Wow! October was quite the wild ride, wasn’t it? The bear market came out of hibernation and certainly mauled a lot of investors’ portfolios. While many dividend investors are feeling pain looking at their portfolios’ value drop, I’m sure they’re also happy about the good buying opportunities now appearing. That’s the paradox of being a dividend investor, isn’t it? On one hand, we love seeing our portfolios’ value grow when the bull market is going strong, but on the other hand we yearn for a bear market to slash stock prices so we can buy stocks with better dividend yields. That’s an internal conflict that I’ve been wrestling with ever since I started this quest for passive income, and I don’t expect a resolution to it any time soon.

So how was October? The bear market and its volatility aside, let’s do the numbers and see what my dividend total was for last month:
AWP $ 50.00
AWP $ 55.00
BGY $ 33.80*
CHW $ 21.00*
CIK $ 22.50*
CLM $ 47.30
CODI $144.00
DHY $ 35.00
DMF $ 10.50
DSM $ 19.25
EAD $ 8.32
EDF $ 45.00*
EHI $ 24.40
EXG $114.00*
NCV $ 45.50
NRZ $125.00
OIA $ 4.10
PFN $ 36.00
PNNT $ 81.00
RA $ 69.85
VFL $ 15.00
ZTR $ 33.90
TOTAL $1040.42

* Includes Return of Capital

Yeah! October was my best month ever! At $1040.42, October is my second $1K month and largest dividend income month ever! Wooohoo! It has been said that history never repeats itself but it sure does rhyme, and that certainly applies to this month’s dividend income story. The first time I broke $1K it was because CLM paid twice in April, to make up for no dividend payout in March. This time around, the dividend payout laggard was AWP which failed to payout in September and made up for it by paying out twice in October.

That was the good news. The bad news is that October saw a couple dividend cuts. BGY cut its monthly dividend from $0.038 to $0.0338 (-11.05%) and OIA reduced its monthly dividend from $0.0344 to $0.0328 (-4.65%). Combined, this amounts to a $4.40 reduction in my average monthly dividend income. A small, but noticeable, nick.

One other bit of good news, although not applicable to October’s dividend income, is that starting this month, Wells Fargo Advantage Income Opportunities Fund (NYSE:EAD) will raise its monthly dividend from $0.052 to $0.061, a 17% increase (!). This unexpected dividend increase will certainly help mitigate the dividend cuts mentioned above. My portfolio doesn’t see dividend increases very often, so any dividend increase is always welcome.

October felt like something of a mixed bag. On the bright side, I had a $1K month and took advantage of the market’s volatility to buy more stocks and raise my dividend income. On the downside, the bear market knocked over $9K off my portfolio’s all-time high valuation, plus there were the minor dividend cuts. Overall, October was a good month, but just barely.

Image Credit: jarmoluk (pixabay.com)