I Want To Fly Away, But Tickets Are Out Of My Price Range.
So as broke Millennials, me and my wife have had to get creative to travel. So what we have done is setup a chase card where we get double points on any eating and travel expenses. Since eating at Panera Bread is one of our main vices this seemed like a no brainer choice. 🙂
Using Award Hacker we can see how to apply our newly minted points to plan our trip to Latvia and see our loved ones. We just hit the minimum spend of $4,000 in 3 months, so we have ~55,000 Ultimate Reward to use. Using the above website I can find a trip using just rewards
So why am I sharing this? Because, I need you to sign up with my chase link. We are at 55,000 but we need to get to 100k to have our trip fully covered. We’ll probably put another 5k on alone before we make it to Europe because we need to go to Washington, DC for some embassy paperwork.
Immigration is a Bitch
So if you haven’t heard, immigration is slower than it ever has been and we’re still waiting on stuff that was supposed to be processed a year ago. We’ve paid more than a trip to Europe for all the paperwork filing we’ve done. We’re close to having it all behind us but man it was expensive and time consuming. End Rant.
Back to Financials
So, I’m very interested in investing. I tried my hand at Robinhood last couple years and had pretty decent results and learned a lot. I had some risky trades that turned out in my favor, that’s not really how I want to invest. So I liquidated majority of my holdings and paid some bills and debt down. Now I’m focusing on a wider diversification aka safer set of holdings.
I’m using M1 and really liking it. I spent a few weeks picking out stocks that I thought fit my risk profile, dividend payout, and social view. Here is a list of the stocks I have and the target percentage.
| PLD | Prologis Inc | 4 |
| AMT | American Tower Corp | 4 |
| INTC | Intel Corporation | 4 |
| LADR | Ladder Capital Corp | 4 |
| CCI | CROWN CASTLE IN/SH SH | 4 |
| MA | Mastercard Inc | 4 |
| V | Visa Inc Class A | 4 |
| AXP | American Express Company | 4 |
| IIPR | Innovative Industrial Properties Inc | 4 |
| IBM | IBM Common Stock | 4 |
| IRM | Iron Mountain Inc | 4 |
| C | Citigroup Inc | 4 |
| JPM | JPMorgan Chase & Co. | 4 |
| MSFT | Microsoft Corporation | 4 |
| BAC | Bank of America Corp | 4 |
| DLR | DIGITAL RLTY TR/SH | 3 |
| AVB | AvalonBay Communities Inc | 3 |
| EQR | Equity Residential | 3 |
| AAPL | Apple Inc. | 3 |
| AMD | Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. | 3 |
| WY | Weyerhaeuser Co | 3 |
| DEA | Easterly Government Properties Inc | 3 |
| SBUX | Starbucks Corporation | 3 |
| OHI | Omega Healthcare Investors Inc | 3 |
| NVDA | NVIDIA Corporation | 3 |
| UNIT | Uniti Group Inc | 2 |
| O | Realty Income Corp | 2 |
| QTS | QTS Realty Trust Inc Class A | 2 |
| SNE | Sony Corp | 2 |
| ATVI | Activision Blizzard, Inc. | 2 |
I would like to chose more REIT stocks but I’m not too familiar with them so it will take time. When i do chose more stocks I can adjust the target percentage so when my weekly $20 goes into the M1 account it will fill up the new securities first. I’m unsure what I’ll trim back, I was thinking of the bank holdings but they are historically good stocks to have during a rising interest rate environment.
So sign up to Chase or M1 and share with me either your travel plans when you hit that 50,000 points or what stocks and ETFs you choose to invest into. Thanks for Reading!