We are in November now and the year end holidays are fast approaching. It is always interesting to see how the sentiment changes at this time of the year as fall turns into winter and investors get ready to close out the year and start a new one.
Festive season for stocks? The market seems to carry on without much care. Last year's end of the year tumble is quite fresh and the market valuations have not quite corrected much (in fact, not at all) since then. Caution should abound.

Avoiding Lifestyle Creep when Living among Rich People
Assuming you are not rich.
I read the article but do not understand if there is any practical advice on how to avoid lifestyle creep. I suppose the real choices are either a) move, or, b) get rich yourself. Why would you force yourself to fit in an environment that you don't want to be part of?
Investing in Real Estate Notes
Jeff @ the debt free doctor talks about investing in real estate notes. He covers options such as hard-money lending, peer-to-peer lending, and investing in performing and non-performing mortgages.
Non-performing mortgages may not exactly be passive income depending on how much leg work you need to do to get paid. Hopefully the discount is large enough to compensate for this. This is pretty much the definition of distressed debt investing, albeit done at a more local level.
Natural Gas is a Hard Market to Make Money in
I remember when I was consulting and we worked on optimizing the energy usage/costs for a client. We worked on a futures hedging program based on contracts for natural gas being delivered at the Henry Hub in Louisiana. Every model we designed had an underlying assumption that the natural gas will get cheaper over time.
This was in 2002.
Things were so bad at that time that the Canadian oil sands operators would just burn off the natural gas that they produced during their normal operations. It wasn't worth transporting and bottling it up and selling it in the market.
Not much has changed since then
I find this article very thought provoking as a reminder that some cycles can run for decades without changing directions.
7 Dividend Growth Stocks from Dividend Growth Investor
7 companies with recent dividend increases that DGI digs deeper to see which stocks exhibit a long track record of dividend growth, sustainability as well as good valuation.
This is all for today. Stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow.