Sharebuilder update

I peeked into my Sharebuilder.com (formerly Netstock) account this morning. Since the account was started in my early college years, I had setup a dollar cost averaging plan for a few large-cap stocks I liked and yielded dividends. Due to some tight financial situations then, I stopped the plan and only turned it on whenever I had a spare $60.00 (the cost of my plan's investment including fees) lying around. So even though I started my account fairly early, the value is quite low for its age.

Since my finances have been settling a bit from a year ago, I started funded this account again a several months back. I have an automatic deposit going into my account on the first and fifteen of the month that totals $20.00 a month. I go in every so often to see if I hit the $60.00 mark so I can invest in some more partial stocks. Anyway, this morning I realize I was above $80.00 and went in to turn on my plan for a one-time transaction. While there, I noticed that there was an option to set it to automatically turn on every time I have enough funds. Seeing how it is always nice to have savings and investments be automatic, I opted for that instead. Now I won't have to worry about my money just sitting in my account and can relax with the fact that Sharebuilder will take care of it.

In terms of what stocks to pick, I don't really have enough money in the account to actually warrant a need to track the market and trade when needed. So I plan on sticking with the few large caps I have and let it grow a bit. The dividends are set to reinvest automatically too, but we're talking cents here. If and when it gets big enough that I can try to "play" the market a bit, then I'll monitor the market more than I am now and see what I can do. The large caps I'm investing in are pretty stable. In terms of more aggressive investing, I have my 401k doing that for me there. Five percent of my gross income at my regular nine-to-fiver is being put away in some funds I've selected.

New reviews, Prosper update

I finally gotten around to writing a couple of new reviews for my Epinions account. My last review prior to that was quite a while ago. So in the last couple of days I went through my head of stuff I've recently purchased and used. I wrote a decent one about my Olympus Stylus 720sw digital camera. Then while looking for a capo for my guitar, I found the guitar I bought and wrote a review for that as well.

In my experience, electronics reviews net me the most rewards, so I'm hoping the camera review will help me out. What's nice about Epinions is that my review is not just on the website. It appears they share their reviews with other merchant sites. I know, because I've seen my reviews on the comments/reviews section of merchant sites. It's fine with me, because it means more views for the reviews.

So the loan I bid on was accepted and approved. I now have four loans of $50 a piece for a total of $200 invested. Prosper says my average ROR is 20.26%, but I need to do my own calculations to be sure. I just haven't had the time to do it yet. But looks like my monthly cash flow should increase a bit.

Google search, Prosper

I was doing some searches on Google to see if this blog would pop up. It turns out if you search for "passive income project", this blog would be on page six of the results. Nothing too impressive, but nice to know this blog is popping up on Google search. I'm hoping this blog will eventually pop up for searches for "passive income." That would be tremendous, because there are a lot of pages and blogs that talk about passive income and being on the search results would really boost my traffic.

Now onto Prosper. The $50.00 I transferred yesterday went through instantly due to the Facebook application I installed on my profile. I'm not sure how it works or what motivation they have for it, but if you install the Prosper application (which is really nothing more than a small square ad), your funds transfers as low as $50.00 can go through instantly. This is pretty big since normally it takes four business days.

With the instant funds in my Prosper account, I bid on a loan that promises to be paid within six months instead of the three years a normal loan would take. Sounds a bit shaky, but his history shows he did that for his previous Prosper loan. His background and financials seem okay and the loan was at 33.5% when I bid. I'm hoping to boost my average return again, although I'm aware if he repays early, I won't get the full benefit of that rate. I feel having the money back early with a 30+% return would be better than a three year loan at 18%. Didn't work out the calculations, but it seemed better to me.

I'll see if I win the loan later.

Dental reimbursement, jacket sale

I received my dental insurance reimbursement check a week or so ago. It was the one I wrote about a few posts back that had expired. A simple phone call and it was reissued. And since I've paid for my cleaning and it's way in the past, it feels like found money to me. Expense has already accrued and I've already recovered from the hit. I feel like this will probably happen to me with my wisdom teeth extraction. I paid upfront and now I'm waiting for all the red tape with my medical insurance. Then I can send the bill to my dental insurance for reimbursement. That's actually quite a bit of money.

On another front, I sold my motorcycle jacket to my friend. I had sold my motorcycle earlier this year to help fund my replacement of my car (it was sad, but I had to do it, and it made more financial sense). Since I sold my bike, there wasn't much reason for me to keep my jacket. My friend had a jacket, but he liked the armor in my jacket. It's quite a flashy jacket too; check it out: Cortech GX-Air (2007) in silver and black. I didn't sell my pants or my gloves. I'll probably keep the gloves along with my helmet, for when I buy a bike again. It's pretty hard to sell a helmet anyway and my gloves wouldn't fetch a lot.

So after these two "windfalls", I'm up $200. I'm going to transfer 25% or $50 to my Prosper account for lending and keep the rest in my checking for future transfer to my ING accounts. I have a vacation coming up, so I've been trying to save a bit for the expense so I don't have to dip into my long-term savings or use credit. But anyway, I'm hoping that $50 will turn into another $0.50 increase in my passive income cash flow.

Something I might not have mentioned before is that Prosper loans are for three years. So as each gets (hopefully) repaid, I have to re-lend the money out to keep the cash flow up. Otherwise, I'll just get a return and nothing else. But since I won't need this money for quite a while, I plan on reinvesting all the money back into Prosper loans hoping to effectively create a compounding interest situation. My ING is doing that too, albeit at a more conservative rate. Well, ING is also FDIC insured while my Prosper money aren't, but stocks are not protected either. You need to take some risk to attempt to get more return. So the questions is, how risk-adverse are you?

Milestone! ...eh...Footstone?

Well, I finally earned something with Google Adsense! I've earned a penny. I know, pretty unimpressive. I just haven't managed to drive traffic to my blogs. The only links I have to these blogs are the blogs linking themselves and the links on my Facebook profile. I've also added a link to my squidoo profile as well, but my blogs do not pop up in Google searches yet. I'm not quite sure how to do so; I only know Google results are somewhat link-driven.

I'll probably start a more topic-oriented blog in the future when I decide on what to write about. That might get more people to find my blogs. And since I can use my Adsense account on multiple sites, I can easily add ads to that blog as well. But for now it's just this one plus my everyday one.

Nothing new with my other passive income "adventures". I haven't added any new money to my Prosper account, so no new loans there. ING accounts have a steady biweekly transfers, so I'll update at the end of the month when my interest earnings are accrued.