Wednesday, December 28, 2011

My Automatic Investing for 2012

It has been my end of the year review and of course it did not go as I had wanted it to when hubby's hours got cut drastically and I had to sell most of our stocks off. But a new year comes with a new plan of action right?

Some of the choices for last year did not fair well at all so it was a good time to sit down and make a new plan and to prepare to start up our automatic investments again! This is always fun for me! Now granted, I did increase what will be automatically invested to a nice round number of $100 a month which includes the $12 a month Sharebuilder fee. $100 a month is a meager amount to invest for sure but on $1300 income a month it is truly the best I can do for now and I think that means I am doing great at being frugal!

So while I am not an investor and can not give advice, I can tell you what ended up going into my picks for 2012. I wanted some green companies that focused on biodiesal fuels from Algae BUT after 8 different company attempts, Sharebuilder did not offer any of the companies I wanted!

So I changed my angle and decided to go with 5 stocks that had a proven record for paying fairly high dividends.

My 5 stock choices are

Converted Organics    COIN  ( yup still giving them a chance!)
Johnson and Johnson   JNJ
Proctor and Gamble   PG
Walmart                   WMT
Exxon Mobile        XOM


I also have 5 ETF picks I will invest in monthly.

They are

Russell 1000 Value Shares          IWD
SPDR S&P Dividend ETF          SDY
Ishares Silver Trust ETF              SLV
S&P 500 Index SPDR            SPY
Vanguard emerging market         VWO


Basically I ended up switching out 4 different stocks keeping only Converted Organics from my original picks. I did not change any of the ETF's and those remained the same.

I set the plan up to start the automatic investments for the second Tuesday of January and it will be a once a month investment.

Now this is all based on our income right at the moment, so if I am successful at increasing our income, I will also increase our investment amounts and may add a few more into the overall plan.

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