2013 Goal Progress through Q1

The first quarter of 2013 flew by. I can't believe it's almost April! I decided quarterly updates on my 2013 Goals would be the appropriate level as most of the goals require time to pass to measure meaningful progress.

With no further rambling, here is my progress during Q1 toward meeting my 2013 Goals:

Ready to Drywall

After meeting with our contractor last weekend, we tore down all of the drywall in our living room and added new insulation in both the newly opened walls and the stud wall to the new laundry room. We're pretty much ready to drywall these two rooms and be able to say we've completed one of the many major projects in our new house.

New Buy: Nucor Corp

I just can't seem to stop buying stocks at attractive prices, despite the market's continued run up and up. I've been expecting a pullback in the S&P 500 for a while, especially with the market above my year-end target. Even with this neutral/negative view (short-term), I'd purchased over $12 thousand of stocks so far this year between January and February. Today I made another purchase.

Portfolio Tweaks

Even after adding $9k of fresh capital to my portfolio last month, I'm still on the prowl for good stocks to buy. I've been impatiently awaiting a correction in the stock market, but have trouble staying away from moderately priced companies with bright prospects. I also made a tweak to take advantage of a pretty strong price movement and the growing bubble in fixed income securities.

Master Bath Demo

It's been a little while since I've provided an update on the progress we're making in our renovation. We spent the first few weekends are our new house ripping everything apart. We filled two dumpsters full of carpet, wood paneling, moldy drywall, and other disgusting stuff. We've been living on subfloor in quite a bit of our house since, though progress on the flooring situation is being made. We hired professionals to add a new wall and get everything ready to move our laundry room upstairs. In the meantime, we decided to demo the master bathroom over the weekend.

New Buys: $9k of Net Additions this Month!

As part of my goal of achieving $5,000 of dividends this year, I need to continue to put fresh capital to work into owning high quality companies. I have been sitting on a pretty large amount of cash for a while, waiting on a market pullback. With payday being yesterday, I decided to put a bit of cash to work. I still expect a correction in the near-term - and have plenty of dry powder - but don't want to get burned if the market takes off.