Stealth Wealth Are you under the radar?

2008 Goals
-Continue to contribute 6% of my income to my 401k

-Get my Emergency Fund to $3k

-Save $4K for engagement ring

-Stretch Goal: Start a dividend portfolio with at least $3k

-Pay $100 per month on Sallie Mae Student Loan

-increase EPS to $1.00

-Reach a book value per share to -$1.00 by year end

-Reach and maintain a profit margin of 50% (if a merger occurs this will not be possible, but there is a merger in the works :D)

-Increase Revenue to $22k for ‘08 (This is a rough estimation.  I’m not sure how much the pay for the new position will be.)

This past year was my first year working a full-time job. It’s exciting to have my first full year of highlights, which will serve as a benchmark for 2008 numbers.

I have a goal of having a profit margin of 50% or better, but I do not see that being achieved until the 2nd quarter of ‘08. Due to paying off my auto loan, another consumer loan, and medical bills the profit margin for ‘07 ended up being 38.55%

I had $18,835.79 in revenues for the year, which I think is decent considering I started in a position that is pretty much the very bottom in the company.

Qtrly earnings growth is up almost 20% because I charged most of my day to day expenses to my credit card, which cut expenses.

Monday I sold all of my holdings in my portfolio.  Monday was the last day to sell shares for the 2007 tax year.  I took around a $800 realized loss from the sale.  For the year my realized losses are around $300 with gains earlier this year.

I have 3 reasons for selling.

1. I didn’t see the companies I had holdings in picking up until at earliest the last half of 2008.
2. It was better to sell Monday because my losses would offset my gains.  I wouldn’t owe any taxes for my capital gains since I didn’t have any.  If I had waited to sell in 2008 I don’t think shares would have gone up so there wouldn’t have been anymore money from the sale.  On top of waiting and selling in ‘08 I would have had to pay about $175 in capital gains taxes for ‘07 capital gains.
3. I decided that I need more cash for an Emergency fund, which is the whole reason for even selling the shares at all.

Since selling on Monday, shares of Coldwater Creek have fallen almost 14% and shares of the company I work for fell about 5%.  Those are loses I don’t have to worry about making up.  Next time I start investing I’m going to make sure I have a good emergency fund built up and then I’m going to make sure that I invest in dividend stocks with money that I will not need in the near future.

I’ll be posting my financial statements up on Sunday evening or Monday night.

Today I wrote my biggest check I’ve ever written out of my account. I wrote a $2,000 check to my employer to pay for my 2008 ESPP contributions. I know I looked at that check more than 20 times before I put it in the envelope before I mailed it off. Even after putting it in the envelope I pulled out a couple more times to double check (25 times check) to make sure that I had written it out correctly along with the correct address. I’m paranoid on things like that for some reason.

Now I’ll have a little over $75 extra every paycheck. The company pays a little over 4% dividend so I’ll be making about the same as it sitting in my money market account. When economy straightens up and the banking industry gets settled from the sub prime mess I expect the stock will climb back up to where it was a year ago, which is about a 50% climb. My employer isn’t directly hurting from sub prime lending, but indirectly it is being hit as is most every company right now.

We have ended the 3rd quarter here at “Stealth Wealth Inc.” and I’m excited to post last quarters numbers. You can some of the stats on the right side bar. Last quarter I had a profit margin of 50.91%, which means I was able to save a little bit more than $1 out of every $2 I had as income. Revenue totaled $4702.07, which was higher that I expected thanks to gifts I received along with some realized gains on the sale of Coldwater Creek stock. My total cash is somewhat disappointing because I need a bigger fund in case of an emergency. You can expect this to grow 4-fold by the end of next quarter. One of my goals is to have total cash per share up to $0.25 by the end of next quarter. Any questions on any of the numbers? Are they easy to understand?

Stock Price will be coming later…still working on how I’m going to do that.

I will be releasing a full highlights release later this week. Also will start putting the highlights of each month into the financial highlights tab.