Thursday, May 31, 2018

MAY BEATS PREVIOUS DIVIDEND EARNINGS RECORD BY OVER 10%!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I expected May 2018 to set a new record for dividend income and I wasn't disappointed.  It not only set a new record high for monthly dividend income but it beat out the old record by over 10%!  In a year over year comparison, the income for this month was nearly double that of May 2017!  While I wish I could see that kind of improvement every month, I'm not really expecting as much for the rest of the year.  I expect gains will be much more moderate, as my efforts to squeeze as much dividend income from my investments have pretty much gone as far as they can at this point.  From now on, increases will come mostly from re-invested dividends and whatever extra cash investments I make.  Still, I'm very happy with the results of my efforts for the first 5 months of the year.  

Collected 12 dividend payments for the last day of the month.  Will collect several more payments tomorrow to kick off the month of June.  All the rearranging I did in my investment accounts had an unexpected benefit, in that it spread income payments out more throughout the month.  I'm now getting more middle of month payments and more payments between first, middle and last of the month.  I suppose it doesn't really matter when you get the money, but it's kind of nice to have some coming in every week.  While I collect 502 dividend payments per year now, most of them were paid on the first, 15th and last days of the month.  Now I still get the big paydays but also get 3 or 4 smaller paydays interspersed throughout the month.

Made an extra $50 this month on Swagbucks!  That doesn't sound like much, I know, but you should see how much faster my charge accounts are dropping since I've been using Swagbucks earnings to pay off my old debt.  I knew it would help, but I'm amazed at what a difference that little extra payment has made in eliminating debt.  I'm pretty excited about it.  Once I finish paying off my bills, I'll go back to investing all the extra money I earn through Swagbucks.  If you're interested, you can sign up for free!  Just click on the Swagbucks link in my Link Exchange on the right side of the page. 

Friday, May 25, 2018

BECOMING FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT

Over the years I've come up with several ideas for becoming financially independent,  which to me means I only work because I want to, not because I have to.  My most recent idea was to get 1,000 referrals to swagbucks who average making $25 each per month (which is easy to do by the way).  Then my referral income of $2,500 per month would mean that I could stop working anytime I wanted to.  In my case, I don't need a huge income to live on, so I could live quite comfortably on that amount.  While I may never get to 1,000 referrals the idea here is to keep coming up with ideas until I figure out one that I can make work.  Had I done this when I was younger instead of putting all my energy into working at a job, I'd most likely have succeeded by now.

The whole point I'm trying to make here is, there are any number of ways to become financially independent.  You could do it by saving and investing, starting your own business, building a better mouse trap or creating a popular new app.  Whatever the case, you just have to figure out how you're going to do it.  So far I haven't been able to make any of my ideas come to fruition, but that doesn't stop me from trying or from coming up with new ideas.  In my case, I've noticed that even my failed ideas are not really failures.  When I was an ebay seller, I didn't make a fortune but I made money.  I make money from my investments every month, even though it's not enough for me to live on.  I make money from swagbucks every month.  I made money when I bought a rug doctor and cleaned carpets and I made money when I was running a flea market booth.  So, even though none of these ideas actually got me out of the work force, I did make money on all of them and am better off because of it.  Now I just need to come up with an idea that works.  Hopefully you can too. 

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

CONGRATULATIONS PRINCE HARRY AND MEGHAN!



As an admitted Anglo file, I have to congratulate Prince Harry and Meghan and offer sincerest best wishes for their future together as husband and wife! 

NEED TO BUY MORE REEVES UTILITY INCOME FUND

Every time I get the distribution report from Reeves Utility Income Fund (UTG) I can't help thinking I need to buy more shares.  While I originally bought in at a steep price, I could buy more shares at a lower price now and reduce my average price per share.  Share price has not been a stellar performer, but the monthly distribution is what I'm interested in here.  Their current yield is 7.22% on a share price a little over the $28 mark.  While that's not as high a yield as some of my other holdings it's definitely nothing to sneeze at.  Average annual return for the past five years stands at 9.33%, including reinvested dividends.  

The real selling point for me is 100% of their distributions have been paid from net investment income and net realized long term capital gains.  Which means they're not playing the old smoke and mirrors game like some funds who cover payouts with a return of capital or some other capital source.  I also like the fact that they actually increased their dividend payout in April of this year.  So I'm looking to buy more shares of UTG while the price is down.  I've held it for a long time now and reinvested dividends, but I think I'd be wise to increase my stake before the price goes up.  

Thursday, May 17, 2018

MAY 2018 TO SET NEW RECORD FOR MONTHLY DIVIDEND INCOME!

As I suspected, last month's record for dividend income didn't last long.  A quick calculation for the month of May reveals, dividend income will set a new all time monthly record!  While I'm very happy about this, here again, I don't expect it to last long.  The current month has a total of 40 dividend payments, while June has 42 and July 44.  So it looks like there may be one or two more new records set in the next couple of months.  This is especially gratifying when you consider the market hasn't done so well this year and I've added very little new money to my investments aside from my 401k.  (401k dividends are not counted with the rest of dividend income since TransAmerica does not report dividends to account holders.)

No further news on Capital One's transfer of our investment accounts to Etrade.  It's kind of put a cramp in my usual investment style.  Finally decided the forced sale of fractional shares for the account transfers would only really affect my taxable account at tax time, so I stopped all dividend reinvestment to that account and continue reinvesting dividends in my IRA and Roth IRA.  Holding off on deploying any cash out of pocket until I've finally gotten my accounts transferred to TD Ameritrade.


THE 70/30 SPLIT BETWEEN STOCK AND BOND INVESTMENTS

In keeping with my plans to simplify my investments this year, I've decided to go with the 70/30 percent stock and bond portfolio.  Which is, quite simply, you hold 70% of your investments in stocks or stock funds and 30% in bonds.  In my case I'll most likely hold the majority of my investments in broad range index funds for the lower costs.  While many people argue you can do better with actively managed funds, over the long haul the costs of actively managed funds tend to make their performance sub par compared to index funds.  Then too, I truly can't think of any fund manager I believe can consistently outperform the stock index averages.  So I'm going with index funds.

What I find especially attractive about a 70/30 stock and bond investment model is that in order to keep your mix at those levels, you would invest more cash in stocks when their prices are down.  In other words, as the stock market drops and the bond portion of your portfolio goes over 30% because of falling stock prices, you would put more cash into stocks to bring them back in line.  So you're buying stocks at lower prices because you're buying when the market is down.  In retirement, when you're not likely to be adding cash, you can continue this process by selling bonds and buying stocks when the market is down.  When stock prices go back up, you would sell a few stocks and replenish the bond side of your portfolio.  Thus maintaining the 70/30 stock bond mix.  Simplicity itself.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

MAY 2018 KICKS OFF WITH 11 GREAT DIVIDEND PAYMENTS!

Just collected 11 dividends for the first day of May 2018!  Nice way to start off the month, although it was a little bittersweet, in that I collected my last dividend payments from longtime holdings T and VZ.  I sold out my positions in the majority of individual stocks in order to boost dividend income and prepare for the transfer of my accounts to Etrade.  While I probably won't stay with Etrade, I do want to make the transfers go as smoothly as possible.  

Completed the purchases of additional shares of CHI for my taxable account and ZTR for my IRA.  I think I got in in time to collect dividends on the new shares this month!  May is now a 40 dividend month, although I'll actually collect 42 this month counting T and VZ.  So I have 29 more dividends to go before the end of this month.  With that including some of the largest dividend payments, I'm expecting to do quite well for the month.  May even set a new record high for monthly dividend income, we'll see how it goes.

Finally feel like I've reached a turning point on debt, since it's actually going down instead of up.  Saw a great reduction in interest charges on my highest interest debt, thanks to the extra payments I've been making on the bill.  The first one will be the hardest to eliminate, but once it's gone, the rest should be fairly easy to pay off.  I don't really owe a great deal of money, it's just spread out over several accounts, so it's a lot of monthly payments.  I'm looking forward to being debt free and only having monthly living expenses.  Then I intend to really ramp up my investment program.  Pretty optimistic about how things are going so far.  Maybe it just took getting mad to finally wake me up to the fact that I'll be much better off without all the charge accounts.