The silver lining

I haven't had a cashflow update for awhile, and there's a good reason for that. I'm moving to a new place, and I had to tap into my savings to come up with last month's rent, broker's fee, and new furniture. Needless to say, I must have shaved off $3.50 off my monthly passive income cash flow. Propser is still on hold as they go through some filings to open up a secondary market for their loans. I have 7 loans active, with 1 late (some real estate flipping loan...go figure), but my return is still pretty high there. There's $56.00 in cash, but I can't loan that back out because of that filing thing. So the only thing I've been able to mess around with is my Sharebuilder account.

I've made some bad decisions here and there. I bought 150 shares of Freddie Mac (FRE) when they were still going down. Lost quite a bit there. Bought 100 shares of Sirius XM (SIRI) since I thought the merger would be good for them and they are the only satellite radio company out there. Besides, they have that partnership thing with GM. But we know what happened with GM, and Sirius just isn't pulling in enough subscriptions. They have some debt coming up, too. So even though I bought cheap, I still managed to lose 75% of my investment there.

I have since made some longer-term investments. Bought 13 shares of Western Digital (WDC) with my BUD proceeds. So far that investment is paying off, but with 13 shares it's not a lot. Accounting for my commission costs, I made $12. I know...riveting. I also bought 50 shares of Fairpoint Communications (FRP). I think the company is pretty promising and I'm pretty excited about their business in Q1 of 2009 when they finish taking over Verizon's landline business up north.

Anyhoot, while watching the market and reviewing my holdings, I suddenly remembered that I had some stocks paying dividends. I didn't pay much attention to it before since I had some pretty measly holdings, but now I have 320 shares of stocks. So I did a quick look into my holdings and I'm quite pleased. FRE and FRP both pay about quarterly dividends of $0.25 per share. I'm not sure if FRE put their dividends on hold (I think GM did), but if both are still paying, I'm due for $50.00 per quarter. So even if my my shares aren't making leaps in gains, I can at least get some cash flow out of them. There's that silver lining.

FRP announces fourth-quarter dividend!

So after a bit of a hit with Freddie Mac (FRE) and Sirius XM (SIRI), I've been a bit more selective about what I put my money into. With the sale of Anheuser-Busch, my shares of BUD were liquidated without anybody telling me. Seeing how I didn't want my cash sitting there while the market was down. I threw the cash into Western Digital (WDC). They are a pretty solid company with good product offerings. Tech has been a bit volatile lately, being affected by the weak retail sales, but I foresee WDC holding its own for a bit. Solid-state drives haven't caught on that well, so HDD should be fine for now.

A while back, I had some meager shares of Verizon Communications (VZ). Somehow, when they spun-off their northern New England business into Fairpoint Communications (FRP), I was given a fraction of a share. A few days ago I noticed some movement, and after some research, I found that they are about done with their transition of business away from VZ to FRP. The price was low, so I went in for 50 shares. Barring any hiccups with the final stages of the transition, FRP should be fine in the short-run. They also just announced a quarterly dividend of $0.2575 per share. So holding FRP will give me $12.88 dividend income per quarter. Not too shabby, while I wait for their business to settle in. Volume on the stock is pretty low at around 120K, but FRP is still relatively unknown. It did make the biggest movers list on Motley Fool a few days ago, though!