Dividend Income Report :: December 2018

The time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve always seems to be a blur–one moment we are stuffing ourselves with turkey and the next we are popping the cork on a bottle of champagne to celebrate the end of another year.

With the close of another year, it is a good time to reflect on whether or not you accomplished your goals and determine what you want to achieve in the new year.

In addition, it also means that it is time for another dividend income report.

December 2018 Dividend Income Summary

There is no doubt that the stock market performance was not what a lot of people wanted to see as we closed out the year. However, as someone that is still in the accumulation phase of saving, I welcome down markets as it means that every dollar can buy more than it can in strong markets.

Of course the risk there is that what you’re buying will recover along with the stock market at some point in the future. Certainly there are no guarantees, but by selecting quality dividend paying companies it is a risk that I am comfortable taking.

Through all of the ups and downs, the dividend checks never stopped rolling in and it was quite the month.

The month of December brought in an unreal $13,980.77 in dividends! * see note below

Moving forward I will provide a more granular breakdown on the source of the dividends as well, including whether they came from my taxable brokerage account, Rollover IRA (this is separated from retirement as it is purely focused on dividends versus index funds in my retirement accounts), or my retirement accounts.

• Brokerage: $432.48
• IRA: $61.70
• Retirement: $13,486.59

Note: The total for the retirement accounts above includes both dividend and capital gains distributions. In Fidelity, they report the number as a combined dividend transaction. As it’s more effort to break down, I am opting to report that as a combined income distribution.

For the purists, this month I did calculate it out and the dividend payment was $3,474.65 and the capital gains distribution was $10,011.94. That would mean the pure dividend total was $3,968.83 for the month.

Let’s look at all of the individual dividends received:

Ticker	December 2018	December 2017
AFL	11.77	0.00
BLK	15.65	0.00
CMI	34.47	0.00
EAT	17.37	0.00
HD	15.55	0.00
JNJ	14.55	0.00
K	8.53	0.00
KO	9.13	0.00
MDP	22.27	0.00
MMM	13.69	0.00
MSFT	9.23	0.00
NEE	5.62	0.00
PRU	40.71	0.00
SBSI	19.36	0.00
SNA	23.77	0.00
TGT	4.51	0.00
VTSAX	0.00	16.91
VYM	149.73	0.00
XOM	16.57	0.00
Total	432.48	16.91
YoY Growth	2457.54%

Last December, I only had VTSAX in my brokerage account and that was my only dividend. I’ve since sold that position and redeployed that capital across my other holdings to better align with the DGI strategy.

Here are the numbers from the holdings in my Rollover IRA:

Ticker	December 2018	December 2017
EPR (IRA)	16.28	0.00
MAIN (IRA)	23.69	0.00
O (IRA)	15.79	0.00
STAG (IRA)	5.94	0.00
Total	61.70	0.00
YoY Growth	INFINITE

Overall, the reinvested dividends from both accounts have added an additional $17.69 in projected annual dividend income!

That is my 2nd largest month in terms of PADI generated solely by reinvested dividends, and third double-digit increase of the year. The highest month was just last month in November.

December 2018 Purchases

December was a busy month that included a number of purchases as well as some reshuffling of funds from Vanguard to Fidelity. In total, there were purchases worth $10,443.95 made including $4,103.96 of new capital.

As a quick recap of the December purchases:

In addition to the transactions above, I purchased 70 shares of VYM as part of the reshuffling that I did when liquidating my VTSAX position in my Vanguard brokerage account.

The purchases break down as follows, including the amount of additional PADI generated:

• MO :: 33 shares @ $53.00/share that added $105.60 in PADI
• BLK :: 5 shares @ $383.00/share that added $62.60 in PADI
• VYM :: 70 shares @ $81.70/share that added $178.50 in PADI
• XOM :: 15 shares @ $71.85/share that added $49.20 in PADI
• BEN :: 41 shares @ $29.85/share that added $42.64 in PADI
• GIS :: 20 shares @ $38.58/share that added $39.20 in PADI
• TGT :: 25 shares @ $65.00/share that added $64.00 in PADI
• WSM :: 25 shares @ $49.70/share that added $43.00 in PADI
• K :: 15 shares @ $55.95/share that added $33.60 in PADI

Overall, these purchases boosted my projected annual dividend income by a whopping $365.34–the total above is $618.34 but that was offset by the loss of $253.00 in PADI from selling the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index.

The increase in PADI also pushed me beyond my revised goal of reaching $5,500 by the end of the year as I finished the year with $5,708.06 in projected annual dividend income!

December 2018 Dividend Raises

It was nice to end the year with a solid five dividend raises, including two double-digit raises!

W.P. Carey kicked things off with a tiny 0.49% increase but that was quickly followed by Franklin Resources announcing a robust 13.04% increase. Next up was Realty Income with their rather standard 0.23% increase and then AT&T with their 2.00% increase. Last but certainly not least was Abbott delivering a 14.29% raise!

Here you can see the impact of these raises:

These five raises combined resulted in an increase of $29.76 in projected annual dividend income.

As BEN announced their raise just before I added the additional 41 shares that were purchased in December, I did not include that above. If I were to include that, the total would be an increase of $72.40 and that would be my largest increase solely from raises.

In January, I am anticipating raises from 3M, CMS Energy, Kimberly Clark, Meredith Corporation, and Realty Income. There may be raises from AFLAC and BlackRock as well.

Summary

It has been a wild and crazy ride since I began this journey ~7 months ago.

The year closed out with a few new purchases as well as my first significant tweak to the portfolio when I exchanged an index fund for dividend growth stocks. Throw in a few raises and reinvested dividends and it turned out to be a great month!

The dividend tripod–reinvested dividends, dividend raises, and new capital investments–added a very respectable $412.79 in PADI during the month of December.

Taking a look at the entirety of 2018, I am quite amazed at the results that I achieved.

Not only was I able to collect $2,815.49 in dividends from my brokerage account and Rollover IRA, I made some changes to my 401(k) that resulted in a massive increase in dividends (and capital gains). My old 401(k) did not produce any type of distribution and therefore I assume the distributions were being rolled back into the funds.

Here is a quick look at the distributions from my retirement accounts between 2017 and 2018:

You can notice the impact of the change that I made to my 401(k) beginning in Q4.

One of my goals in retirement is to touch the principal as little as possible, therefore seeing the combined total of $20,113.48 received in 2018 is extremely encouraging. I’m not sure we will reach 100% of our desired fatFIRE income just through distributions, however it will certainly mean we can take a much more conservative withdrawal.

I am beyond excited about what the future holds, and I hope everyone has a prosperous year ahead!

Did you close out December and 2018 on a strong note?

Do you think I am lazy by including the capital gain distributions moving forward?