How to Manage Your DIY Portfolio While on Vacation

Earlier this month, we talked about our 21-Day Summer Trip Around the UK and many seem to wonder how we are able to take care and manage our DIY Portfolio while enjoying rather extensive vacation.

So, the big question this time is what do we do with our holdings when we get away from home for 3 long weeks?

Those who know us already anticipated our short answer which simply is: nothing different!

For starters, we never take a lot of time to manage our portfolio and sure don’t have to monitor it on a day-to-day basis. We normally take only a couple minutes each week to look at our holdings and set up upcoming operations.

If we are available, we usually like to manually process our stock buying and selling. From time to time, we still must rely on automatic orders like when we know we will be busy working. Programmed orders can always be bypassed if more time becomes available afterwards.   

We just treat trips or vacation as completely booked periods. Three fully-occupied workweeks would be handled the same as three weeks of vacation.

So, before our summer trip, being on a buying mode, we simply set up buying orders on selected stocks from our Watch List that would trigger at specific thresholds. Using our own tool, we typically like to buy stocks that would reach a Dip Factor of 3, 3.5 or 4. For your information, no orders were triggered during our latest trip.

With internet now accessible from almost anywhere, if necessary, we could access our online brokerage accounts and input transactions while on vacation. Then again, privacy may be an issue. One more reason we prefer not to.

A quick anecdote. We were in the US a couple years back when markets plunged because of one of the debt-ceiling crisis. US media was talking about it all the time. Being there, we felt the pressure even more and were tempted to consider selling some of our stocks. We were fulling invested at the time and we had no buying or selling orders set up. Being on vacation with limited internet access, we had no way to manually input transactions on our autopilot portfolio. In the end, we were very fortunate we had no opportunity to give into the panic because markets went back up a few days later after the crisis was resolved.

We are very proud to limit time we spend managing our DIY Portfolio. Our conservative passive style of investing sure helps us accomplish so. It also allows us to always enjoy our vacation a little more!

Photo by Lady C

Our 21-Day Summer Trek Around UK

Over the years, going on trips every now and then has become essential to our family life. I must admit that traveling projects are somewhat against my nature, being more an appreciate-what’s-around-the-house kind of guy. Thanks to my girls (or women should I now reluctantly say) and their irresistible influence on me, we still manage to plan noteworthy trips on a regular basis.

After the fact, I’m usually very happy that I went along with their mad traveling desires. In the end, it’s always interesting to discover and experience different cultures and points of view. It also makes us appreciate even more what we already have here around home sweet home.

This summer’s trip around the United Kingdom was no different.

So, without further due, let us share some thoughts and impressions of our exhilarating summer trip around beautiful cities and countryside of the UK.

LONDON

Our initial stop was the great city of London. And what a stop it was! 

Wacky Golf Fact (Revisited) – Unsuspected Members of the Thieves Guild

The Wacky Golf Fact Series was originally posted in 2016.

Our initial plan was to add new articles to this fun series but the Rules Modernization proposed by the golf authorities caught us of guard.

Even though these new rules won't be in effect till January 1st 2019, they still propose major changes and will completely revolutionize they way we play golf and enforce the rules. Don't get us wrong, we welcome these changes and they should be great for golf! We are just not ready to talk and write about them yet. 

So you will note that our article still refers to the actual and soon to be thing-of-the-past golf rules.

This article was originally posted on November 18, 2016

When you play golf, you’re bound to see animals here and there. Some are beautiful, others less so; most may seem the shy-quiet type, yet some rare ones are proud and loud. Most golfers simply view them as innocent by-standards. But stay alert because, when you least expect it, some of these poor creatures may sneak up on you and literally try to get a piece of the action. Watch out before they reach their ultimate goal: to steal your precious ball and ruin your game!

12-Minute and Your Schedule (Revisited)

The 12-Minute Series was originally posted in 2012.

We’ve decided to republish it integrally because we believe it can still help as everyone aspires to make things better.

Let’s hope it stirs up the discussion and stimulates you to change the world 12-Minute at a time!

This article was originally posted on March 12, 2012

The 12-Minute Approach can be applied tons of ways to your schedule. We will submit you some ideas here but the possibilities are almost endless.

Why 12 Minutes

Using the 12-Minutes Approach will allow you to be more efficient; doing something different only 12 minutes every day can produce surprising results.

If you break down your day in 12-Minute Periods, you’ll find that there are 120 such Periods:

1 day = 24 hours x 60 minutes =

24 hours x 5 x 12-Minute = 120 x 12-Minute