I started this blog back in December, 2009. When I started the blog, I didn’t know what I was going to write about and someone told me to put a stock of the week on the front page and then every week change the stock and then I’d have something different to write about every week. It was supposed to be a writing crutch, and a way to get into the groove of writing the blog. Lots of folks have used it successfully in the past. It should work for me.

As fate would have it, I used to go to Starbucks, every Wednesday. My wife would come to downtown Santa Fe and join me for a coffee at Starbucks. We were regulars and we didn’t even have to call our drinks, since everyone knew what we ordered. When I got laid off, I mean when I took early retirement, I started making my own espresso at home. It was Starbucks of course.

And when I started the blog, I put the Starbucks stock on the front page. I never wrote about it. It was there in case I needed something to write about. It was a crutch, as I said above, in case I needed something to talk about. But as fate would have it, two weeks before I got laid off, I mean two weeks before I took early retirement, I purchased 300 shares of Starbucks at around $20 a share. I was actually going to write about it one week, but I had something else I wanted to talk about and I never got around to it.

Fast forward two years and two months, and here it is February, 2012. When I put the SBUX stock on the front page the price was around $23.66. My portfolio with the SBUX in it had a nice 18% gain in the stock going from $20 to $23.66, from October to December, 2009. I felt funny about writing about SBUX. It might seem like I was touting the stock after I made my purchase 10 weeks prior. So I never wrote about it. I just left it on the front page.

Well you can see how SBUX has done since I put it on the page at $23.66. Needless to say, I still have my 300 shares and I plan to sell ½ one of these days and buy something else. But for now, I’ll take my 100% gain and plan to go to Starbucks on Wednesday to celebrate.

For Taking Early Retirement (TER), I hope you are enjoying a great retirement or are close to that day!

Jeremiah John

P.S. If you look at the fine print at the bottom of the chart you can see what SBUX gained for the past 90 days. As of this writing, it says, 16.86%. I’m not getting that on my savings account, are you?

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