Hello everyone!  It’s the first month of 2015 and it was a fruitful month to begin the new year!  It’s wild to see that one month has essentially finished and another month of dividend income is in the books.  I know we all love to read these posts from the writers in the community, so let’s get to the January Dividend Income Summary!

Dividend Income

This month, I received a total of $278.32!  Wow… what a great way to kick off the year.  I am excited, as I mentioned in my monthly income & expense summary post, I will be using my dividend income & savings as part of my equation, as I had never considered this before.

Similarly, I have split out between the individual stock amounts and the retirement accounts, as the ” – R” indicates a Roth IRA dividend.  I separate these two, as I like to know what portion of my dividend income is coming from those retirement accounts that I cannot touch until 59.5 (barring any other usage rule I could use).  Here, it shows that I received a total of $27.26 or 9.80% of my income from retirement accounts and the other 90.20% was from my individual taxable account portfolio.  To see my portfolio – one can go to our portfolio summary page.

Comparison

Now, I look back at 2014 January’s total.  The total back then was $179.61.  Earning $278.32 this month equates to an 55% increase!  I will rephrase that, this month of January 2015 I earned 55% more money from dividend income stocks than I did last year.  Insanely amazing and I know it wasn’t easy to get to this point.  Even 2 years ago my income was $88.47, each year that passes and each year the grunt work goes in – saving 60% of your income, using the dividend stock screener and the importance of the dividend growth rate are all playing a major factor here.

Dividend Income Increases

This month had a few dividend increase announcements.  (1) Realty Income (O) has increased their dividend 2.95% from $0.183417 to $0.189, which increased my dividend projection by $4.58, not much but still something additional I didn’t have to do and O typically increases a few times during the year.  Further, (2) Kinder Morgan (KMI) increased their dividend 1 cent from $0.44 to $0.45 or 2.27%, which more than likely won’t be their last time this year, as their goal was to get to $2.00 in annual dividends.  This increase added $2.55 to my overall projected dividend income.  I was pulling for announcements from Tupperware (TUP), but they are hard nosed on their 50% payout ratio based on trailing 12 months EPS, so a strong quarter for Q1 is a must, LETS GO TUP!!!  I was excited as I recently purchased them earlier on this year.

Conclusion & Summary

Okay, wow, one month down, and one month of busy season down.  I am sitting a projected Dividend Income (as I’ve received February dividends already that were reinvested) at $5,230.40 going forward, which is still 22.51% away from my goal of $6,750 at 12/31/15 projected going forward.  It’s been another positive month in comparison to last year and February has already started off to a roaring start, which I assume will also crush last year’s total.  If I’m not destroying my last year totals, then what is my portfolio doing?  It could only mean a change of months of dividend payment or no payment at all – aka my strategy wouldn’t be working.  I am pumped to see the fruit being grown from the labor over the years and I know each month continues to fuel the train to the finish life of financial freedom.

With that being said – How did your last month finish off?  Satisfied?  Did you hit targets you set for yourself?  Are you ready for winter to be over already?  As always – thanks for stopping by and I am excited to hear from everyone!

-Lanny