
Well, and how much is DLR stock by itself? It's like a hundred, right? 160 something. So remember how we said, if you can buy more share quantity, you get more dividend payouts. So this one actually has a much lower price and a higher yield.
So that's two for two. Like you're just gonna, you're just, again, so much more from the preferred side. Like I said, we got 140 shares of this one at $20 and 56 cents, but the par price of this one's 25.
So right there, you're 21.5% price appreciation. Maybe not within a year's time, but like at some point it'll hit $25 again. And even if they call it back at 25, you're up.
And that's what she just brought up because like a lot of preferred, like when companies issue preferred shares, like if they have the extra money, they'll actually just buy their preferred shares off the market as a way to kind of finesse you into owning their stock as opposed to their preferred shares. Is this one that automatically converts to DLR then? Or did it not have that option? I can't remember. No, it didn't.
It's not a convertible. And it is a cumulative. I mean, it means if DLR gets into financial problems, like they will, if they cancel their dividend, which they won't, but if they ever do, like QVC.
I was gonna say, unlike QVC. They can't like to suspend their dividends. Like as a preferred shareholder, you'll get your dividends before the regular shareholders do if they ever reinstate their dividend.
We're not too worried about that in the next year. But this one is just like 100% way for me to actually have a good yield on a data center money as DLR is pretty much all about data center. So again, this one's just a macro trend that we happen to find a preferred share for.
Big macro play. It would have been maybe 30 shares of DLR if we actually bought the stock. Right.
Versus 140 and double the yield. And you get a 33 cent dividend every three months. So that's pretty nice.
That's quarterly. Good enough. I like that one.
I like that one a lot. I think that's a really good way. That's one of the things that I wish I could convey better when we're talking about stuff.
You can absolutely find a macro trend data centers, find a really good stock DLR that you would get into in a heartbeat, but then find that they have a preferred share. So you're actually making more. You're literally buying a back doorway into something.
And it's kind of like having a bond, kind of like having a bond, but you have more frequent payouts because bonds only pay out twice a year. This pays out quarterly. Now, this one's down, I think, like 10 or 11 cents since we got onto it.
So you could actually get it a better price than we got into that. But whatever. Drip, drip, drip.
Now, the fifth one. Fifth one, we have five. I think we're on five is Opera.
If you're not familiar with Opera, where have you been? Even myself as a Gen X tech dinosaur, I know about Opera. It is basically a internet platform from Norway. Oh, I love Norway.
And it's actually infiltrated a lot of American computers. I didn't realize that was Norwegian. Yeah.
We've got 215 shares at $13.97. The 12 month expert target price for this is $25.50. So they're a little bit more optimistic than I am. I think it'll be about $20 at the end of 2026. But even at $20, that's still 43% potential price growth.
It has a 12 month projected revenue growth of 21%. So this one's going to pop off. And it's only been paying a dividend for two years.
So there's no dividend growth streak. So whatever. But it has a yield currently of 5.5. The issue with O-P-R-A Opera is that it only pays two dividends a year.
It pays one out in March and it pays one out in... Oh, so it's a biannual. Like October or something like that. It's like a bond.
So you're not getting a dividend as much as you'd like to. But everything else in this one is just ridiculous. Like it's forward price to earnings ratio is 11.94. The sector average is 34.45. Well, this is kind of in the tech sector, correct? Yes.
So this is one of those, again, I think this is more of a growth play with yield as a bonus type deal. And like the dividend is a variable one that's paid out, like I said, probably every six months. And what management's doing is they're basically taking 90% of their earnings and paying it back in the form of a dividend to the shareholders.
So the better the company does, the higher your dividend is going to be. That's interesting. You would think they'd do R&D.
Maybe they'll switch over to that at some point. So I really like Opera. I've been actually about... I've mentioned Opera a few times as a growth stock.
The fact that it has a dividend is irrelevant. I never made the correlation between Opera, the stock, and the actual browser. I actually use Opera.
That's funny. One of my three internet things. Okay.
The sixth one is Kimberly Morgan, KMB. It's another packaging one. It does plastics and papers and things of that nature.
It's a higher price one. We only got 39 shares at $101.45. The 12-month target expert by the experts is $127.40. I, again, think that's a little high. I'm shooting for 120, which would be an 18% potential price growth.
The 12-month projected revenue growth for this one's only 2%, but this one's a massive. This one's a huge company. It has... It's packaging, and it also has toilet paper and Kleenex and diapers, huggies, and shit like that.
It has its hands in a lot of different things. It's kind of like Icon, but not as shitty. What about the one that Buffett always talks about? I'm having a brain fart.
Berkshire Hathaway-esque? Not really. Esque. No esque.
But it does what it... It currently has a 5% yield, which is obscene for this one. This one's generally in the 3.5% range. That's how much the price depreciated in 2025.
So you're getting the same company that everyone else bought in 2025 at 3.5% yield for a 5% yield. Yeah. It's like buying shares years ago.
It's fantastic when that happens. A 53-year dividend growth streak. So this one, your dividend is getting increased, basically.
Unless something like what Triple M happens. But Triple M is a completely different scenario because they spun off the medical division. A lot of people always talk shit about Triple M. Like, oh, they cut their dividend after 66 years.
Understand that they had a completely different scenario where they spun off a large portion of their revenue into a medical component. And they kept the packaging and industrial component. I imagine that wasn't an easy decision.
And that's what they ended up going with. So I'm curious to see what Triple M does in the future in general. We have that in your mom's retirement.
I know we do. Let's see. A 13.57 forward price-to-earnings ratio versus the sector average of 22.84. So in that regard, it's undervalued compared to its sector.
It has a 10-year dividend growth rate of 4%, which, okay. Its payout ratio is high at 92.7. But with management's willingness to reward shareholders, I think the payout ratio will shrink because I'm assuming they'll do a share buyback to get less shares on the market so they're not paying out as much in dividends. But I actually would be okay with a dividend cut in this one.
But put the profit margins around 10% and the projected EPS to cover dividend payments by about $0.55 a quarter. It's unlikely in the short term. But this is one to keep your mind on.
This one actually could have a dividend cut unless their financials turn around because that payout ratio of 93 is really high. Yeah, that is crazy. They're going to have to do something if they want to stay king status.
That's a hard decision to make. Again, as a company that's known as one of the dividend growers, that's like elite status of the dividend stock. So I think that's going to be... They'll probably use that as a last resort as dividend cut.
Yeah, they'll probably borrow money before they do that. Right, which isn't good either. Next one was H2O.
HTO. You always say H2O. H2O.
H2O. It's a water utility. One of the most overlooked aspects when it comes to data center is the amount of water they use.
They use a lot of water to cool their shit. And I just now saw a couple of people mentioned it in social media reels and one article was written about it. But water is going to be gold here in five to 10 years.
Well, we've said that for other reasons too with droughts out west. If you're in the Northeast, you don't realize how water... The water table has shrank considerably. So there's a lot less water underground for us to actually tap into what is called the aqueducts? Is that what they're called? Aquifers.
Aquifers. That's why they're talking about desalination and all sorts of stuff. So things are changing.
Climate change is a thing due to stuff. But yeah, if you haven't been out west, there really is drought issues and all sorts of stuff happening. And when you're at the ends of one of those big rivers, like Colorado River and stuff that goes down, like any of the cities upstream, obviously are getting more water than the downstream.
So the downstream cities are having bigger issues. Yeah, and they sell their water rights the whole way up the river. So by the time it reaches Arizona, there's no water rights left because everyone in Colorado and Nevada has bought up all the water rights.
Right. It's interesting how that's legal, but whatever. Yeah.
With HTO, we bought 80 shares at $50. The 12-month experts price target is 62, whereas I think it's going to come in a little under that at 60, which is still a 20% potential price growth. It has a projected 12-month revenue growth at 3%.
But as a utility, utilities generally have lower revenue growth because they're like monopolies. They go to any portion of the country, and you can find the electric monopoly, and you can find the water monopoly, and their growth isn't as that robust. Current yield on HTO is 3.4%, and it does have a 57-year dividend growth streak.
Wow. That was a little... It was a... I haven't heard of this one. San Juan something.
It was SJ... I want to say SJM, but I don't know if that's right. Oh, did it change ticker title? Yeah. Ah, that's probably why.
Even though I haven't heard of San Juan either. It's like pop culture references. I'm ignorant as AF.
You're just a wee woman. Wee woman. Wee woman.
It has a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 16.56, and the sector average for water utilities is 20.20. And it has a 10-year dividend growth rate of 7.9%, which is pretty good for a utility. 7.9% for over 10 years. You seem to be really good with utilities.
Look at last year's results. And the payout ratio is only 52%. And that's actually kind of... That's really good.
It's kind of low for utilities. Utilities are generally in the 70% range, so this one has a lot of room to run. Interesting.
Very nice. As we'll see in the next ones, which is an electric utility, you'll see a completely different set of metrics. Speaking of electric, we bought ES, which is an electric utility.
We got 59 shares at 67.92. The 12-month expert target price for this ES is $72.73. I think they're really conservative in that. I think my target price is $80 in 2026, which is 18% potential price growth. Their 12-month revenue growth is 5%.
So again, utilities, they have a smaller revenue growth.

Their yield is 4.48%, which is really good for an electric company. It has a 26-year dividend growth streak, which you're starting to see a theme here. What we're putting in the main portfolio is a little bit of stuff that can generate cash, but then a lot of stuff that has dividend growth streaks.
Just if I had to summarize this in two minutes. It has a 14.22 forward price-to-earnings ratio versus the sector average of 21.07. It has a 10-year dividend growth rate of 6.2. You already see that that's almost 2% lower than the HTO. ES's payout ratio is 81.58, which is significantly higher than HTO's payout ratio.
Like I said, that payout ratio in HTO at 52% is really low. I like ES. I've actually liked ES for years.
We bought it two years ago in her mom's retirement account. I didn't just stumble on HTO, but I've been monitoring it, and it finally reached a price where I was like, oh, we have to buy that. So that's what happened.
Then we bought more shares of UPS. I think UPS just got the shit kicked out of it in 2025, and I think it'll bounce back. Yeah, we bought in before, and then the price dropped, and we've been dollar cost averaging to try to lower our cost basis.
Then when we got the proceeds from the condo, we were able to dump more in to bring it down even further. So we got 14 additional shares at $101.72, so not a lot, but enough. I think we have 39 shares now of UPS.
The expert's 12-month target price is 103.83, so not a lot of growth according to them, but my 12-month price target is $120, which is 18% potential price growth, because the median for UPS has been between $120 and $140 for years and years and years, so I think we'll get to the low end of that median in 2026. The current yield is 6.52%. That's huge for a different end grower. Which is retarded.
Yeah, that's huge. I'm sorry. Not retarded.
Absurd. Yeah, ridiculous. That is absurd.
I don't want to offend people. It only has a 16-year dividend growth streak, so this one has a little ... It had a longer dividend growth streak, but they had to cut it at the ... I think that was right around the financial crisis of 2008, they cut it. Or they actually didn't cut it, they didn't grow it.
That's a huge difference. When you have a dividend growers and they just maintain their dividend for a year or two, that technically breaks the streak, but they didn't cut it. Dividend cuts, like what ABR did, where they went from 43 cents down to 30 cents.
Or triple M. They didn't cut theirs either. They cut theirs before, didn't they? Yeah, they did. Because they don't lie to me.
That one's stuck in my brain. They did cut that. The payout ratio for UPS is really high at 101.11%, but remember the payout ratio is current dividend divided by current net income.
And because the net income is projected to turn around, that the projected 2026 payout ratio is expected to be 85 to 90%. And in 2027, the projected payout ratio is 50 to 75% range. The payout ratio is literally just a snapshot in time of their current dividend divided by their current net income.
So this one you had to dig a little deeper. Yeah. Gotcha.
That has a 14.554 price to earnings versus the sector average of 18.39. And it does have a 10 year dividend growth rate of 9.3%, which is really good. That's really big for a dividend grower. And then before we get into the, was that it for? I think so.
I actually picked up shares in SBAR. So I was going to ask you. S-B-A-R, which is basically just a treasury closing fund or ETF.
I think it's a closing fund, but it might be an ETF that basically just holds treasuries and like its price doesn't wiggle very much. So I'm going to, that's where I'm dumping the cash. We were debating between SBAR and THTA for the same, for that reason, because we want to try to keep the principle as flat as possible while we're waiting for other watch lists, tickers to come into valuation swings in the next month here.
But you said SBAR makes how much? 28 cents a month. Which is what percent? 12%. So 12% on something.
For THTA makes 15 cents a month, which is 12%. But THTA did that whole price drop thing. So we don't know.
So what I did to be honest, she doesn't know about this yet. She hasn't read the emails. I put $6,000 into SBAR and I put $3,000 into THTA.
Oh, okay. I'm all about the splits. I put a little bit into each.
Why would you lie? That's where I'm in the... So he's running a mini experiment. Running an experiment in the dry capital potentials, but then the drip's on both of those. So we'll be getting, I don't know, one or two shares.
So the rest of the money is just sitting, it's a good chunk of change though. It's just 37,000 plus 37,000 in the checking accounts. We still have 75,000 around there.
Okay. So that was what I was going to ask. Do you have a watch list off the top of your head? I always have a watch list, but not... Throw some tickers out? No.
Okay. Then nevermind. Well, the best thing to do if you want to create a watch list, one thing I would recommend is you go in and find the, say the top, the bottom 10 performing stocks in the S&P 500.
And then you compare that with the bottom, probably the bottom 10 performing dividend growth stocks. So what I mean by dividend growth stocks is you go into like Sure Dividend, or you go into Yahoo Finance, you look up like dividend achievers, dividend kings, and you pick the bucket. It's basically the dowel of the dog where they take the bottom 10 performing dividend growers.
And that's a good place to start. Because like last year, Verizon was on that list. Verizon went up 12% or something like that.
Usually when the dividend growers have like an issue, they figure it out and they re-stabilize because like they do what they do and they bounce back. Like Verizon's always bounced back. UPS is likely going to bounce back.
Target's probably going to bounce back. Target's probably on this year's bottom 10. And Target we're in.
And UPS is probably on this year's top bottom 10. And we're in UPS. And I feel like there was another one that's LYB is probably in the bottom 10 or around the bottom 10.
Oh, it was Target. Okay. So yeah, it was those three.
So like there's a few like that's where I would start. If I was looking, I mean, we can do that if you want to for a podcast. No, not necessarily.
But I imagine we'll do updates. I mean, we could do that. Or you could always subscribe to the email and get a top 10 list every week.
Right. I was going to say the other thing you can do is tune into our live stream that we're going to do on Tuesday nights. If you just missed the last one, same deal.
The emails come out on Friday from that list picking, but you'll see us live actually go through that. But that's how we find a lot of the undervalued ones that we didn't even know about. And then at really good yields, really good profit margins, really good all sorts of stuff.
And then you stick those on your watch list if it's not the time to get in them. But that's kind of how we build the lists. We do what he just said, and then we kind of do that weekly thing.
But we kept doing that not just because we wanted to give you something, but because it actually helps us find new stocks to invest in. So it's kind of a selfish endeavor, but it works. It works.
And that does I do that every week. And then I have another another screener I would potentially do would be like monthly dividend payers. And then when you screen it, just screen for their dividend frequency as monthly.
And then you want to do their P.E. ratio or you want to do their year to date. We have an episode on that, don't we? Somewhere. Yeah.
If you look back, you'll have to find it. But it's how we basically screen how we find investments. So there's three different modalities.
I will probably update that here soon. We're going to, again, be pivoting the podcast. A lot of shit's been going on outside of this.
We had the condo sale, then we had the condo disbursement, then we had to get the shit done, and then we had to get the van done. Yeah, we're downsizing right now. We have a trip to plan.
We're getting the van built out. It's going to be like another four or five weeks before we're actually situated. I feel like our projections of timeframes are always like multiple week lags because we suck it.
We overestimate what we can get done because roadblocks are a legitimate thing. There's a lot of shit going on. I really should factor in the fact that I have the worst things possible happen to me all the time.
Like right now, I am dealing with the fact that we have a mail forwarding address, but the condo was sold on 12-15, and I found out that it takes 20 to 30 days for my mortgage to release the escrow balance via check to my old address. So I had to go check with the post office to make sure because I forgot what date it was because I didn't think it was a big deal. So that check is probably going to get mailed after we're gone.
So then I'm going to have to have that forwarded or reissued. It's just like one thing after another, after another, after another. And it's been super windy.
Oh, woe is her. So dumb. Shush.
A $1,200 check. What will you do with yourself? Oh, I want my money back. Shush.
But it's like we've had to buy all this stuff. We have stuff shipping and then it's like been windy as hell. So going outside.
Oh my God. And car work. My hands are like freaking permafrosted right now.
Yeah. So it's been a lot of stuff. But I do have a bike race to train for that.
I'm hoping to get out into elevation like by the end of January. So then it's going to happen. We'll have more time to like do because that's peace.
Like there's no one. The only thing I can do. So big things are coming.
It's just a matter of when the hell we actually get on the road and get out to New Mexico. Yeah. So bear with us.
Apologies. It's coming. We always eventually get there.
It just sometimes takes longer than we want. So that was the first part of what we spent. The second part is what we put into the income portfolio.
The income portfolio. Love to live off of. So again, yes, this is the monthly income like we would be working a regular job and getting a paycheck.
So we're not touching anything in the main portfolio because that's going to continue to compound and grow. Kind of like we were investing in a retirement account. The income side of the portfolio, which now has 52,000 into it about there when we actually did the investments.
Obviously, those prices fluctuate and typically decrease in NAV value because that's just the nature of these beasts. So the goal here is the higher income. So our minimum is $2,500 a month from these.
Hoping. Hoping. First one was WPAY, which is like basically the it's like YMAX, but it's for Roundhill.
So it's Roundhill's index of all the different Roundhills. We got 183 shares at $43.50. My expectations on this one at the minimum range of the dividend will be in this one is $0.35 to $0.40 per week. If you go back since inception, which was in October, it's been paying about $0.58 a week.
When I mean like $0.35 to $0.40 per range, like if you added up all four weeks and divided by four, it would be at a minimum $0.35 to $0.40. There's a possibility that it could be around the $0.58. Yeah, but we're doing conservative estimates. I am doing the conservative estimates just so I know what's going on. So this one here, the 183 shares will generate $64 to $73 a week at minimum.
But if it actually does stick to around its average, it could be $106 per week, which is possible. So that would mean that $256 to $292 per month at minimum on WPAY. It would take us about 27 to 31 months to recoup our national investment.
These ones here, I have the drip on currently because we're still sitting here. As soon as we go on the road, I'm turning the drip off, which I actually just did that today. We just got our payment today and I turned the drip off.
So next week, we'll start accumulating cash in these. Now, if I had that check from the thing, we could actually postpone this and have them drip even more. So don't give me crap.
$256 to $292 at minimum on this one with what we invest in that WPAY, which isn't terrible. The second one that we did this with was TSLW, which is the single stock of Roundhill for Tesla. I think Tesla is going to have a pretty banger 2026 and probably 2027.
So this one actually could be at the average range or the average range might actually increase. But we'll see. We got 119 shares at $37.08. I think that I expect the minimum payment for Tesla to be $0.30 to $0.35 per week, though since its inception in March of 2025, it's been paying on average $0.49 a week.
So I'm a little bit under. Again, the minimum is the super conservative. The $0.49, I think $0.49 is actually low.
I think it'll probably be $0.50 to $0.55 on average for 2026. But you're still estimating at the $0.30 to $0.35, right? Tesla should have a banger year. In 2026, they have SpaceX coming out.
One of the things that Elon Musk said is that when the private companies go public, he's going to reward the shareholders of Tesla. So Tesla's share price could actually appreciate more than it already has. But we'll see.
With the 119 shares, we'll be making at minimum $36 to $42 a week. But if we stuck to the $0.49 average, it would be $58 per week. So again, the conservative estimate is really low compared to where the average is.
So at minimum, I'm thinking $144 to $168 a month. But $200 a week or more is extremely possible in this one. Like this one, it wouldn't surprise me at all if we were making more than $200 a week in this one.
At the minimum payments of $144 to $168, it would be 26 to 31 months. So again, like around that 30-month period. So that's two and a half years.
The third one that we did was Palantir, PLTW. We got 195 shares at $42.02. I expect the minimum dividend for this one to be between $0.45 and $0.50 per week. Though since its inception of $0.3, $0.3, 2025, it's been paying $0.63 average weekly dividend.
So again, we're really low compared to where its average is at. So with the 195 shares, we're looking at $88 to $97 a week at minimum. But if it holds to an average, $123 per week is possible.
On this one, it'll be $352 to $388 a month is what I expect bare minimum. But $475 to $500, maybe $525 is very possible with this one. Like super possible.
This one actually is probably the highest payer of the Roundhills, like the main ones. There's like Robinhood's another one that pays a lot. But we don't actually have that one because I'm not a big fan of Robinhood stock.
At the minimum expected pay rate would take 21 to 23 months. Less than two years to recoup our initial in the pound tier. I think it'll actually be sooner than that.
I think this one could be 12 to 15 months just because I'm grossly conservative to this one. $0.63 on average, and I'm saying $0.45, that's $0.18. That's like 25% lower than where I've been. And I have no reason to believe that it'll be much lower than $0.63. I was going to say it would be freaking hilarious considering this is the investment focused portfolio.
But if we actually get price appreciation in this, that's insane. Considering these things are supposed to have declined. But it's possible with some of these heavy hitters.
The last event that was paid out today on Tuesday was $0.60. And you estimated $0.45 to $0.50. Yeah, and this was like a down week. Well, yeah, we had two weeks of four-day trading because of the holidays and whatnot. So that's pretty cray-cray.
The next one is NVIDIA NVDW. That's the single-payer round hill for NVIDIA. NVIDIA is going to smash it.
It's going to be great. So this one, again, is grossly underestimated. But we got 163 shares at $41.09. I think the bare minimum is $0.30 to $0.35 per week.
But I think the $0.47 per week average that it's been averaging since inception in March is very, very possible. It might even exceed the $0.47. Like this one, we just got a dividend for $0.50. I think it was $0.50, maybe $0.53 for this one. And I want to say this here.
We projected with our 2026 predictions that the markets are going to be very volatile. That's actually really good for these options, covered call ETFs because they make their money from, allegedly, unless they're Yieldmax. Unless they're the Yieldmax ones, which none of these are.
So we're looking at a bare minimum $49 to $57 a week. The average $0.40 to $0.07 would give us $77 per week. I think $77 is more plausible than the $49 to $57, but whatever.
$196 to $228 a month at the bare minimum. But $300 is, I'm pretty sure $300 is going to happen more than the $228. But again, conservative.
At the minimum expected pay rate, it would take 29 to 34 months to recoup our initial estimates. Almost three years in this one. Pretty standard for these.
And then the last one that we put money to is the Coinbase one. Don't ask me why I'm glad for punishment. I don't know.
I questioned this one, but he seems to think crypto is going to turn around this year. We've had an argument. If you watched our last Cony update, we had a heated debate about that.
But we'll see. He's more oracle than I am. He sees more patterns than I do.
So COIW, we got 213 shares at $2220, and I expect the dividend to be in the minimum $0.30 to $0.35 range again. The average since inception, though, in March was $0.56. So I'm way, like, I'm like 50% lower than the average in this one. I think that $0.56 a week average will probably be like from June on through the end.
I think crypto is going to have a, crypto, and then by like proxy, Coinbase is going to have like a shaky beginning of the year. And then like it'll probably turn around like in the summer. Might even start in like spring, like in May.
But whatever. Well, should this be the time when we talk about the gold-silver correlation? So silver hit $80. Silver hit $80 and then dropped to $70 and went back up to $77.
And then you came back up. So we think it's actually going to rebound before it goes down again. But I'm starting to hear short people talking about shorting silver and stuff.
So crypto goes like, I think, opposite to what silver and gold are doing. Because silver and gold is fear-based when fear is higher. But crypto is when people are super optimistic.
So that sentiment, I imagine, will shift. And the fact that more experts are now talking about getting into gold and stuff, the sentiment is shifting, which means it's going in line with the herd, which means more people in the herd are going to jump on, which is usually when things start to pivot the other direction. You know, they leave people holding the bag.
And you said that you saw an article that was talking about the new 60-40. Yeah, the new 60-40. We discussed this on one of our podcasts.
It was one of our earlier podcasts where we said the 60-40 is dead. That if you're not from the 60-40 was for years and years and years, it was hold 60% equity and 40% bonds. The theory being when the equity 60% went down, bonds would go up.
And then when bonds went down, the equity would go up. Yeah, that doesn't work. There's more and more articles and streams coming out that that's not working anymore.
Yeah, they're realizing it's not working. Because bonds have decoupled from the stock market to the point where inflation is causing bonds to just have really shitty years. So they're actually recommending a 60-20-20, which is 60% equity, 20% fixed income, and 20% gold or silver.
So that's very interesting change. So there's more people pumping that again. So that'll push prices.
Well, that's like my biggest problem with the gold and silver trade is like, if you want to invest in gold and silver, it's fine. But if you look at it from like a psychological factor, the fact that everybody's talking about gold and silver, and all the experts are saying buy gold, buy silver, buy gold. Contrarian.
That to me says something's going to happen. Yep, something's going to happen. They're going to leave the general populace holding the bag, which is usually the pattern.
So contrarian, choose your own adventure. But just FYI, that's usually the thing. We'll see what happens.
It's the same way when they were talking about AI. They were all talking AI, AI, AI. And then like AI stocks went down because all of a sudden they're like, wait a minute, they're spending $2 trillion a year on AI research.
That's too much. Right. But now like all the talk is AI bubble, AI bubble, AI bubble, which to me sounds like institutions are pushing the narrative of the AI bubble is bad.
Get out of it. With their right hand, they're buying shares of AI stocks that are cheap, on the cheap. Exactly.
That's what I think is going on with AI stuff. Anyway, Coinbase. $64 to $75 a week on the 213 shares is what I think at a minimum we'll be making in this one.
In the second half of 2026, I fully expect to be making $119 or more. So that would come out to about $256 to $300 a month at the bare minimum. At that minimum pay rate, it would take us 16 to 18 months to recoup our initial investments in COIW.
So with these five additions to the portfolio, I expect at a minimum to be raking in $300 to $344 a week, making each month at a bare minimum, again, being $1,204 to $1,376. These are the worst case numbers. So I expect to be making much more than that.
My estimates using, I've been following roundhouses that came out, and just using the average, and then kind of wiggling around with the prices. My estimates are that we'll be making about $1,700 a month at the bare minimum with what we added. All the ones we just discussed.
Those are the ones we just added. Just added. We've held other stuff.
Yeah, we had $30,000, $20,000 before in the portfolio. So combine that with all of our other income producing holdings like LFGY, for example, YBTC, YMAX, NVDY, WNTR, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Our monthly income should be more than $2,500 a month.
And I said during our live stream that if we would have taken that snapshot of the $52,000 portfolio value and just lived per month on our estimated $2,500 a month, we're guaranteeing it to go to zero in 20.8 months anyway. So instead of doing that, we're opting to invest in these because essentially if these pay out for more than 20.8 months, so just say 21 months, we basically hit break even. And if they continue to pay past that point, we actually get more money out of that money than we would have if we would have just spent the cash.
So that's the thought process here. It's the thought process. And I think- And that's kind of being wonky because we had the $20,000 before that, but I just took a snapshot to kind of illustrate the point.
Well, that doesn't sound possible. If you look at it, we've been in NVDY for 28 months and it's been paying consistently. We've been in CONY for 24 months and it's been paying consistently.
We've been in YMAX for 18 months and it's been paying consistently. And those are YieldMaxes and not to offend anyone that YieldMaxes followers, but YieldMaxes suck compared to Roundhills. They do suck.
Because Cony was good until we got into the experiment. So we've been in a lot of YieldMaxes for more than the 21 months. Now, granted the price per shares went down or up.
Like NVIDIA used to be $22 or $23 and it's now at $15. So the price depreciated by $7. But again, you have to- If you pull out and you say, oh, NVIDIA's price went from $22 to $15 in 2025, it's a shitty investment.
If you just went with that figure, that's accurate. But if you look at what NVIDIA, NVDY paid in dividends, it's paid out of $15 some dollars in dividends. So you're actually, you've almost- Break even.
100%. You're up like 80% on your $22. Well, and again, if you look at it from the perspective of, if you got the amount of money that you would have just spent in cash, because we're looking at this as living expenses.
This isn't from an investment standpoint. This is living expenses. If you would have just spent that cash, you would have guaranteed it go to zero anyway.
So the NAV decline doesn't really bother us as much as people with the perspective of the investment strategy. So this is a completely different strategy. These are two completely different beasts.
It's a different strategy. So we have- It's a completely different strategy. And we've income portfolio, which is all of our roundhills and all of our yield maxes.
Yep, that's what we just discussed here. That's what we're living off of on the road. The first half of this.
All the drips are off on all those now, every one of them. Then you turn them off. And probably what I'm going to do moving forward is, if we have a week where we only do $200 worth of travel, I'll turn the drip on one of the roundhills, depending on the valuation.
And then we'll accumulate some shares that way. So it's going to be touch and go for the first, probably, couple of months because we have to pay off the Kony experiment train wreck that it is. And I have a credit card I have to pay back that's been a 0% that we've been living off of to get us through the condo proceed situation.
And that comes due, I think, February 11th, I think it is. And we're going to be sitting in New Mexico. So the first couple of months are going to be touch and go.
So anything that's extra, it's going to be going towards this stuff and then reinvesting to a certain point. But I think the game plan going forward is to spend majority of what we have or save it towards a specific savings goal for, say, paragliding or whatever we're going to end up doing. And then anything above that is either going to get reinvested to bump up from an inflation standpoint or move it into the main portfolio to buffer our fallback, right? That's the plan.
That's the plan. But I might even do those. I might even buy an initiated position in S-bar and the income portfolio.
That way, all the cash is actually generating. So anything we would do in the savings portion, you put it over in SBAR. OK, that makes sense.
You might have S-bar in the income portfolio and S-bar in the main portfolio. And S-bar will be in the income portfolio of what's left over each month that we didn't spend. I'll just put it in S-bar or THTA.
And then as we need it, I can liquidate those shares. We can accumulate a little bit of interest while things are sitting. Because all those little things, they add up over time.
So that's that plan. That's what we did. Next week, I'm going to talk about the portfolios and what was good and what was bad.
I'm going to have the year-end total where I can go through and be like, well, this one was shit. This one was good. I'd also kind of like you to do something with comparing it to an index fund of the S&P potentially.
It's really hard to do dividends as like a- It's hard to do like that because- Because it's not apples to apples. The S&P is literally an index of the S&P 500, which is like the 500 biggest companies. Yeah.
A lot of the portfolios, the small caps. So it might be more apples to apples if I compared it to the Russell index fund. Because we have a lot of small caps.
We'll probably want to compare it. But it's like you should- Or maybe we can just show what would happen if you would have been in index funds versus what ours actually produced with the dividend component. But I don't know.
We should do something so you can see the difference. And then like he was just talking to F&A Van Life who uses our strategy or he manages the portfolio. And her portfolio value has been pretty steady across.
Like it was down and now it's back to pretty much break even. But the number of shares that she's accumulated in the interim has gone up dramatically. And we always say with dividend portfolios, you don't pay attention to your portfolio value.
You pay attention to the share accumulation and the dividends increasing. You want your income and your shares. Value of the portfolio doesn't really matter.
One time that matters is like when they do if you're in some sketchy shit and they do a reverse stock split. Right. Then it really hampers.
Like I understand like what people said though all when they did the Coney thing, like it didn't affect your dollar amount. But like that's- Yeah, it did. You're missing a huge component.
Because we had two like- They're lying. Well, we have 876 shares. And then it dropped it down to 87.
And the dividend being 40 cents would have been like having a dividend of 4 cents. So we're losing a lot of money even though like the price, the total amount of our dollar amount didn't actually go anywhere because of the reverse split. But like the dividend, like the income we're generating is much lower.
So they're lying. They're just doing smoke and mirrors in my opinion. And I'm pretty sure that's going to fail this payout period.
I don't think so. But that's me. She's pessimistic about- Extremely pessimistic.
All right. So we're going to wrap it up there. All right.
See you guys. See you guys next week.