Hijinks Inc.

Category: Aaron Nelsen

  • REITs

    With the housing market falling faster than Bush’s approval rating, Real Estate Income Trusts (REITs) are a shaky investment at best.

    The good news is that you can buy into REITs that only invest in business real estate or development properties, and that can help reduce the risk.

    Most REITs also pay great dividends, so for my long term dividend investing strategy they fit nicely. Here’s the problem though, a lot of REITs are either based out of Canada or are considering reducing or stopping their dividends, not cool. Case in point, CapitalSource (CSE) has announced that they’re thinking about putting the kibosh on their dividends for the time being to help combat the rising costs of operating in a floundering economy.

    A huge drawback of the Canada REITs is the dividend is taxed both in Canada and the US. Boo!

    Thoughts or opinions?

  • Passive Income – June 2008

    I made a killing off of credit card rewards this month, thanks to their bonus program adding extra cash back on purchases from my distributor. I also had a CD pay out its quarterly interest, and I added a new dividend stock to my portfolio before its Ex-dividend date, so I got in on the dividend this month.

    • Interest: $68.36
    • Dividends: $43.75
    • Credit Card Rewards: $76.02
    • AdSense: $16.20
    • Text Ads: $25.00
    • Surveys: $12.00

    Yielding $241.33 for the month of June. Otherwise known as the best month ever. Seriously.

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  • New Investment Strategy

    It’s no secret that I like to dabble in the stock market, and that I’m trying to generate a decent income from dividend stocks.

    With that in mind, I’ve decided to start taking the entire balance earned each month through my Passive Income Project and invest it in various dividend stocks. Now since I’m only making around $125 a month in passive income, I’m planning on setting that money aside on a month to month basis and investing it in a different stock every 3 to 6 months.

    Since I’ll be making smaller trades than I usual do, I’m considering getting an account with Zecco so I can invest while avoiding that pesky $12.95 per trade fee with E*Trade.

    The general idea is that I’ll be able to both expand my stock holdings as well as my return from passive income. I’ll post updates as I make purchases.

  • 10.5.4 is live

    Apple released 10.5.4 today, you can grab it from Software Update. Changes listed below.

    General
    Recent Apple security updates.
    Resolves an issue with saving and reopening Adobe Creative Suite 3 ?les on a remote server.
    Includes additional RAW image support for several cameras.
    Addresses an issue that may result in a partially installed X11 application.
    Improves L2TP VPN client reliability.
    AirPort
    Addresses AirPort reliability issues with 5GHz networks.
    Addresses AirPort issues that may result in slower performance in Logic Studio or MainStage.
    iCal
    Improves overall iCal reliability for meeting requests, cancellation notices, delegation, and syncing with iPhone.
    Resolves an issue that prevents deleting an iCal event without notifying the creator.
    Addresses an issue in which events in all calendars affect availability. A checkbox now enables information-only calendars to be transparent from free/busy lookups.
    Resolves a UI issue preventing delegated calendars from showing up as a separate window.
    Addresses an issue with copying and pasting attendees from one event to another.
    Resolves an issue in which iCal may not delete events after a speci?ed time interval, even when set to do so in iCal preferences.
    Addresses an issue in which To Dos cannot be marked private.

    Safari
    Addresses a potential performance issue when loading secure web pages.
    Resolves issues that may be encountered when accessing secure web pages with client certificates that reside on a smart card.
    Spaces and Exposé
    Addresses an issue in which switching from a space with a Finder window keeps the Finder as the active application instead of the application residing in the destination space.
    Fixes an issue in which dragging an application from the list of application assignments in Spaces System Preferences does not assign the application to the desired space.
    Resolves an Exposé issue that may result in only a subset of windows being shown.

  • The Death of XP

    Today is the final day Microsoft plans on selling Windows XP. Though retailers will likely continuing selling until they run out of stock.

    Still, XP will live on, at least for a little while in the UMPC/sub-notebook market.

    Can’t wait until they discontinue sales of Vista!