Weekend Reading – October, 15, 2011

Another week is through, and the weekend has found it’s way into my life. The market has been very kind to me, as the S&P 500 up almost 6% over the past five days. I don’t particularly enjoy big market rebounds, as it simply makes the equities I’m interested in purchasing more expensive. However, it does look nice to see my net worth increase by a dramatic amount.

On a totally unrelated subject, my hometown of Detroit is killing it in the sports world. The Detroit Lions are 5-0, the Red Wings are 3-0 and the Tigers are two games away from the World Series. Awesome! That town has seen some rough times, so I’m glad to see a sports revival of sorts occurring this year.

It’s Saturday night, we just had a beautiful sunset after eating some Mexican and the Tigers are up 2-0 on the Texas Rangers. It’s a great weekend so far. I hope yours is doing just as well.

Here are some excellent articles from fellow dividend growth investors, frugalists and personal finance bloggers from the past week.

Medtronic (MDT) Dividend Stock Analysis
Dividend Monk provided an outstanding analysis on Medtronic (MDT). His analysis is always fantastic and pretty spot-on. This company is on my watch list for a possible future purchase, and I agree with Monk that it appears to be a pretty solid long-term play at current prices.

How I Beat The Market With My Dividend Trades
The Dividend Guy presents some information on his recent moves in his dividend stock portfolio. He switched to this approach back in the beginning of this year and actually experienced a lot of success with aggressive stock trading. It sounds like he’s also doing quite well with his dividend-focused strategy as well.

How I live on $7,000 per year
Jacob writes on article dissecting his budget and shows readers how he lives on a lot less than just about everyone else. Whenever I think my budget of appx. $14,000 per year is impressive I just look at Jacob and become inspired. Great stuff.

Fall Update – 2011 Personal Finance and Investing Goals
My Own Advisor gives us an update on his personal finance goals for 2011. It sounds like he’s doing a great job with what appears to be a pretty lofty list of goals. I’m doing pretty well with my goals as well and I hope we can both cross all of our goals off the list at the end of this year.

How a Vacation Can Teach You about Financial Markets
Dividend Ninja has a guest post by Barbara Friedberg that correlates a cheap vacation in Canada to the long-term success of her overall investment strategies. She likes to stay on course, grow her wealth through high and low markets and, of course, vacation when the exchange rate is in her favor.

10 Investment Tips That Can Advance Your Objectives
The Wealthy Canadian highlights 10 tips that can help you grow your wealth and get to where you want to be, financially. My personal favorites are numbers six and ten. I’m trying to aggressively save as much money as possible and I’m also starting fairly early in life. This is a great list!

AT&T and Coca-Cola are more expensive that you think
DGI posted a great article here about why T and KO are a little more expensive on a P/E basis than one might think due to one-time earnings events. Great stuff here. I was already aware of the situation with KO, but was unaware of the earnings event with T. Always best to do as much due diligence as possible when considering investing any of your hard-earned money with a company.

September 2011 Pocket Change Portfolio Performance Update
D4L updates us on his pocket change portfolio performance and highlights some of the recent activity related to this portfolio. Interesting enough, I also liquidated my HGIC holdings and used that money to purchase COP and AFL, along with PM. We made very similar moves. Great stuff here, and I hope to have a portfolio of this size within a couple years. If only my pocket change looked like this!

9 Impulse Buys That Turned Out Better Than Expected!
MoneyCone highlights some of his best impulse buys. Interesting choices, and I can’t say I have as many gadgets. My personal best impulse buy would be my iPhone 3G that I purchased a few years ago. I still have it and use wifi at work to access my brokerage account during normal business hours. My internet at work is blocked, so if it wasn’t for my little iPhone I’d be hard-pressed to buy stocks.

How To Read A Cash Flow Statement
Dividends For The Long Run shows readers how to read a cash flow statement, which is something that isn’t as intimidating as it seems. It’s extremely important to check a cash flow statement, as dividends are paid out from cash. If an enterprise doesn’t generate enough cash flow to continue paying dividends then odds are pretty good that the dividend is in danger of being cut.

Thanks for reading.