Another month has passed and another month of results to analyze and look back on.  Time to look at where I stand with my goals, to see if any “tweaking” needs to be performed and also – another month closer to Financial Freedom!  Let’s see what August brought us.

Investment Activities

This will not include any 401K purchases through my employer as an FYI.  This month ended u being extremely busy!  I infused approximately $6,059 into dividend paying stocks this month, which seems like an astronomical number when you think about it, very lucky and fortunate to do so but also my hard work pays off in order for me to do that.  These purchases is also a reason why I am trying to aim to save 60% of my income every month.  I first invested more money back into our favorite duck – Aflac , picking up 25 more shares of the golden beak.  As if the quack sound wasn’t enough, I drowned out that sound by buying Diageo and a large toy company – Mattel.  I bought Diageo because we did an analysis on the company and their strong branding proved to be a no brainer, especially after they increased their dividend.  I bought Mattel due to the interesting turn of events they are going through with the toy industry, their backlog of inventory and also – a tremendous decline to the share price to very low price points.  Lastly, I hopped on the green tractor as many of the dividend bloggers in the community have done and scooped up 23 shares of John Deere.  These purchases alone added approximately $191 to my annual dividend goal, phenomenal and am excited to start seeing the benefit from these purchases.    This further led me to re-evaluate my annual dividend projection goal… see the projection section below.

Goal Updates

As the portfolio has been updated in our Dividend Portfolio section, we have come to update you on the following goals for Lanny:

Forward Annual Dividend Projection: $3,959.78 or 99% there towards the last $4K goal.  Really?  Do I want to SETTLE for $4K in projected income?  We are changing this game and I am bumping this up yet AGAIN to $4,250 annual goal or a 6.25% increase from my goal set at $4k.  Reason being – I have 401K purchases for 4 months, dividend income coming in that gets reinvested back to produce even MORE dividends.  Also – given that I made 4 moves in August – I find it hard to believe that I won’t make a purchase over the next 4 months.  It’s done – $4,250.00 in projected 2015 income is my goal by December 31, 2014.  No going back now, excited for Bert as well, as he increased his goal just recently.

Market Value: $114,581.38 which far surpasses the $100K goal, I cannot believe I am almost at $115K, it felt like it was just yesterday when I talked about crossing $100K.

# of Stocks: Increased to 29 out of 25 – far surpassing my goal of 25  stocks.  I want to add more to current positions, but opportunities keep coming up!  I really hope I buckle down and see what investments the upcoming few months brings.

Dividend Yield Individual Portfolio: 3.74% this does not reach my goal of 4%, due to market swings in appreciation, as the S&P crossed 2,000 for the first time ever this month.  Further my purchases in DEO & DE were lower yielders – approximately 2.85-3.00%, which reduced my overall yield.

Dividend Yield Retirement Portfolio: 3.07%, above my goal of 3.00%

Investments YTD: $24,584 (give or take a few dollars)

Thoughts…

I am hungry you can say.  I have now a $114.5K portfolio that produces close to $4K in total dividends per year.  If I stopped today, right now and assumed all reinvestment + 8% market growth, in 25 years my portfolio would be $1.5M and would produce $53-$54K in income for me.  That’s if I stopped.  No chance in hell I am slowing down right now.  This year has been pretty amazing with the amount of capital I was able to use to buy sound, fundamental companies who continually produce and grow their dividends every year.  I am expecting something phenomenal come September, I am optimistic about a record month.  I am lucky to be in a position to have complete control over investment decisions right now.  I truly love research, analyzing the market, reading financial reports, helping/teaching/guiding others and then ultimately making a decision.  This is what moves me.  I know I wrote recently about my emotions, about waking up seeing if I was happy/looking forward to what I was going to do on that very day – we will see where that goes, but the more and more I am on here, writing, producing analysis articles and talking with the community – the happier I am.  So thank you.  Thanks to everyone for visiting our blog, please let us know if you are changing your goals, if you are seeing something on the horizon or just want to stop by and say hey.  Hope everyone enjoys their Labor Day weekend with your friends & family.  God bless.

-Lanny