Update #3 - How I get “free” Vacations.

As a reminder, I’m not a financial advisor and this is not investment advice. Do not use money you need to pay bills and feed your family for this kind of experiment.

Refer to my original blog post here for the complete story on how it began.

The “most magical place on earth”, also happens to be a pretty expensive place to visit. I know there are several ways to do it affordably, but for me, I like to splurge a little and enjoy convenience. Especially since I work an average of 50-60 hours a week all the time. So when vacation time rolls around, I want to relax and not have to deal with any hassles.

THE EXPERIMENT

If this is your first time here, what I did was take about $12,000 that I earned from doing side hustles from 2021-2023 (Door Dash, taking surveys, affiliate marketing etc) and invested it into 3 YieldMax ETFs that pay very high monthly distributions. I collect that income and move it to my vacation savings account at my local bank every month. The distribution varies every month, as does the total balance of the amount invested due to stock price movement.

If you’re saying “But you’ve got $12,000, you could easily pay for Disney with that!” - You’re right I could… but doing it this way, in theory - the $12,000 is saved and generates enough income to pay for Disney world (and more) every year for the rest of my life. So if I go 10 more times, instead of “costing $50,000 (10 x $5,000/trip [[2 adults, 3 kids, on-site moderate, 6 days]])” - it only still “cost me” $12,000 - because all the other income was free money generated by my portfolio.

From the math, you’ll realize that $12,000 investment is actually paying me $800-1000/mo - which is $9,600-$12,000 in total income. That is enough to fund all the vacations I take every year. So over the next 20 years, I’m saving almost $240,000 in vacation costs. If this continues to work.

THE UNKNOWN

The Yieldmax funds are relatively new and it’s unknown how they will perform in a down market. There is a subtantial risk of loss of money for sure with these new fund types. That’s why they don’t make up more than about 20% of my portfolio where my play money is, and less than 1% in my retirement account.

As such, I would not recommend anyone go out and do this particular thing unless they are ok with losing their $12,000.

UPDATE #3

As noted in last months entry, I have changed from “Disney vacation fund” to just “Vacation fund”. I began selling options and invested in 1 other YieldMax ETF (YMAX) that will also fund “General vacations”. But for this experiment, I’m only going to use income from the 3 funds that I originally began this experiment with. I did add a few more shares to get to an even 200 across the board. That was simply because having odd numbers of shares was bothering me. This could certainly still work as originally set up 3 months ago.

Balance History with current values:

JUNE ($14,297)

• AMDY - $3,463, 200 SHARES (+ $147)

• CONY - $4,788, 200 SHARES (+ $1429) ** added 45 shares to get to an even 200

• NVDY - $6,046, 200 SHARES (+ $962)

MAY ($11,758)

• AMDY - $3,316, 200 SHARES (+$528) ** added 50 shares to get to an even 200

• CONY - $3,359, 155 SHARES (-$526)

• NVDY - $5,084, 200 SHARES (-$178)

APRIL ($11,935)

• AMDY - $2,788, 150 SHARES

• CONY - $3,885, 155 SHARES

• NVDY - $5,262, 200 SHARES

JUNE 2024 - PAYOUT #3 ($1,032.40)

So far things have been going up in the markets since the last update.

Total Disney World account is now $2,849.71 - with 4 months to go.

Averaging the 3 months of payments I’ve received since I began in April to calculate possible future distributions for the next 4 months, we’ll be right at $6,500 which should be more than enough to pay for everything needed for the 4 days well actually be on-site at Disney World.

IF for some reason the funds payouts dip due to a stock market crash (or big correction), I will pull from YMAX and also all the options I’ve been trading as well to pay for things, but that scenario is unlikely at this time. I’m getting around $400/mo trading options right now, so that’s another $1,600 over the next 4 months as well that can be added if needed.