My quest continues to earn $100,000 passive income in a year. Supporting my strategy is $QYLD, a monthly dividend producing ETF that uses a Covered Call strategy by owning and selling Nasdaq 100 stocks. It’s not one for the faint of heart, but it fits with my passive income strategy and I went long. There are two things that jump out at me risk wise. For my readers, I’ve written covered calls before, and they’re a great strategy to amp up your returns.

I added $GILT to my passive income portfolio at the beginning of 2021. I did it because the ex-dividend date was on 1/8/2021 and I saw that it had a low price with a history of big dividend payouts. Albeit it is a short dividend history. I’ve written that my goal is to build up a passive income portfolio. My measure of success will be when I generate a $100,000 a year income, and right now GILT is part of that strategy.

I spent the first week of 2021 reacquainting myself with Dividend Reinvesting and I’ve concluded that it makes a ton of sense for someone like me. Retirement isn’t here yet but I can see it coming on the horizon. I’d need to think about stabilizing my investments against volatility and start thinking of long term income. When I first started investing I put a small amount of money in Dividend Reinvestment Plans (still long INTC, thank you very much) and focused on growth inside my retirement accounts.

As 2020 was ending I took some time to look at our 401k balances. This was a good year for our investments, all things considered, but one thing surprised me. There was a line item for “dividend’s earned” and it was quite a large number. My wife’s 401k earned more dividends than what I made as a salary in my first year out of college! This got me thinking about a passive investing strategy that I first read about decades ago.

2020! What a crazy year! We had the Covid19 pandemic, major economic shocks, two big IPO’s in the immediate ‘AI’ space, and lots of new machine learning libraries and innovation. Right now there are so many startups in so many different niche markets or services that it’s hard to count. I’ll highlight the ones that I stumbled across. First is Spell.ml. A buddy of mine ended up there and clued me into what they do.