How Much Do I Need to Make Some Money?

How Much is Enough?How much is enough?

I still vividly remember the Tolstoy short story “How Land Does a Man Need?

That story tells of “Pahom” who surprisingly needed much less land than he thought.

Eschewing greed has always been a tenet of the Option to Profit strategy, but I don’t think that it derived from any Tolstoy influence on me during childhood. I was probably influenced by Soupy Sales and The Marx Bothers much more than Tolstoy.

When I was younger, I looked at everything through the lens of the “The 1964 Zenith 25 Inch Color TV” metric. I don’t think that the word “metric” was really a word then, but like “algorithm,” it sounds like you have credibility when you sprinkle casual conversation with those words, especially if you master the art of subliminal suggestion..

G-spot.

In essence, for me the question was always distilled down to “how many Zenith Color TV’s, using 1964 prices, could be purchased with the amount of money in question?”

For standardization purposes, a single such TV was about $500 back then.

I remember when my father was offered a job paying $25,000 a year.

Totally unaware of such mundane things as taxes and other asset drainers, I just looked at that sum as meaning we could buy a new color TV each and every week.

Now, nearly 25 years later, Zenith is gone, your SUV glove compartment is probably bigger than 25 inches and $25,000 isn’t really that much.

So how much do you need?

I started using the covered call strategy and actively trading in and out of positions while I was still getting a regular paycheck. At the time, the income stream was a nice adjunct and I was only devoting about 25% of my portfolio to the strategy.

Now, I don’t work and I’ve devoted 100% of my stock portfolio to the strategy.

Did I mention that my wife, coincidentally, became known as “Sugar Momma” once I devoted myself to plunking my butt on the La-Z-Boy and trading full time?

I’ve always maintained that you can generate 2-4% per month of income from your assets. That shouldn’t be confused with “profit.” My goal is to use my assets to create income, while limiting downside risk in a down market and accepting the fact that my capital gains may be lessened during a bull run.

I’m OK with that.

Even if the market is going down and your portfolio may show paper losses, you can still generate that 2-4% that can become a source of income or “the source of income”

Since I tend to be a conservative guy, let’s make some assumptions.

Firstly, the upper range of the 2-4% return is during periods of market volatility and utilizing near the money option sales. You want higher than 4%, that can be done, too, but you have to also dismiss “fear” as you would need to devote more of your assets to “momentum” stocks or more speculative plays, like Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Amazon, Netflix and MolyCorp, to name a few. Maybe even those “evil” leveraged ETF’s and ETN’s, such as ProShares UltraSilver and UltraShort Silver, Barclays Volatility ETN and others.

Secondly, the upper range also assumes that most, if not all of your holdings will be hedged, thus creating income streams.

So, now lets assume that it’s not very volatile out there and only 50% of your holdings are hedged and you’re not a momentum risk taking kind of guy.

I’ll call that 1%.

So how big of a portfolio do you need to make a monthly 1% income stream meaningful to you? What is your personal “Pahom” telling you that you need?

Well, let’s not forget to throw the monthly $200 subscription fee in there (once I increase it to that amount).

That means to reach a break even, your portfolio would have to be at least $20,000.

The bad news is that if that’s all you have, you may be in the 1% for income stream, but you’re probably not in the 1% by “Occupy Wall Street” standards.

Beyond that, even if you wanted to put the strategy into effect and accept a 0% income flow, after your subscription costs, $25,000 really isn’t enough to be diversified and have some pricing efficiency, even with your Uncle Vinnie acting as your discount broker.

So, you can easily do the math at different asset levels and different income stream rates.

From my perspective, after expenses, at that 1%, I’d need a $75,000  portfolio to get one new Zenith 25 inch color TV every month.

You may have your own metric.

Obviously, the next question is how much would it take to make a meaningful difference in your life?

I’m also assuming that your investments are discretionary. That is, you’re not playing with money that you may need in a moment of desperation. Those moments always seem to come when you’re stocks are at their low points. There’s nothing worse than taking losses, unless it’s taking losses when you’re arm is being twisted to do so.

Been there. But you’ll have to read “Option to Profit” for the story.

G-spot.

 

 

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