August is over and for the most part, so is summer. Here in the Pacific Northwest, August saw a week long heat wave with 100°+ F temperatures. Once the heat wave broke, it wasn’t long before the rain came for a few nights in a row. As for the market, things looked well at first, but the third week of August saw a noticeable dip in the market. It has recovered a bit, but still not back to the highs of early August.

As for my dividend income for August, let’s do the numbers and find out:

ARR $14.00
AWP $44.00
BGY $33.80*
CIK $22.50
CLM $49.12*
DHY $27.13
EDF $15.00*
EHI $26.80*
EXG $82.95*
NCV $23.80
PFN $32.31
ZTR $24.00*
TOTAL $395.41

* Includes Return of Capital

<sigh> Another sub-$400 month. Not exactly something to get me excited.

In August I decided to change up my portfolio a little. First, I sold all 1000 shares of BGY at $5.18/share. Once the transaction settled, I put approximately 1/3 of the total towards needed cash. The next approximately 1/3 I put towards 200 shares of CLM at $8.25/share. The final 1/3 I put towards 375 shares of ARR at $4.80/share. This gave my average monthly income a needed $21 boost.

One bit of good news is that there were no dividend cuts, and starting in September USA will raise its quarterly dividend 6.67% from $0.15/share to $0.16/share. For my 300 shares, that’s an extra $3.00/quarter. It’s not much, but it’s a little closer to USA’s former 2021 dividend of $0.21.

Overall, it was an okay (at best) month for dividend income, but things should be a little better going forward with this month’s CLM and ARR buys.

Image Credit: jarmoluk (pixabay.com)