Dividend Income Report :: February 2019

Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives.

For those that grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, you might remember that catch phrase from the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives. It was ingrained in my head as my mom watched the show religiously.

I mention that because the blog has been a bit quiet lately and despite all of the best intentions to get back to writing and sharing updates about my dividend journey, the days have slipped away one by one until an entire month had elapsed. There have been a lot of happenings lately and I’ve got some additional posts to share on some of the topics that have been keeping me occupied (it has to do with another source of passive income).

Other happenings are not nearly as exciting–such as traveling for work, putting the finish touches on one global system implementation while launching another major, global project, and other day to day joys.

Needless to say, I am well overdue for the next installment of my dividend income report so let’s get to it!

February 2019 Dividend Income Summary

While January ended my historic run of two consecutive months exceeding $500 in dividends, I knew that it would be a short-lived setback as the quarter opening month is my slowest.

However, while the dividend payouts resumed, I will share a bit later that the buying opportunities were not as plentiful. While I did make a couple of purchases during February, I found that I was being a bit more conservative and/or cautious with deploying new capital.

In hindsight, I am sure part of that was because my wife took a leave from her job to help a family member with some health issues so I was a bit more cautious with our funds. In addition to that, or maybe a result of, was that I also had a more conservative view on my price targets for positions I was watching.

Fortunately, that didn’t slow down the dividends and February brought in $547.47 in dividend income that was broken down as follows:

• Brokerage: $452.93
• IRA: $94.54
• Retirement: $0.00

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

Ticker	February 2018	February 2019
AAPL	66.15	77.50
ABBV	83.55	130.56
ABT	30.97	36.03
CBRL	--	28.15
CLX	--	7.78
CMS	--	17.07
GIS	--	33.33
PG	--	18.23
SBUX	--	14.58
T	--	52.65
VZ	--	15.39
WSM	--	21.66
Total	180.67	452.93
YoY Growth		150.69%

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

Ticker	February 2018	February 2019
EPR	--	17.14
MAIN	--	9.98
O	--	16.25
SBRA	--	24.41
SPG	--	20.72
STAG	--	6.04
Total	0.00	94.54
YoY Growth		broken calculator

All of these dividends were reinvested and have added an additional $23.55 in projected annual dividend income!

It is always nice to see that projected income growing simply by reinvesting dividends, as now those dividends will be earning future dividends–and that is what really fuels this DGI fire!

February 2019 Purchases

With everything that I had going on during February and into early March, I wasn’t watching the stock market nearly as much and had not done a lot of advanced research to determine my potential buy orders.

As a result, things were pretty quiet and I only made two purchases late in the month for one of the smallest amounts of new capital being deployed since starting this DGI portfolio. The two purchases totaled $1,607.50 of new capital.

As a quick recap of the February purchases:

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

• PEP :: 10 shares @ $116.00/share that added $37.10 in PADI
• KO :: 10 shares @ $44.75/share that added $16.00 in PADI

Overall, these purchases raised my projected annual dividend income by a meager $53.10.

In all reality, that is not a bad number but I say that it is meager as it is well off the average that I need to maintain if I hope to reach my 2019 goals. I’m going to have to hustle the rest of the way to reach my targets.

February 2019 Dividend Raises

While I thought January was great with 8 7 dividend raises (I mistakenly recorded the ABBV raise from late 2018 after seeing a release on SeeklingAlpha and not properly vetting the details), I was thrilled to see February surpass that with 9 dividend raises!

There were an impressive 3 double-digit raises, led by the King Whopper from Home Depot with a 32.04% increase! The other double-digit raises were from NextEra Energy at 12.61% and Prudential Financial at 11.11%.

Here you can see the impact of these raises:

Apologies for the small size of the image, but I had to shrink things down in order to fit all of the details on one screen! Not a bad problem to have if you ask me!

These nine raises combined resulted in an increase of $60.21 in projected annual dividend income.

Due to the mistake I made in January’s reporting of the ABBV raise, I did not set a record as I had thought but fortunately the results here in February checked in at a solid 2nd place in terms of overall PADI increase.

I’m not expecting nearly as much excitement in the month of March as it looks to be a really quiet month for raises. Maybe there will be some pleasant surprises, however I am only expecting to see increases from General Mills and Williams-Sonoma. There may be an increase from BlackRock as well.

Summary

With February disappearing in the blink of an eye and half of March nearly gone as well, I am hoping that things will begin to return to some semblance of normal and I can get back into my routine. Part of that will include being a bit more active with the stock purchases, however I definitely don’t want to chase any prices.

Despite having felt removed from things, I am thrilled that the dividends continued to roll in and the summary below will show that through the first two months of the year I have already exceeded the dividends received in all of 2017!

I’m definitely liking the trend in that chart and I am excited to begin filling in that gap covering March and April.

The three legs of the dividend tripod only added $136.86 in total PADI. Unfortunately that is below my targeted monthly average required to reach my goal and I am going to have to turn that around soon if I want to achieve my goal of receiving $4,500 in dividends from just my brokerage account.

My PADI is just shy of $4,200 for my brokerage account, and while I am happy with that, it is a long way off from my goal of reaching $6,500.

On a positive note, feeling so far away from my goals does not discourage me. It actually motivates me to work even harder and focus on what I need to do in order to be successful.

Time will tell.

How was your month of February?