FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DIVIDENDS PER YEAR IS ENOUGH.

I had planned on adding shares of EVV to my IRA account which would have added another 12 dividend payments per year to my portfolio.  However, after giving it some thought, I decided that 520 dividends per year is enough.  I'm going to concentrate more on building current positions instead.  With the recent down market, I've gotten a little help in that regard, since reinvested dividends buy more shares at the lower prices.

Had a little extra cash in savings, so I decided to put that to work by purchasing more shares of AGNC.  With their yield over 11%, I'll earn a lot more money per month than if I'd left it in the savings account.  I'm looking forward to putting my small tax refund to work as well.  I'm leaning towards buying more shares of NLY since the price has dropped from my initial purchase.  It would reduce my cost basis and increase overall yield, so I don't see how I could go wrong with that.  

This downturn in the market brought home the need for me to pay a bit more attention to reducing cost basis on all my investments where possible.  In the case of NLY, I'm investing more cash out of pocket, which will bring my average price per share down rapidly.  However, in most cases where I overpaid, I'm simply reinvesting dividends at the lower prices.  Each time a dividend is reinvested on stocks that have dropped in price, the average price per share goes down.  Reducing cost basis makes it much more likely you'll come out ahead when the market goes up again.  The other side of that coin is, where I bought stocks that were down and have seen a big increase in share price, the average price per share goes up with reinvested dividends.  In cases like these, I have to decide whether it's worth paying a higher price or whether I'd be better off to take the dividends in cash.