How to get yourself kicked off of Pinterest

I work with a guy who is an Apple fanatic.  He owns the latest Apple everything, pretty much when it comes out.  He tracks the latest Apple trends.

"Last night, as me and my wife were watching a movie from my Mac through my Apple TV, I read the funniest thing on my MacBook Air."

"It was... Oh hang on, I'm getting a text on my iPhone."

"Did you know that the next iPhone will be built with Gorilla Glass?"

Another guy that I work with has the nickname "Gadget Guy".  He's not married to any one company, but he buys all of the cool toys. Like mosquito bite lasers and car mounted deer scaring air warblers. His office is equipped with a digital picture frame and a tablet that he uses to read books on at lunch time.

"Mosquitos were a problem at the cottage.  So then I installed a surround-sound mosquito repelling frequency emitter.  It's thought powered."

And then there's me, the late adopter of everything.

I never got a Facebook account, or a MySpace one when that was big.  I'm not on Twitter.  When I finally relented and got a cell phone two years ago, I got a cheap little pay-as-you go plan with a correspondingly cheap phone.

It doesn't text very well, its pictures are of terrible quality and it has no app for that.  It is, however, inexpensive.

I'm a Millennial, but when people talk about how technology and social-media savvy Millennials are... well, I must have missed the memo.

"Wait, come back!  This is really important stuff!"

Two years ago, I joined the latest social media craze - Pinterest.  Two months later, my Pinterest account was locked.

This is my story.

It is quite possible, given the rapid rise and fall of various social media sites, that in a few years, someone will be reading this and be all, "What's Pinterest?"

That person will have been born in 2020 and be reading the blog from the cyborg implant in their arm.

So, for that cyborg child, here is a description of Pinterest.

"Pinterest is a company that provides an Internet service that they describe as a visual discovery tool. People use Pinterest to collect ideas for projects and interests. Users create and share collections (called “boards”) of visual bookmarks (called “Pins”) that they use to do things like plan trips, develop projects, organize events or save articles and recipes."

In practise, it looks a lot like this:

OMG Events!

OMG Crafts!

OMG Food!

I got a Pinterest account a few years ago, on the advice of a co-worker.

What on earth would I use Pinterest for, I asked her.  She used Pinterest to do crafty things like design costumes for her kids and to plan super-fancy theme birthday parties.

For many years, I hadn't needed Pinterest to help me with my sewing projects.  I failed to start needing Pinterest to help with my sewing projects once I had Pinterest.

"If only I could look at the amazing project of someone more talented than me.  That would make me feel better about my own work." --Not said by me ever.

I looked elsewhere for my PINspiration.

Ha ha ha!  So original!  This is not a pun that has probably ever been used before!!!

So what else did people make boards of?  My first board featured pictures of things that I thought looked like fun.  Three days and twenty or so posted pictures later, the exercise felt self-indulgent; I got bored.

"OMG Space travel! ... I'm really reaching, aren't I?"

Pinterest niggled at me, though.  I felt like I needed to do something meaningful with it.  If this was to be my contribution to the great social network of the world, I wanted it to have oomph.

You know what is meaningful and contributes to the world?

I bet you weren't going to say stocks.

Traitors.

I decided to make a Pinterest page on stocks.  Specifically, dividend stocks.  Extra specifically, those dividend stocks that are listed in the Dividend Champions list.

Feel free to commence mocking me.  What can I say?  I like my stocks.

I didn't just stop there.  Oh no, if I was going to do a page on Stocks to Consider, I would analyze the heck out of those stocks.  I used the four questions of Derek Foster.

1 - Is it recession proof?
2 - Is it dominant in its industry?
3 - Does it have a long history of strong performance?
4 - Does it have a strong consumer brand loyalty?

(For the uninitiated, "Yes" is the right answer to all of the above questions.  To buy a stock, you would have a confident yes answer to all four questions.)

I started at the top of the alphabet.  On the first day, I pinned pictures representative of 3 companies and my analyses of those companies.

Three days later, I went to add the fourth stock to the super awesome board.  That's when I found out that my account was locked.

Pinterest had apparently found my board and decided that my pins were too commercial.  I had, in their opinion, violated their terms of service.

I was crushed.  For a full week, I mournfully checked every day to see if my password had started working again.

"Maybe?"

For a full week, my password continued to not work.

"No."

The following week, I pulled the tattered shreds of my life together and proceeded to ignore Pinterest.

"I can live without you, Pinterest."

Like a spurned ex-boyfriend, Pinterest didn't ignore me.

"What do you mean, you can live without me?"

Pinterest never deleted my account.  My Stocks to Consider page lives on.  Pinterest still sends me emails about all of the people who "re-pin" my pins... like it is something about which I should care deeply.

"Love meeeeeee..."

Could things have been different?  Could I have found a way to make a board about finance that wouldn't have gotten me kicked off of the website?  I'll never know.

Now I shun Pinterest and blog instead.  That is, until Blogger spurns me somehow.  Stay tuned!

Taxes - the introduction

Spring is reluctantly springing.

Biorhythms.

In Canada, spring means two things: allergies and taxes.

And the start of a unique time of year when temperatures are consistently above freezing.

Canadian taxes are usually due by the end of April.  This year, the Heartbleed virus hit the CRA's (Canada Revenue Agency, for the uninitiated) net-file website, so Canadians were given an extra 10 days to file their taxes.

The CRA, I presume, felt that this was sensitive information and did not post it on their website.

Armed without that knowledge, I returned from a sleepless weekend out of town and filed my taxes on what I thought was the last day of tax season.

I filed them thoroughly and accurately, for anyone who is keeping track.

It took me about three hours, consistent with last year's time.  Are you asleep yet?  Stay with me.

When I told one of my coworkers that I was starting a blog on finance, she got very excited.  She said: "Great, you can do topical posts.  March is coming up, so you can do some articles on taxes!"

Taxes!

My coworker is taking a series of university courses to become a chartered accountant.  She knows more about Canadian taxation laws then I ever will.  It was inspiring to see how much faith she had in my ability to write useful and succinct things about a topic as obscure as taxation.

Fortunately, I don't have to.  I get all of my information on Canadian taxation from a single website.  Do you have any kind of a question about Canadian taxes?  The only answers I know are here.

I bet you didn't come here to learn factual information about Canadian taxation.  I've got more to say on the subject, especially when it comes to the taxes of someone who has active finances.

Over the years of trying out different ways of investing and using and earning my money, I have turned my taxes from the standard person's type three numbers and claim some deductions style taxes into a marathon of data entry and a personal competition to see how many different forms I can invoke.

That's what I'll talk about next time.  See, I've run out of time.

Thanks again for all your patience.  See you in two weeks!

Let's Talk about Investment Strategy - Part 1

I want to talk about investment.  I do.

I just get bogged down in the details.  Do I tell my story first to give you the context of why I made what decisions, when?  Will that take too long?  Shouldn't I review a book before I reference it?  ...and on and on.

Someone should invent this.

I want to talk about investment.  So I will.

Investment, by definition is buying value and then earning a profit.  Even the Black Swan strategy of Mr. Taleb, the investor who is a true original, still involves buying low cost options and then earning a profit (provided that the economy happens to totally tank).  This makes sense - if you are spending money and not earning a profit you do not have investment, you have a hobby.

What a contrarian derivatives strategy might look like.

So the meaty chunks in the investment strategy stew are figuring out what is "valuable" and how to profit from buying that thing.  That's why investment strategies can range from keeping money in a bank account to buying Bitcoins.

One involves putting your faith in an unaccountable entity until such time as the inevitable crash comes,
and the other is a digital currency.

As a side-note - you will never, ever, find here a recommendation that anyone buy a real, tangible item as an investment.  EVER.  It's really a whole other post, but basically: if you are spending money and not earning any income, you don't have an investment - you just own something.  Most of the time, if you own a thing, you own a thing - it's not an investment.

Except for my beanie baby, which is totally an investment, you guys.

Of course, you're free to do what you want.  But I'll be over here, recommending investment in dividend-paying stocks.

Yes, dividend investing - using your investment money to buy stocks that pay cash to their shareholders at regular intervals.  You've got another boring dividend investor on your hands, joining other old boring people like Warren Buffett and... here I was going to list at least two other famous dividend investors.  

The only other famous investor I know of is Bernie Madoff, but he is not famous for being a dividend investor.

Pictured - The mug shot of NOT a famous dividend investor.

For want of a broader base of celebrity gossip from the finance world, it's me and my buddy Warren, sharing an investment strategy.

Warren and me, chillin' on our piles of money.

Or, to be more accurate, Warren, me, and Warren Buffett's zillions of rabid investment fans who watch his every investment move with fascinated interest.

Or maybe they're just trying to steal his money.

Now it's time for an admission:

I was going to do that thing where I slowly explain bits and pieces of investment strategy until it comes together as a cohesive whole.
  

I realized how stupid that idea was.  I am a person who gets easily bored; I demand that what I read is quick to get to the point.  Why write something that I as a reader would find annoying?

For this reason, I will start this series by getting to the point.  For the edification of those who are similarly impatient, the rest of this article is a picture-less overview of the investment strategy that I champion.

Buy quality:
1 - Reduce the playing field.  Only buy stocks that give dividends.
2 - Reduce the playing field more.  Only buy stocks that have given dividends consistently over a period of time.  5 years is a good number, some people use 25 years.

Buy value:
3 - Make a list.  List all of the stocks that meet the conditions above.
4 - Analyze the list.  Download relevant stock information about each of the stocks on the list.
5 - Compare and contrast.  Use a ranking system to give all the stocks a score.
6 - Narrow the field even more.  Using the ranking system, find the top 10% scores.
7 - Pick.  Decide which of the stocks in the top 10% is the most interesting.
8 - Buy.  Buy as much as possible.

Sell duds:

9 - Never sell.  But, if a stock lowers or cuts its dividend, sell it. 

So that's what I do, in the nuttiest nut-shell of them all (get your minds out of the gutter, people).  

A peanut.  Because, why not?

I wanted to expand and to add sub points and sub-sub points and then maybe a few explanatory paragraphs, but I stopped myself.  I shouldn't expose myself to the liability of someone getting mouse-scroll-related tendinitis if I get too wordy.  My lawyer tells me that I should stop here.

(Note: I don't have a lawyer.  I'm also not a lawyer.  So... don't ever take legal advice from me.)

*** 

 Please realize that "Let's Talk Investing" is not authored by a financial planner, adviser, or a professional investor in any capacity. As such, this is not expert advice in legal, taxation, financial, or any type of information that may be provided. The reader must realize this when reading these articles and must not rely on them as the ultimate source of information but must seek proper verification from the appropriate professionals before acting on any of this information.