Another month down in the dividend income books.  Monthly I will evaluate and show the results of which companies paid dividends, progress towards the year and comparison to the past.  This is a great way to track my dividends to see if I’m on pace for financial freedom.  Now onto my September dividend income results!

September: I received a total of $610.18 of dividends broken out by the following:

Well, not too bad right?  $610.18 in portfolio income that I did not have to do anything for, but simply just make investment decisions.  Truthfully, we do a lot of work for this income in the beginning such as trying to save 60% of my income monthly as well as using our dividend stock screener in order to find the dividend income producing stocks that are attractively valued.  September and other quarter ends are usually the bigger months as the more common month a company pays its dividend is during this time.  $610 in one month feels so insane.  This is the 3rd time in 9 months that I’ve received at least this much in a month. I had received $615 dividend income in March and then received the infamous $753 dividend income back in June of this year.  In those 3 months that = $1,978 in dividend income!  That’s almost $2K that I received from hanging out with friends, traveling, working on my salary job, writing articles, going out for a run and, well – you can probably see where I am going with this.  We are investing into dividend income fundamentally sound companies – and we are being paid like-owners, which goes along with what Dividend Mantra said about thinking/acting like an owner.

 Comparison

Now, I look back at 2013 September’s total.  The total back then was $327.  Earning $610 this month equates to an 86.5% increase!  I will rephrase that, this month of September 2014 I earned 86.5% more money from dividend income stocks than I did last year.  If I keep the same growth rate, I’ll be at $1,137 for this month… haha, but we all know those growth rates are near-impossible to maintain, but I’m known to be crazy… right?  I actually hoped that this month would be record setting, but I know one of my investments normally has a smaller payout for the September quarter end, with larger one’s in the March & June quarter ends.  In comparison of the dividend income this month to prior month of $180, is not really worth speaking of.  I tend to like to compare off-end quarters to each other.  Therefore, the comparison of this month to March & June is more realistic.  I know why I trended below those two as I spoke about a few sentences ago, but my dividend income this month was awfully close to March’s income stream.  This is due to 6 months of purchases I had throughout that period, which gets backloaded into future months – enter September 2014.  I am expecting my December quarter end in dividend income to be somewhere between $650-$750.

Dividend Income Increases

This month had a few dividend increase announcements.  (1) As we described in our September re-cap and expected October dividend income increases, McDonalds (MCD) had a 5% increase to their shareholders, which will add more income to my portfolio going forward.  (2) Realty Income (O) had a slight increase of 0.17% increase to the dividend income to their shareholders as well.  They pay monthly and routinely throughout the year increase their dividend income, so the small bump along with other bumps equate to a much larger increase. (3) Lockheed Martin (LMT) had a nice increase of 13%!  This increase in dividend income was amazing, especially given that I own over 33 shares and they now pay $1.50 per quarter.  Thanks Lockheed! (4) Philip Morris (PM), the tobacco giant also increased their dividend income by 6.4% from $0.94 to $1 per quarter.  I appreciate the dividend increase, nothing better than receiving raises to your income for owning high quality companies!  When I calculated all increases and dividend income before & after, these raises added $38 to my annual dividend income goal.  These are just raises alone and doesn’t even included the $610 in dividend income being reinvested to own more shares, which ultimately… produces more dividend income.  Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Year-To-Date & Summary

My dividend income received now stands at $2,679.63, which is now reflected on the dividend income page.  When taking that over the 9 months, $297.74 per month!  I cannot believe it everyone.  I have on average almost an extra $300 rolling in from dividends alone.  Speechless.  That covers almost 1/3 of my living expenses for the month and I can taste a sense of accomplishment and freedom.  However, similar to how I described back in June’s post, I sadly have the split between retirement dividend income and portfolio/taxable dividend income.  From my retirement/Roth/Roth 401K accounts I totaled $219.12 for the month with the remaining $401.06 coming from my taxable account.  Year to date this is looking much better for my taxable account, as June I had an alarmingly high retirement dividend income figure.

I do like having a large projected year for my retirement account, because as I’ve stated in our set it and forget it article – if you maximize your results for 10 years with modest/conservative assumptions, you will be at $1M by the time you retire.  If I can continue to fuel this account, I will ultimately stop and shift those funds into different investments, such as my taxable account, business ventures for the Diplomats, rental properties potentially, etc..

This month was phenomenal, the market took a small slide and we as dividend income investors love that!  It’s time to see what capital to use to buy sound companies such as McDonalds, Aflac, Philip Morris and others that are going on sale.  I know we have a few on our September watch list that are looking a little bit better from a valuation standpoint.  Enough but one of the diplomats, how did you all perform for September?  Did you meet expectations?  Did things happen within your stocks that translated into something better or worse this month for dividend income?  Thoughts about where we are standing?  Thanks everyone, best of luck and hope you all had a prosperous September!  Talk soon.

-Lanny