BennyEast.Com/Blog The official blog of Kenny West

When I was Two I Fell In Our Backyard Pool

This poor realtor.

He's probably thinking all these hits he got all of a sudden came from prospective buyers.

Legit though, who has a cool 6.5 million sitting around to drop on a house?

Not I.

Although I WISH I did.  Anyways, my sister posted it after I posted it, on her Facebook... and from all of her friends and our extended family watching the video... It's racked up over 100 views.

So, this was my grandparents house growing up.  we'd go for dinner pretty much every Sunday.

My grandfather would wrap the seats in plastic wrap.  And we would sit on phone books because we were too short to reach the table.

My aunt seems to think it's a little over the top.  I say... If I had 6.5 million, I'd put the money down without even a second thought.

So, whoever owned it last added a second floor and redid the entire house.

My grandparents owned it from 1971 to 1991...  They sold it in 1991 for about 1.5 mil to move up the coast to live in Montecito.  They actually had a house built to spec.  That house was sold for about 3.6 mil and put into the trust when my grandfather passed.

Who knows, maybe one of these days I'll be able to buy Mom and Pop Pop's house back.  I personally LOVE the house.

Plus it has a lot of fond memories from when we were kids.

My goal is to maybe work it in the music industry, or get my book published and then make that into a movie and then make enough to buy the house.

I don't know.  Some how, some way.  I want to buy that house back.

Oh, so... Mom is my grandmom, and Pop Pop is my grandfather.  Just to clear things up.  See, my mom we called her mommy.  So... we called my grandmom mom.

Although, my grandparents used to call one another yum.  I'm not sure where that came from.  My grandmom actually at one point had AOL Instant Messenger.  Her screen name was yum191.

191 was the address of their house in Montecito.

ANYWAYS...

I love that house.  I mean the Montecito house was pretty awesome too.  But that house?  It's in the Pacific Palisades.  The thing is... One day I'd love to be someone in the music or movie industries...

So, I feel like that house would be super fitting to own.  There's family history with it.  And additionally... It would be only a short drive from Hollywood/Beverly Hills.

The trust is still in Beverly Hills.  So, I mean... there's just lots of nostalgia happening all over with this whole setup.

We'll see.

Right now I just live here in Philly.  But, I'm hoping in a maximum of 5 years time to be owner of that house and somehow/someway involved in Hollywood.

I actually have two new tunes that are on the precipice of being completed.  One is basically, for all intents and purposes, finished.  The other still has a ways to go.

I'm about halfway done the cover art for the song that's pretty much finished.

SO, that's rolling on.

As far as some kind of legit way to get back to LA?

My year end investment income was more than last year.  So, if nothing else, my own personal investments are on track to help me make money.... Even if I just slept all day every day.

What's awesome is that some of the investments I own have increased their quarterly dividends.  So, I've done ABSOLUTELY nothing but sit here and hold the shares in these companies... And now in 2017, I'm going to make more money than I did in 2016.

One of the stocks I own is called CoreSite Realty Corp.  I've had this one for a couple years now.  They basically run data warehouses for cloud storage.  The previous quarterly divvy was 53 cents a share in 2016... This year though?  I'm at 80 cents a share for 2017.

So, if you had owned 10 shares... your quarterly dividend salary every 3 months would have been $5.30 in 2016...

But you would have gotten a raise of $2.70 cents per quarter.

So, your new quarterly salary is now $8 dollars a quarter.

If you own 100 shares, you get 80 dollars a quarter.

If you own 1000 shares it's 800 every 3 months.

And so on and so forth.

This is why I own dividend growth stocks.  I could literally sit around with my thumb up my butt and NOT ONLY make money but, I would still get a raise every year.

I'm pretty much just a buy and hold investor.  Right now the stocks are own are the ones I own.  But I'll definitely be buying more over the course of the next year.  Each one I buy is pretty much... Buy, and done. Hold forever.  Collect an ever increasing dividend income salary.

A lot of my stocks have been bumping their dividends up.  So, I'm definitely going to make a significantly higher dividend salary this year than I am last year.

I currently own 50 different stocks... But I've got cash yet to be invested.

So, obviously my dividend income stream is just going to continue to go up.

This doesn't count the trust.  The trust is sitting there being managed by a professional on our behalf.

So, no matter what, even if I screw up my own investments and mange to completely lose my shirt... I've still got friends at that bank in Beverly Hills, a portfolio manager, and a team of analysts, who's entire job it is to figure out how to make this trust grow as much as possible before me, my brother, and my sis turn 50 and the trust is cashed out.

At that point, I'm going to still have them, or some major bank/investment firm manage the pot of money, I just want the dividend income stream coming off it.

Anyways... The plan is to one day figure out how to A) become a famous musician/author/Hollywood actor... OR B) hopefully I'm able to become a super savvy investor or the trust is invested SO well, that it balloons in size enough for me to be able to...

Buy back that house.

That's one of my dreams.

Get back to those Sundays by the pool.

Although, minus my mom, and my grandparents.  But... Still.  I think that would be cool.

True story though, our other house had a pool growing up... and apparently at 2 years old I fell in, and someone had to dive in and rescue me.

My mom literally told me a thousand times who it was.... and now, I wish I had paid more attention.  I THINK she said it was this one girl Tiffany that dove in after me.  I could be wrong.  Tiffany is who I THINK it is.

Tiffany is now married to the VP of a past US Prezy.  But at the time her family lived down the street from us in Southern California.

So... if it WAS her... Basically the only reason I'm still living and breathing at this very moment and didn't drown in our backyard pool when I was 2 years old... Is because the current daughter in-law of a previous Vice President of the United States of America jumped into a pool and saved my ass in 1984.

To be fair though, almost every house in Southern California has a pool.  I imagine there's a LOT of 2 year olds falling into backyard pools and having whoever was nearby jump in after them to save them.  It's probably a fairly common thing in Southern California.