Sometimes I feel that I bounce around on a lot of topics here, though my main focus is always finance. A Return on Investment or ROI is usually a financial term, but it can apply to almost anything in life.

You can spend 30 years working for a great place and get a solid pension that comes with benefits (great ROI). You could devote hundreds of hours to Call of Duty and have the entire version wiped from existence when a digital storefront is shut down forever (bad ROI). Sometimes, like with raising kids, your ROI doesn’t need to benefit you. Many people volunteer around their community, or their churches, and get nothing back besides the satisfaction that they helped others and made their community a better place. That’s a great return on investment.

My point is that some things should be meticulously calculated for ROI before you put forth the effort, while other things will be worth it regardless. We don’t plant trees just for ourselves, we plant them for future generations.

I bring all this up because I find myself doing lots of calculating these days for my ROI. An example would be my dividend project funds. I track them in this handy spreadsheet I made. It tracks my cost, current price, and how much the funds have paid me in dividends over the time I’ve held them.

Yes, I know it’s super red. That’s why this is the SNOWBALL EXPERIMENT and not the “I’m a genius” experiment. Regardless the ROI is clearly column J. This is the point where I can tell if the dividends produced are worth more than the principal gain/loss. For example, EARN is the largest holding, it’s spent the last few months floating around $8,600 and $9,000 but I spent $10,330. However, it pays me almost $150 a month in dividends. It’s held its 8 cent per share dividend for over 6 years. It’s no KO, but it’s being used to buy off debt, or buy shares of other stocks instead of reinvesting it. At the current rate, dividends will exceed capital loss by end of year.

COIW, like most weekly paying funds, is a trap full of giving you your own money back, but I don’t put the money back into COIW. This averages around $10 a week and flows into other funds from my 15 fund plan, or currently the switch to debt reduction. My point is that I know I picked sketchy or bad funds and I don’t care if they give me my own money back because the dividends are paying for other things instead of DRIP. Also for some reason BLOX seems to be a weird exception to the weekly dividend trap.

Another way I try to calculate this is when I’m side hustling games on Swagbucks or Freecash. I try to research games before I start them. The example below is Rise of Kingdoms on Swagbucks. The $2,000 goal is almost impossible on a 40-50 day timeline, so I ignore that. I then research how difficult reaching city hall level 25 will become. The timeline seems reasonable so I target that. Total payouts should be $438, because VIP 10 is a rough one with little benefits. So I’ve set myself a spending cap of $150. That will give me almost $300 of pure profit.

The bigger issue is usually waiting on the pending portion. Either way, you should always try to find the things that will help you meet your goals the fastest.

~~Miniwing~~
Investor, Stoic, Parent