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.