Hello Everyone! This will be a traditional/monthly post where I explain my investment activities (purchases, sales) and goal updates. This should always be an exciting time, as it will help not only me & Bert, but hopefully YOU – the reader stay on track with your goals as well. Let’s get down to business and to breakdown the transparency to my portfolio & goals!
Tag Archives: Investing
Expected June Dividend Increases
As dividend followers, we love companies that raise their dividend on an annual basis. Lanny and I often find ourselves having side bets about how much a company will raise their dividend to see which one of us will get closer. Of course it is all fun and games, but it emphasizes the importance of investing in a company that will continue to grow their dividend as a flat dividend or a dividend increase less than inflation will decrease your future purchasing power. Using the Wikipedia definition of a Dividend Aristocrat (25 years of dividend increases), we projected which aristocrat will declare a dividend increase in June. Remember, we cannot guarantee that the dividend will be increased in this month, but we wanted to use the timing of historical dividend increases to project which aristocrats will declare an increase in the upcoming month.
Bad news, after accumulating the list we realized Aristocrats do not typically raise their dividend in June. We predict only the following companies will announce an increase next month:
The Target increase should be the most interesting of the three in lieu of the recent pullback in the stock price. I am looking forward to see what action they take. Hopefully all three of the companies will continue their historical trend and increase their dividend.
~Bert
See which companies increased their dividend in May
Bert’s Monthly Dividend Summary
What a beautiful Memorial Day here in the Buckeye State. It is a perfect day to honor our veterans, spend time with family, grill, and most importantly, review the dividends you have received during the month! Earlier in the day Lanny wrote about his monthly dividend income, so now it is my turn to assess my portfolio’s performance for the month of May.
May Dividend Increases!
All – this post will breakdown the dividend increase announcements from the month of May that we hold in our portfolios. This is a great way to see if/when our individual stocks decide to give “more” earnings back to their shareholders – “us”! Some months we may have a post, others we may not – it all depends if our companies that we own decide to increase. We each will go through our portfolios and review any dividend increase announcement. This is one of the trickling effects/ways to increase your portfolio, reinvest those dividends to increase your annual income! And the cycle continues…
Dividend Increase Announcements – May
Latest Stock Purchase 5/21/14
This market is very difficult to find a good value/purchase. The average P/E within the S&P is hovering around 19 (give or take 20 basis points), and the shiller P/E around showing higher, the value buys are there but are becoming very small glimmers in the rough. I updated my goals page and realized, it’s time to make a move towards that 4% overall yield and a nice little boost to my projected annual income. Continue reading
Lanny’s Fixed Monthly Expenses
Hey everyone – we are heading into summer and heading into where individuals usually spend time vacationing, experiencing more “free time” and thus are usually spending a little more than usual. Which provides a good segway into talking about fixed/typical monthly expenditures that I pay for and that most of us do pay for on a monthly basis. I am here to talk about Transportation costs & Rent/Mortgage. I am going to break it down for us to show much in investments we will need to have in order to cover these large monthly expenses in our lives and also to find ways to reduce this, as that will lead us to where we all want to be – Financially free. I will leave other expenses out of this discussion, for now… that is.
Lanny’s Goals
Life would not be worth living if we did not stretch and push ourselves to the upper most limit possible. In order to do that, however, you need to set Goals. Now you’ll learn to find out – I’m pretty crazy/intense when it comes to goal setting and always push it to the brink of insanity, as we have described at our goals page. I know Bert could attest that I not only make myself go the extra mile but I try to make everyone go that extra mile with me – aka Bert – step those goals up! Joking, he actually did a great job setting/updating his goal of projected 2015 dividend income from $1.5K to $1.75K, awesome.
Here are my goals and how I will get there for the year ending 2014: Continue reading