August is done, and for the most part, so is summer 2015. Overall, it has been a pretty good summer. Mrs. Dividend Quest and I made a few jaunts out of town, with the first major trip being my 30-year high school class reunion and the second big trip was spending a few days at camp doing stuff we’ve never done before. Thanks to my previous stock buy last month, I finally reached my 2015 goal of an average projected dividend income of $625 per month. Yeah! High-fives all round! With four months of the year remaining, I certainly have room to blow right past that goal and see just how far I can push it.
Now that August is in the books, let’s do the numbers:
BGY $ 49.00*
CLM $ 70.29*
CIK $ 22.00*
DHY $ 42.00
DMF $ 15.75
DSM $ 22.83
EHI $ 19.25
EXG $121.95
FGB $ 87.50
HHY $ 37.50
HTR $ 38.00
NCV $ 63.00
OIA $ 4.10
PFN $ 36.00
VFL $ 19.50
TOTAL $648.67
* Includes Return of Capital.
Yet again I’ve broke $600. It may be a bit premature, but I think sub-$600 months are behind me and a $700 month may just happen this year. I got my fingers crossed!
The recent Chinese stock market crash and resulting volatility of the world’s markets had an impact on my portfolio’s value, dropping it by about 8%. It has recovered a bit and is now down about 5%. Fortunately, until I sell anything, it’s just phantom loss right now. As long as the dividends keep rolling in like clockwork, I won’t worry too much about it.
Some changes are occurring or are just around the corner. RSO did a reverse 4:1 split starting this month, but that shouldn’t adversely affect the dividend income (for now anyway). For this quarter’s payouts, FGB and HQL will raise their dividends a little, so that will be a nice little improvement.
Aside from the markets’ mini-crash, August was largely an undramatic month, but it was a good solid month for dividend income and consistent growth of my portfolio with the additional stock buys.
Image Credit: jarmoluk (pixabay.com)
Contrats – August was a great month for dividends! I wish you continued success.
Thanks for visiting Dividend Driven. Keep up the good work yourself, and I wish you well in reaching your dividend income goals. It’s a long road to travel, but it’s worth it!
Nice income from a bunch of names that I’m not familiar with. At least your sources of passive income for the month is pretty diverse. What ever happened to the “traditional” dividend growth stocks? Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for visiting. I considered dividend growth stocks, but the problem I had with them was that their initial dividend yields were usually low, and even when they had a high growth rate, their growth seemed rather slow. For example, a 2.5% yield that grew 10% annually would take 5 years just to reach a yield of 4%. In my opinion, that’s just too slow. When I discovered high yield ETF/CEF stocks, I was hooked. My approach is certainly unorthodox (and more risky), but it seems to be working well for me. A couple of my stocks (HQL, FGB) have raised their dividends and I love it when they do. In the future, I may add some “traditional” dividend growth stocks to my portfolio for further diversification, and to benefit from some small dividend growth.