What Is O Stock and Why Are People Obsessed With It?

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dragon running a reit like the o stock company

O Boy – Realty Income Corp If you have spent more than a few minutes on Twitter, Facebook, or Threads reading posts from investors, chances are you have come across O the stock symbol for Realty Income Corp. So why are people so captivated by O, and why do they insist that O is a great investment for virtually anyone? Let’s start with what is O stock and what company is this anyway? What Is Realty Income Corp? Realty Income is the largest triple-net REIT in the country. A REIT is a company constructed as a trust of real estate holdings. It has over 15,000 properties, mostly of the retail establishment type. But that’s not why everyone is crazy about O. As is so often the case, the popularity comes courtesy of a very deliberate marketing strategy. O bills itself as “The Monthly Dividend Company.” Therein lies its distinctive trait that lets it stand out in a crowded marketplace. While most companies pay dividends quarterly, or even annually, O pays dividends every month. There is nothing magic about monthly dividend payouts. Instead of holding onto the cash and making a larger payment each quarter, the company makes a smaller payout …

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Buy and Hold Forever Is Bad

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Buy and Hold Forever Is Bad 1

When it comes to investing in the stock market, newbies are often cautioned against trading too often. This is good advice. Many investors end up badly trailing the returns on any market index you choose simply because they are terrible at timing. Jumping out of stocks when they are low, buying into them when they are high. Chasing winners, selling out “before” a crash, and so on eat into investor returns, but is buying and holding a good investment strategy? Warren Buffett Buy and Hold Strategy Once upon a time, Warren Buffett was quoted as saying that his favorite holding period for investments was “forever.” Of course, that was taken a bit out of context and leaves out the fact that in many ways, when Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway want to hold an investment forever, they buy the whole company. Buffet’s company bought Geico, Burlington Northern, Dairy Queen and numerous others including my personal favorite Acme Brick Company. What Warren Buffett actually advises to anyone who asks how to invest is to buy an S&P 500 index fund and leave your money there forever. This is actually very good advice. Few investors beat the S&P500 on a consistent basis. …

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IRS Standard Deduction 2024 and 2025

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taxes 2020 personal deduction

What is the standard deduction amount for 2025, and what about 2023 and 2024? (That way I don’t have to go through and delete that data 🙂 The IRS updated the standard deduction number and it’s a little bit higher this year again. When filing income taxes, taxpayers can choose to either itemize tax deductions, or take the standard tax deduction amount. The IRS adjusts how much the standard deduction is each year based upon inflation. The 2025 standard tax deduction amount is a bit higher than the 2024 deduction amount for most taxpayers because of inflation. Capital One Rewards Catalog 2023 Remember, even though you will be filling your taxes in early 2025, those tax returns are for the year 2024, so use the 2024 standard deduction amount on taxes you work on in the first quarter of 2025. When you file your taxes in early 2025, those taxes are for your income and deductions in 2024. Alright, now that we’ve beaten that horse to death, let’s get to some numbers. 2024 Standard Tax Deduction Amount For use when filing your taxes in early 2025. As usual, there are different deduction values depending upon how you file your income …

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Marcus High Interest Savings Account Review

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lightbulb with dollar signs

Update: As of January 2024, the current interest rate Marcus accounts is 4.50% Update: As of July 2024, the interest rate on the Marcus High-Yield Savings Account is 4.40%. Update: As of 10/11/24, the interest rate on Goldman Sach’s Marcus High-Yield online savings account is now 4.10% after recent rate cuts by the Fed. High Yield Savings Worth It Again After a few years decades of the Fed running along with near zero interest rates yielding high-yield savings account earning only a few cents more, online high yield savings accounts are back. With interest rates up over 3% for the first time in a long while, watching that monthly interest payment hit is a whole lot more fun now. As someone a little older and with more finance experience the return to 6% mortgages and savings accounts paying at least a few percentage points feels like normal. However, it’s been over 20 years since the Fed Funds rate was this high, so this might all be new to you if you are in your 30s, or younger. While the cost of your borrowing has gone up, whether it’s mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, or personal loans, taking out a loan …

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Tax Loss Harvesting for Regular Investors

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tax loss harvesting at finance gourmet

Every so often, tax loss harvesting seems to show up in various marketing literature like it was just invented. The funny part is that tax loss harvesting has been around for a long time. In fact, it’s less important today than it was before Bush the Second cut long-term capital gains tax rates to 15 percent. So, what is tax loss harvesting, and how is it important to the average investor? Understanding Tax-Loss Harvesting and Capital Gains To understand tax loss harvesting, you first have to understand capital gains taxes. Income taxes apply to most forms of income. However, the profits made from the sale of certain types of investments — for our purposes, stocks, bonds, and other equities — are taxed differently. These taxes are known as capital gains taxes. The easiest way to understand it is by example. Capital Gains Example If you buy $10,000 worth of Apple stock and then sell it a few years later for $20,000, then you have made a $10,000 profit. This profit is a form of income known as capital gains. The original investment amount, or purchase price, is known as the basis. The basis may be adjusted depending on several factors, but …

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Westerra Goes Big (For a Little)

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9 percent cd credit union financegourmet.com

The main credit unions in Colorado have left behind the days where marketing meant sitting there, serving your customers well, have lower fees, and higher interest, and waiting for the smart, financially savvy people to find you on their own. Well, that, and collecting new employees at the companies they started out servicing. Today’s credit unions are willing to put some effort into finding new members and making sure you find them. Westerra Credit Union 90th Anniversary CD Westerra has been around since 1934, which is bonkers. I didn’t even think they had credit unions by then. Be that as it may, the company is making a splash with an outlandish 5-month 9.0% APY CD. Of course, 9% comes with some fine print. In this case, the CD has a maximum deposit of $3,000 and those funds have to be new money to the credit union. Still, 9% on $3,000 is a lot better than 2.5% on $3,000 in some savings account, or even 4.5% in an online high-yield savings account. And you get local, physical locations to go with it just in case you ever need to talk to someone in person, get a cashier’s check, or even get …

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Ibotta Review Cash Back for Buying Stuff

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ibotta really works legit

A friend of mine keeps going on about Ibotta. For those of you who don’t know, Ibotta is a shopping app that gives you cash back rebates for various items you buy. It’s kind of like coupons, only instead of saving on your grocery bill, you build up a cash back account. What makes it such a huge deal for my friend is that those offers often include beer and wine, and often for a few bucks at a time, so that can add up. But does that make Ibotta a legit deal for others, or is Ibotta a scam that takes more than it gives? Let’s dig into is Ibotta legit. What Is Ibotta? Ibotta is an app for either Android or Apple. You can also use it online via the webpage. It works a lot like many grocery store apps where you go through a list of coupons and select which ones you want to use. However, unlike my King Soopers app, or Safeway app, the offers on Ibotta are rebates, not coupons. In other words, while the coupons take 50 cents off of my grocery bill, the Ibotta rebates have no effect on the cost of my …

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Should I Worry About the Equifax Hack?

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Boy, time flies when you’re protecting your identity. This article was originally written September, 2017. It was just a taste of things to come. In August, 2024 criminal hackers went bigger and literally hacked the Social Security Administration and got away with as much as all of our social security numbers, date of birth, address, and who knows what else. Even a baby identity thief could profit from this. The worry is that new state-sponsored criminal organizations are already working on profit and intelligence gathering. If you are wondering whether to be worried about the Equifax hack from 2017, the answer is yes. You should be worried. However, you do not need to panic. How ever bad the Equifax hack of 2017 was, there were plenty of doozeys on its heels. So many, in fact, that any one of them likely caused more damage. Still, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Get Some Credit Monitoring By now, you should probably have some rudimentary credit monitoring whether it comes through a free credit score service like Credit Karma, or from your bank, or one of your credit cards. You’ll want to read all of those emails …

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Dividend Investing and REITs

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There are more than a few people out there on social media, or even respected money news and financial analyst websites and publication who hate dividend investing. Dividend investing is for people who are irrationally conservative and growth investing always wins in the end, is what they say. Of course, part of the reason they say that dividend investing is bad is because they don’t fully understand it, or they do and are choosing to focus only on trendy, but ultimately underperforming types of dividend investing. REITs and Dumb Dividend Investing On the internet, dividend investing is, as are so many other things, dragged to the extremes. The idea of only investing in the most boring of stocks with dividends like utilities and maybe banks is, not surprisingly, a recipe for underperformance, even if it is less risky. Likewise, the starry-eyed adulation of fund, ETF, or stock paying an astronomical dividend, attract droves of followers who assume that their sub-reddit has found the holy grail that all other investors are too foolish to see. Dividend Investments Hype Any investment that has a good run will develop a following who believes that it is a never ending good run and getting …

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