Biggest Dividend Payday to Date!

Man! I love investing!!!! Biggest single dividend paycheck!!! $6.11 paid in one day on a $6100 portfolio. That’s a 0.10% yield! Show me a bank that will pay 0.10% in one days interest!

U-Haul Investors Club – An Alternative Investment Vehicle

I’ve found an easy way to invest and wanted to share it with you. U-Haul Investors Club^® offers its members the opportunity to invest in actual U-Haul assets and earn rates as high as 8%. I’m enjoying my membership and think you will too.

Joining U-Haul Investors Club^® is easy and free! To get started follow this link:
https://www.uhaulinvestorsclub.com/ReferAFriend/Invitation/9c5bc3e6-026a-435e-9375-dc98c85debc3

3/29/19: Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly Performance Results

Below is a recap of my weekly, monthly, and quarterly portfolio performance. I will try and update my dividend performance at a next week. I am out on the road til Monday, and I forgot my WiFi hotspot when I left. My spreadsheet hasn’t been updated in quite awhile.

Weekly Ending 3/29/19

My IRA: 1.63%

My Taxable: 2.25%

Wife IRA: 0.94%

Wife Taxable: 1.21%

Month Ending 3/29/19

My IRA: 1.24-%

My Taxable: 2.23%

Wife IRA: 2.00%

Wife Taxable: 1.93%

Quarter Ending 3/29/19

My IRA: 11.89%

My Taxable: 4.79%

Wife IRA: 2.98%

Wife Taxable: 1.26%

Weekly Portfolio Performance for 3/15/19

My Taxable: +3.08%

Wife Taxable: +2.94%

My IRA: +1.64%

Wife IRA: +2.57%

Jan & Feb Dividend Report

Sorry I haven’t made a post recently. I was caught up in work and getting what I wanted my portfolios to

Look like and what not all.

Jan 2019: $4.93 (Up 61.87% from Jan 2018)

Feb 2019: $9.02 (Up 85.25% from Feb 2018)

I am starting to learn where to put my money and to leave it alone. No more chasing dividends!

October 2018 Results!

Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com

October is OVER!!! HooRay! We have finished revamping and settling down. Hopefully I have settled on some winners (and a couple wild bets). I have pared my small and humble portfolios down to 39 unique positions (a few are held in more than one portfolio). I am comfortable with my selections, even my wild bets, which I believe will come back in the long run.

So, what do we have as of the close of October? My positions are held in 4 different accounts, Retirement Accounts for my wife and I are with Stash (a mobile app), My large (relatively speaking) long term taxable account is with M1 Finance. And I also have an account with Robinhood which I started almost a year ago, and tried day trading and swing trading (it didn’t work out so well). All 4 of these portfolios are now being geared towards what I hope is a DGI approach. I am reading and learning constantly, but it is now a definite buy and hold mentality with no more short term trading.

I have set a minimum weekly deposit into each of these accounts, which I plan to increase as I finish paying off my revolving debts. My goal is to have the two IRA accounts maxed out within 24 months, and then even start a SEP-IRA, as I am self employed. Eventually, I plan to move the Robinhood over to M1 Finance and combine it with that taxable account, I just need to be able to “justify” the $75 transfer fee, or decide to cash it out and just move the money. I would prefer to transfer the holdings, to minimize the tax issues of selling and the risk of rebuying at a higher price.

I hope you, my readers, can read the data above, I know it is a bit blurry, but I don’t know of a better way to capture the spreadsheet summary, other than a screenshot. Ideas on getting a cleaner pic will be most appreciated.

September and October were spent fine-tuning and really getting down to basics with my stock selections.  I narrowed down my holdings, tweaked my portfolio’s, bought several books on investing, and started reading. I have “fixed” all of my earned and paid dividend income for the year, as I was dabbling with it in previously with Robinhood. Therefore previous months may not agree with other numbers I presented. This is about as close to accurate as I think I will get. It may still be off a tiny bit.

What I am excited for is that November is forecasted to break $10 in dividend income across all four accounts!!! That will be nice.  I am also excited to say that my annual dividend income should easily break $250 for 2019, based on my current positions and weekly contribution amounts!!!

As always, my portfolio holdings are available from the link above somewhere. Thoughts, ideas, suggestions, and comments are always appreciated.

So, onward with November and the start of a strong finish to 2018!

A Serious Lack of Updates

I apologize to my 2 or 3 followers (someday maybe there will be more), but I have been busy fixing my portfolio’s and spreadsheets into something more manageable than the 50+ stocks that I owned a factional share of each.

A few more days (or maybe weeks) of tweaking my spreadsheet and I will try (no promises) to update and post on a somewhat regular basis. My day job must take priority.

July 2018 Results

Photo by Steve Johnson on Pexels.com

With the first full month under my belt, so to say, I have some actual results on Trucking For Dividends. For starters, I did actually make a couple bucks in dividends, $2.18 to be exact! This represents a whopping 90.83% increase over June. Keep in mind that I started this portfolio on June 11, 2018, so that statistic really isn’t all that important.

I started this journey with 40 odd stocks and an ETF last month. I grew my portfolio to a staggering 110 +/- positions and with a cost basis of $370! I also said last month that I didn’t know what I was doing yet, but that I needed to trim the number of holdings down. I am currently at 64 unique positions in both my STASH IRA and my M1 Finance taxable account.

I will eventually be moving my IRA over to M1 Finance, hopefully before September is over. I’d prefer to not pay Stash $2.00 a month to hold my positions for me. Now, before anyone chastises me for my balances, please note that I know my IRA should have a much higher balance than my taxable accounts at this time, but hindsight is 20/20 and I am working on maxing out my IRA contributions.

So, with all that rambling being said, I will say again, between my IRA (which I will include from now on in these blog posts), and my M1 Finance account I have 64 unique positions. I will only sell a position off if it no longer meets my criteria:

• Must pay a regular and consistent dividend.
• Maintains or increases its dividend payment year over year.
• Using the BetterInvesting.org model for growth and income (as best as I understand), have a “Buy” or “Hold” rating with an upside downside ration of at least 3:1.
• Portfolio will be evaluated and adjusted on a quarterly basis.

You will notice that I changed a graph, added my IRA (Stash Retire) account, show a prediction of future dividend payments, and made a few other minor changes to this recap of my spreadsheet. As all good things, it is a work in progress.

I have opened and made contributions to both my STASH Retire account a total of $366.71 between June and July. While I have yet to be paid a dividend in that account, I do have an “unrealized gain” of $0.44 (0.12%)!!! WOOHOO!!! Off to a great start!

As far as my taxable M1 Finance account (all the other “portfolios”), I added $459.61 to my cost basis. This cost basis includes paid dividends that have been reinvested. The exciting part of this portfolio is actually seeing income paid to me, $2.38 Year to date!!! I am actually making money while I sleep!!! This is cool!!! I didnt even do anything except buy some pieces of some companies!

I know that a total value of $1180 across 64 stocks & ETFs is spread thin. I am still working on fine tuning my holdings (the goal of 50-60 still stands), as I continue to add money whenever I find some that isn’t claimed by a bill of one type or another. That being said, I am sending most of my money to those nasty credit card companies. Once they are paid off, a little over $500 a month will be freed up to begin Trucking For Dividends! I cannot wait for that day to see the explosion my accounts.

I am still at an impasse on how I want to apply new monies and dividends. With the M1 Finance and with STASH Retire, all dividends are applied to the cash account. I can then spread the paid dividends and new money however I wish. However, in M1 Finance, I have a few options with the cash account. I can either manually invest the money into individual stocks and ETFs with a minimum of $10 per transaction, or I can set it to “autoinvest” which will act to rebalance the portfolio based on set percentages of each piece. For now, sometimes I set the cash account to “autoinvest”, and other times I manually invest the funds. I just cannot decide.

So anyway, until next month, keep on trucking!

Good and Bad

There are good and bad companies, there is no such thing as a good stock; there are only good stock prices, which come and go.

Ben Graham

Results for June 2018

With any journey, one must start by taking small steps. On June 11, 2018 I opened my M1 Finance account with $100 (the minimum opening deposit). I did not know much about dividend investing, but I had a list of 40 odd stocks and 1 ETF that paid a monthly dividend. I figured I would start with that. If nothing else, I might see a couple bucks in dividends after 30 days had passed.

Now, keep in mind, that I opened this account on June 11, 2018. June 12th was the start of a downward slide that caused much angst among my friends who day were traders and not investors. Also, these results are not for a whole 30 days.

Now I did add another $270 in deposits and added quite a few more stocks into the mix. I will not go into the total mix of stocks, because one can probably deduce the lists fairly easy with a simple google search. As I type this blog post I have approximately 110 stocks  that my money is spread thinly about. I admit, it is spread way to thin. Nothing can happen with some of these positions. For example, I have 0.11188 shares of Snap-On Inc and 1.07739 shares of Orchid Island Capital Inc. and a whopping 0.0003 shares of FedEx Corporation.

Also, the photo is going to show portfolios with no holdings. These are portfolios where I am actually researching the companies in the lists (found via a google search), before I add approximately another 300 companies to my portfolio. My goal is to eventually work my way down to a manageable portfolio of approximately 50-60 companies spread evenly across all sectors and sizes. I will post in more detail later as to what my strategy is towards building and maintaining this dividend portfolio.

However, in the drive towards my goal, accountability is required. Below, is a photo of my spreadsheet showing my results of my “shotgun” approach to dividend investing.