Hi! I’m Janelle, and I trade covered call options for a living.
Ok, I’ll be more honest here–I want to trade options for a living! So I’ve created a plan and will detail my journey as I create a full time income selling covered call options.
Who Am I?
I’m a wife, mother, and grandmother who lives out in the rural country in the Midwest. My husband and I are empty-nesters with 4 daughters out on their own and 5 wonderful grandchildren.
We thought in our 50’s that we had it all figured out. My husband and I had great jobs, a nice nest egg plus a pension for retirement, a beautiful acreage with a house we’re in the process of remodeling–life was good!
Then 2020 and the pandemic hit. Businesses had to close, schools shut down, and, just like everyone else, our family had some hard decisions to make.
Our oldest daughter lives close by, and she and my husband both have essential jobs. However, our young grandson needed someone to care for him full time when they closed the schools and daycares.
So the most logical decision was to have me quit my job and care for him during the day and do the remote classroom with him every day. We considered ourselves very fortunate to be weathering the pandemic with an income when so many others were facing much more hardship.
We hadn’t been prepared to lose a significant portion of our income, though, and it’s been a little scary to have it happen this close to retirement. So over the past couple of months I’ve been determined to find a way to earn more income working from home.
Essentially, we’re asset heavy, but income lacking at this point. Our retirement nest egg and savings are in good shape, but we had to take a 72t distribution to get through. So we’ve been reducing our holdings and not getting the growth we will need.
I’d already created an online affiliate marketing business by starting a couple of websites and was making a small steady amount of money each month. The idea was to add content in my free time and build up my traffic. Then we’d have another income source in retirement that I could work on even when we travelled.
But now I have a different priority for working at home–to create a full time income now! As much as I love affiliate marketing, it takes effort, consistency, and time to be successful. Unfortunately, time is what I don’t have at the moment.
Using our assets to generate income, instead of just depleting them, became the basis of my ideas. We’d made a lot of sacrifices over the years to set ourselves up for financial independence in retirement, and we didn’t want to lose that security just trying to get by for a couple of years!
So after a good deal of research, I have decided to try my hand at something I’ve actually been doing for several years on a much smaller scale–options trading! And because I love blogging, I created MyCoveredCallOptions.com as a platform to learn and hold myself accountable.
The Plan
Now I know what a lot of you are going to say–options trading is very risky! You are right, of course, and I want to go on record agreeing with you.
However, my plan involves writing covered call options, and only covered calls. I’ve been doing this for several years now, and I’m comfortable with the downside risk in relation to the potential profit.
I’ve always used covered calls to juice my investment returns. However, I’ve always been held back because I’m a rather conservative investor–I like my dividends!
That has meant that I’ve always been very conscious about my stocks being called away and missing out on potential gains. This led me to write calls with higher strike prices and lower premiums. With most of my investments being solid dividend stocks with low volatility, I traded less risk for less income–much less income.
But now I’m older, wiser (hopefully), and more experienced with all aspects of investing and with option trading. So my plan is to devote approximately 50% of our investment portfolio to generating income with covered call options.
My goal is to earn an average of $5,000 per month, which would be a full time income of $60,000 per year. I expect this income to change each month, with significant gains and losses along the way.
The stocks that I will be purchasing will have much higher volatility than I’ve chosen in the past in order to sell higher premiums. However, I will only purchase stocks that I’m comfortable owning for a long period of time.
Join My Journey!
Each month I’m going to post the covered call trades that I made and the resulting profit or loss. I’ll explain why I’ve purchased each stock and the rationale behind each option trade.
I invite you to see my journey with all of the successes and failures as I set off to earn a full time income working from home!
