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Welcome back to my monthly dividend Investing review where I will analyze my dividend Income an Investments for August 2020.
Keeping track of my monthly dividend income is a great way to keep focused but it also acts as inspiration as I continue to see those dividend checks getting bigger.
Hope you enjoy it and feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions!
My Investing approach
I believe in the KISS or Keep it simple stupid approach. It is much easier to stay the course if you don’t over complicate matters. My Approach can be laid out in a couple of steps.
Invest Monthly
The long term aim is to save and invest at least 50% of my income. If I can live off 50% of my income than that means in theory I gain an extra year in retirement. Yes, I have ignored inflation but it’s a good starting point. Currently, I am saving/investing around 30% of my income. Myself and the European Dividend Growth Investor both discuss why saving rates matter in the video below
Invest in Quality
Investing in quality is key to your success. In this post I give an outline into 4 steps to screen companies. But this is just an initial screen and is not enough to buy shares in a company. Before I make a purchase, I like to get under the hood of a company and do some research on Management, Financial Strength, Dividend Strength and potential growth. I want to be as sure as I can that a company will be around in 10 years time. Check out this example of my review on Royal Dutch Shell.
Hold on Tight
I do not buy companies to sell. All of my purchases are intended as long term holds. I have made some mistakes. *cough cough Tanger* but as a rule, I do not like to sell companies that I own. remember the saying “Time in the market is better than Timing the Market”.
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dividendtalk
Dividend Investing
August was the first month in the last couple of months that I have dropped out of the 3 figure club. Although as you can see in the below image it was $90.79 which is pretty close. YoY from 2019, my dividend income has grown over 300% from $24.36 to $90.79.
A 300% raise every year would be the ideal situation, but I expect this
Dividend Raises
I had 8 Dividend Raises in total, CVS were unchanged while AT&T and Hasbro are new companies added to the freedom fund
$O,$ABBV,$AOS and $AMP all gave nice raises of at least 6% which is well above the current rate of inflation.
Dividend Chart
The Chart below shows the Dividends I received in 2019 in Red.
The Blue is what I have received so far this year. The projected income is $1,276.04 assuming that there are no dividend cuts and I add no more cash to my investments.
In Reality, I will be continuing to add €1250 which will bring in roughly €37 in forward income each month. Currently, I am expecting to earn just over $1400 in dividends this year.
August Purchases
August has been a busy month for me in terms of buying and selling. I added 4 shares of Microsoft this month. Usually the yield is below where I usually screen for companies but this is a company that I really like and have a rock solid balance sheet. I also placed an order for $BTI the same day but that got filled a couple of days before in July.
Between those two companies the average yield is 4% so I was quite happy it balances a high yield with a lower dividend growth rate with a Low yield and higher growth rate. I added to my position in $WBA, you can check out my review here. I also added to my position in reality Income. There is just something about monthly paying dividend stocks that feels so much better.
Last but not least, those who listen to our podcast dividend talk, will have heard us talk about Danone and recommend them. Well now you know I am not just hot air and will put my money where my mouth is 🙂
| 03/08/20 | Buy | MSFT | 3 | $213.46 |
| 04/08/20 | Buy | WBA | 14 | $41.02 |
| 13/08/20 | Buy | O | 14 | $61.88 |
| 17/08/20 | Buy | BN | 17 | $56.12 |
| 20/08/20 | Buy | MSFT | 1 | $209 |
| 31/08/20 | Buy | ABBV | 12 | $95.64 |
August Sales
You will be forgiven if this confuses you as you might remember that in the opening of this post I claim to Hold on Tight. However I have mentioned in the past that I have been doing some work on my portfolio and I had way to many companies. I want to whittle this down to 32 companies.
While I am still working to nail down my top 32 companies that I want to hold forever, I did sell some companies to reduce the holdings amount in my portfolio.
For the moment I have these companies in my list but I will write a post about my decisions when I have it finalized. Would love to hear your thoughts on it
Hope you enjoyed this review, If you did, please consider joining my community by signing up to my mailing list where I will keep you up to date with my investments and provide more analysis.
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I also Co-host a podcast called Dividend talk where I chat with European DGI about Dividend growth Investing. Feel free to listen to our latest episode below
Thanks for reading and happy Investing!
Now this is some SERIOUS progress EMF. That’s what I am talking about right there. It would be sick if you could keep up that 300%+ dividend growth rate. I would absolutely love it haha
Bert
[…] Engineer My Freedom – $90.79 – Here is another strong dividend growth rate! Engineer My Freedom’s dividend growth. The largest contriibutor to this dividend increase was…you guessed it….AT&T (T). It seems like 95% of the bloggers this month have received an AT&T payout. […]