I’m writing this article in the final minutes of the Super Bowl. This wasn’t the most exciting game to watch and there was a lot less scoring than anticipated. It was nice to receive a dividend from the official halftime show sponsor, Pepsi, this month. Luckily, even though the game wasn’t too exciting, that wasn’t the case with our January dividend income summaries. Lanny kicked off our site’s dividend income summaries with an impressive $777 dividend haul. Incredible results Lanny! How lucky of a number is that by the way?? It is a tough mark to beat, but here is the question, could I possibly have topped him this month?
January Dividend Income Summary
In January, I received $346.55 in dividend income. Okay, so I didn’t beat Lanny. In fact, he doubled me up for the month. But I at least kept you all in suspense for a few seconds, right? However, despite that, I was pretty excited to see my dividend income increase 149% compared to last year. Here is a detailed chart explaining my dividend income (The W represents dividend income received by my wife).
Here are some of the highlights from the month:
- The impact of my fourth quarter stock purchases was really felt. When the market fell in the fourth quarter, I built a strong IRM position in my wife’s Roth IRA and added to my positions of ITW and LEG. Those companies were three of my six largest dividend contributors during the month. It took me a while to finally receive the dividends from these purchases. But man did they pack a punch once they arrived.
- I was aided by the fact that Pepsi pays one of their dividends in January (the first month of the quarter) rather than the regular third quarter of the month. Since I purchased Pepsi last year in the second quarter, I didn’t realize this happens. This is awesome for January, but will hurt come April when my dividend income decreases during that month. But today, I’m pretty excited about it!
- NGG was purchased back in September. The company only pays their dividend semi-annually and this is the first payment I received from them. A nice $41 payment to start it out.
- The last comment is something that was pretty cool for my dividend income. Realty Income was one of my lowest paying dividend companies for the month. At $20 received this month, that’s a pretty decent chunk of change! So it was nice to see that dollar amount on the bottom of my chart, rather than the top!
January Portfolio News and Updates
In this section, I’ll review two different ways that my forward dividend income increased during the month: dividend increases and investment activity. In the first table I will review dividend increases.
We love dividend increases on this site. In fact, I talked about them monthly in my “Expected Dividend Income” series. The first quarter always has a lot of dividend increases. I was fortunate to receive 5 dividend increase this month and add over $23 to my dividend income as a result. There weren’t any large, surprising dividend increases. However, they were all pretty solid. NSC led the pack with a 7.50% dividend increase and I think they are setting themselves up for a second dividend increase later on in the year once again.
This second table shows the additional dividend increase received from purchases and 401(k) contributions. I kept my stock purchases simple this month by only purchasing two stocks this month., Dominion and Abbvie. In fact, I already owned both of those stocks; so there were no new companies added to my portfolio in January. I actually purchased ABBV multiple times, as their price continued to decline, falling below $80/share for a period of time towards the end of the month.
The reason my mutual fund was larger than my wife’s is due to the fact that my company pays us every two weeks. January was one of those months where we happened to receive 3 paychecks. Accordingly, I received 3 401(k) contributions. Another item to note is that once again, I did not receive any new shares in my HSA. I wrote about how I am consolidating HSA accounts during the month. Once consolidated, I will have over $1,000 in my new account and each new contribution will become invested again. Read more about this here!
All in all, purchases and contributions added $253.72 in dividend income. In total, that’s over $276 in dividend income from these two avenues!
summary
Welp, another month has breezed by. Time continues to fly by and I don’t know where it is going. It is truly insane, if you ask me. But with time passing by, we continue to have a chance to monitor our progress and growth over the years. For Lanny, he absolutely crushed it, as I mentioned earlier. Each month, we cover and show how all of YOU continue to crush it as well. Your growth and progress is truly inspiring and I’m happy to have embarked on this journey with all of you. I’m going to enjoy this 100%+ YOY increase, but I know that’s not the norm and it will eventually revert closer to the average. But 2019 should be a fun year for so many different reasons. So lets crush it, conquer it, and make every freaking dollar count. Let’s do this!
How were your months? What was your dividend growth rate? What stocks did you purchase this month? How many extra dollars did dividend increases add to your forward dividend income?
Bert