Month: October 2020

Categories
Dividend Analysis

Huge Surprise Dividend Increase!

This morning when I woke up, I didn’t think there would be any more surprises this October. I check my phone to see where the market is pre-market and I remembered that there were some earnings reports being released today. Come to find out that one of the stocks that I’ve been holding onto has increased their dividend by over 10%! They had a very good quarter based on their earnings report and they were able to raise the dividend because of it.

$ABBV is the company that I’m so fond of as of this moment. They already had a great yield of over 5.5% and now with this dividend increase from $1.18 to $1.30, their yield is almost reaching 6.5%! Their payout ratio is still between 40-60% which means their growing dividend is safe in my opinion.

They were able to raise their dividend because of their other financial metrics highlighted in the earnings report. Their revenue has increase 52.1% from last year which was higher than expected. Their earnings per share (EPS) was $0.06 higher than expected as well. With $ABBV being a health care company that deals with pharmaceuticals, it’s no wonder why they’ve done so well during the pandemic.

With the current political landscape, they have no reason to be doing badly for the upcoming years. Although, if we had a candidate who was fighting for a universal healthcare system, drug prices would be lowered and companies like $ABBV would suffer from it. But I think we’re a long ways away from that and until that day comes, my portfolio will just keeping reaping the rewards that they give me.

I just wanted to share my thoughts about this morning and the surprise I found for my portfolio! As always, thank you so much for reading the blog and I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus

Categories
Portfolio Updates

October Update to the Portfolio

Hey everyone, it’s that time of the month when I’ve made my last few acquisitions and additions to the portfolio. Now it’s time for me to summarize everything that I’ve done in this last month of October. Before you take a look at what I’ve done, just understand that this type of purchasing power is only done with safety nets in place. My wife and I have enough emergency savings to last us 10 months without either of us working so if you don’t have an emergency savings, I don’t recommend doing this much investing. 

I did not include my Roth IRA because it’s in mutual funds and I have a financial guy that takes care of that. With that being said, here is a look at the moves I’ve made in the market over this past month of October.

TickerSharesAverage CostTotals
ABBV2$86.33$172.66
CSCO3$39.77$119.31
CWEN5$29.62$148.10
DUK3$92.67$278.01
IRT12$11.60$139.20
KO6$50.14$300.84
LYB2$69.01$138.02
MAIN4$30.49$121.96
MO7$39.19$274.33
O2$61.02$122.04
PFE7$36.72$257.04
SO4$58.55$234.20
T6$27.55$165.30
VZ2$57.84$115.68
WTRG6$41.96$251.76

These are the new additional holdings to the account this month 

TickerSharesAverage CostTotals
AFL14$33.94$475.16
IRM20$26.29$525.80
STX10$51.61$516.10

You might be looking at this and realizing that this is more than what I said I would be investing every month. That’s because last month, we had way more in our savings than we needed so I decided to invest it into our dividend account. 

As you can see, I don’t try to buy the dips if I can help it. I’m a long term investor. I buy shares based on when the Ex-Dividend dates are and the goal is to grow my portfolio. If I waited for the perfect opportunity to get in the market, I would always be on the sidelines without growing my account.

The strategy I took up this month was trying to get every holding that I have closer to $500. I won’t be doing this in the future, but I just set that little goal for our account and now that I’ve reached it, I’m going to start purchasing additional shares based on when their Ex-Dividend date is. Since I’m not selling my holdings, I’m just going to keep buying and hold. 

For November, I’m going to be looking at the following companies with their Ex-Dividends coming up this month:

PFE – 11/5

WTRG – 11/12

DUK – 11/12

SO – 11/13

AFL – 11/17

MAIN – 11/24

KO – 11/30

By the end of the year, I’m trying to hit a number of different milestones for the account.

  1. Reach Annual Projected Dividend Income of $500. I’m at $474 right now!
  2. Reach a $10,000 account size. I’m at $8,750 as of the writing of this article!
  3. Hitting 20 different holdings in my account. I’m currently at 19 and need just 1 more to hit it!

I hope this information helped you out with understanding my strategy as a long term dividend growth investor and hopefully it spurs some motivation for you and your account! Thank you so much for reading along and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s in store for November. I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus 

Categories
Portfolio Updates

Dividend Income: October 2020

Hey everyone, the time has come for my first monthly update concerning my dividend income for the month of October. Before you pick apart my income, just realize that I started dividend investing 3 months ago and therefore still have a pretty small account size and my dividend income won’t be sexy by any means. What this month shows is that although I’m relatively new to this community, I already am growing my account at a rapid rate!

Here are the dividends I received in October 2020:

KO$1.23
DUK$0.97
MO$3.44
BEN$5.13
MAIN$2.47
O$1.87
CSCO$3.24
IRT$3.00
Total$21.35

This comes out to a grand total of $21.35! Yes, I know it’s not a lot compared to a lot of other blogs that are showcasing 4 or even 5 figures of dividends every month, but it’s a starting point that’s just going to keep growing. Next month, I have a lot of exciting companies that are going to be paying me dividends as well. 

In November, I’m looking forward to receiving dividends from:

AT&T – $T

Verizon Communications – $VZ 

Realty Income – $O

Abbvie Inc. – $ABBV

Main Street Capital – $MAIN

As always, I’ll be keeping you updated on the status of my portfolio and the investments I’ll be making in the future. If you’re just starting your dividend investing journey as well, just know that it’s very easy to start and that it’s YOUR journey. Go at your own pace and don’t compare yourself too harshly with other people’s portfolios. 

On that note, I’ll wrap it up and thank you so much for reading the blog and I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus

Categories
Dividend Analysis

Markets are Slipping: Is It Time to Panic?

Many new investors out there aren’t sure how to handle the recent drop in the markets. Since October 12, the DOW has been down 6.27% as of the writing of this post. The S&P 500 has been down 5.69% over the same time span. If you’re new to investing and haven’t experienced a drop yet, you might be panicking because your small account has constantly been losing money over the past 2 weeks.

I’m here to tell you to not panic!

Think of the markets as a roller coaster. There will be ups and downs, twists and turns. It’s up to you to stay disciplined and to not panic. If you consider the market as a literal market, you want to buy items that are on sale right? That’s the way I think about dips in the market. All of my favorite items are on sale! It’s not like one or two of my investments are down because they’re bad investments, the entire market is down so I have nothing to worry about. If anything, I think of it as an opportunity.

I’m 27 and still have decades of investing to do before I officially retire. So averaging down for my portfolio is great for me. For those who are close to retirement, this might not be the case. But for most of you new investors out there, this is an opportunity. The market as a whole is consistently upward trending.

If you take a look at the chart above, you’ll see that throughout the span of 90 years, there is an upward trend. The Great Recession was an awful event that devastated millions of families, but if you look at the market, the economy recovered and skyrocketed even higher than it was before.

If you stayed in the market and bought at the low in 2009, for the past 12 years, your wealth would have grown by 338%! I’m not saying that this is what is currently happening, I mean it might because of the pandemic, but it might not.

The moral of the story is that you don’t want to get off the roller coaster while it’s going because that’s when you get hurt. Investing in the market regardless of if it’s down or not is something that seasoned investors do. While you can’t time the market, you can utilize dollar cost averaging at any time.

I hope after reading the post, you settle down and make a decision not out of panic, but out of careful consideration. You will experience downturns in the market and if you’ve been in it for any considerable length of time, you’ll definitely feel market slides. Although it might be tough to stay in and not panic, getting out at the bottom is the worst thing you can do for your finances.

I’ll end on that note for this post and I hope you enjoyed reading about the stock market dips that we are currently experiencing. Thank you so much for reading and I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus

Categories
Dividend Analysis

Why I’m Quacking for Aflac

As a dividend investor, I’m constantly looking for new opportunities and dividends to invest in. This time, my digging has brought me to a company that’s been around for over half a century. It’s an insurance company that has a solid and consistent track record and after being on my radar for some time now, I’ve finally decided to take a position in it.

In my next batch of purchases, I will be investing in the most annoying duck that has ever been on commercials… Aflac.

Like I said before, this company deals with insurance and right now, people need insurance more than ever. With the current political landscape, our healthcare system isn’t going to be upended anytime soon contrary to what some news outlets might think. But taking the politics out of the equation, let’s look at the financials to see what makes Aflac such an attractive buy as a Dividend Aristocrat.

FINANCIALS

With a current share price of $36.58, Aflac is an easy investment to grab shares in. It currently offers a strong yield of 3.05% and it gives investors a quarterly dividend of $0.28 per share. What I really enjoy with this investment is the fact that it’s a Dividend Aristocrat. It has been consistent in growing it’s dividend for the past 38 years! With a 10 year growth rate of 6.79% Aflac really values the dividends it pays out to investors and it’s growth is very important to them.

What is even more stunning is how safe the dividend is. It’s current Payout Ratio is an incredible 23.88% While normally, I value companies that are within the 40-60% range, this company has shown that it is very consistent in the dividend growth and to a dividend investor like myself, this is a perfect opportunity to get into.

To top it all off, it’s current Price to Earnings Ratio is 9.46! This is just further proof that this dividend is so safe, that they have plenty of room to grow it more in the future and every increase in the dividend for an investor like me is essentially just a raise in the income I receive every quarter.

Conclusion

So there you have it. A Dividend Aristocrat such as Aflac has been on my radar ever since I started this journey 3 months ago. After all the research that I’ve done myself along with other blogs that I’ve read on the company, I feel like Aflac is going to be a terrific addition for my personal portfolio. I haven’t purchased shares yet, but will be doing so at the end of the month and I will be updating my portfolio when I do.

Thank you so much for reading my take on Aflac. I hope you found it informative so you can have a starting point if you want to research this company. I’m ending this post on that note and I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus

Categories
Frugal Tips

How to Save Money on Coffee

Starbucks, Dutch Bros, Dunkin Donuts.

What do you consider the category that these companies fall into? Coffee? Breakfast places? Not me, I call these the Money Traps. 

Every day, people value breakfast and their coffee. Breakfast is a whole other issue that I’ll tackle in the future, but for now let’s just focus on coffee. For most college students, coffee is the daily vitamin that you take in order to get through your projects and exams. It even gets to the point, (and this has happened to me) when you have withdrawals if you don’t have your daily dose. Because of this addiction that most people face, companies that specialize in making coffee drinks, are multi-billion dollar money printing machines. The cost to make a cup of coffee is incredibly low and they get away with charging incredibly high prices for their customers.

In 2019, Starbucks generated $21.4 Billion in sales… this comes out to $65.20 per man, woman, and child, both young and old. Spending money on coffee is by far, the most ridiculous commodity you can spend your money on. It doesn’t appreciate in value and once you sip down the last drop, your body just gets rid of it soon after anyway. You are essentially peeing out money that you didn’t have to.

You can easily make your own coffee at home for around $0.17 per cup. The cheapest coffee at Starbucks is a small sized black coffee for $1.96. That’s 11 times more expensive than what you can just make at home! My wife and I go to Costco and get 2 huge containers of ground coffee for $13. Even with having coffee every day, our coffee stash lasts us over 4 months… on just $13!

Just think about what all those savings could do for your retirement or investing portfolios. If you saved that $1.79 every day and instead put it into an S&P tracked ETF that would grow just 7%, after 30 years you would have just over $70,000! Compound interest is a serious matter that everyone should be taking advantage of. 

Once you become more frugal with these small changes, you’ll quickly be able to see that choosing the cheaper option doesn’t mean that you’ll sacrifice on the quality you’ll be getting. It just means that you have more money in your pocket that can work for you! And that is what all these posts in this section are about. I want to teach everyone who reads my blog that becoming more frugal doesn’t mean that you suffer, it just means that your wallet won’t suffer. In fact, it’ll make your money work just that much harder!

I think that’s a solid tip for today, I hope you learned something and that you stop buying coffee altogether in the future! Not for my sake, but for your sake. Thank you so much for following along and I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus

Categories
Portfolio Updates

Our Dividend Portfolio

Many people have different investment methods and strategies. There’s no one size fits all! The strategy that works for us (and when I say “us” I mean me since my wife trusts me to take care of finances) is focusing on high quality dividend growth stocks. For the most part, I look at companies that have been steadily increasing their dividends for years because it shows stability and gives me confidence that the companies have enough cash to pay out their dividends. I have 17 holdings at the moment and am always looking to increase the number of holdings as well as the amount in each company. My portfolio is only 3 months old, and this is just what I have so far. 

These are the companies that I’m currently invested in:

$ABBV – Abbvie Inc.

$BEN – Franklin Resources Inc.

$CSCO – Cisco Systems Inc.

$CWEN – Clearway Energy Inc.

$DUK – Duke Energy Corporation

$IRT – Independence Realty Trust Inc.

$KO – Coca-Cola Company

$LYB – Lyondell Based Industries

$MAIN – Main Street Capital Corporation

$MO – Altria Group

$O – Realty Income Corporation

$PFE – Pfizer Inc.

$SO – Southern Company

$STX – Seagate Technology PLC

$T – AT&T Inc.

$VZ -Verizon Communications Inc.

$WTRG – Essential Utilities Inc.

My sector breakdown is:

Healthcare – 12.2%

Information Technology – 12.0%

Utilities – 22.2%

Real Estate – 12.7%

Consumer Staples – 12.4%

Materials – 4.7%

Financials – 11.3%

Communication Services – 12.4%

With my current breakdown, my highest value sector is Utilities and that’s because I’ve found that the Utilities dividends tend to be very safe and consistent even though they have lower yields, which is fine with me. My Materials sector isn’t too high because I just have one company that deals in Materials. This is because I just haven’t found any Materials companies that have looked attractive to me yet. Again, I have criteria that needs to be met before I invest in a company. 

At the moment, I have roughly $500 in each company and I contribute $1,000 every month to the portfolio. My strict rule is that I DO NOT SELL! I buy shares in these companies when there is either a dip, or an ex-dividend date coming up so I can get additional dividends. I’m currently projected to receive $409 every year in dividends from the $8,200 portfolio I currently have which means my yield is just under 5%. I know for many of the dividend investors out there, this yield might be on the higher side, but I’m looking to get into more high quality dividend stocks in the future which have lower yields, but more stability. 

Again, this is just a basic level summary of my portfolio and in upcoming posts, I’ll speak on each of these and highlight why I am invested in each of them. I don’t just randomly pick companies, there is a method to the madness, I swear!

The goal for my portfolio is to be able to get enough dividends coming in every year to be able to cover the expenses that my wife and I currently have like our mortgage, utilities, and food costs. After doing the math, we would need $26,400 in yearly dividends in order to reach this goal and although I’m new to the journey, I’m excited to share the path we are taking with everyone who reads this blog. I’ll be learning a lot along the way and I look forward to sharing what I learn with all of you!

I’m going to end the post there so I hope you enjoy reading about my portfolio and I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus

Categories
Dividend Analysis

My Dividend Investing Strategy

The great Warren Buffet has said, “If you like spending six to eight hours per week working on investments, do it. If you don’t, then dollar-cost average into index funds.”

This is exactly the situation I find myself in week after week. I’m a complete nerd when it comes to trying to find the right dividend stocks to fuel my portfolio because I view it as a type of wealth puzzle to solve. Meanwhile, my wife couldn’t care less about it, but she trusts me with paying taxes, mortgage, and essentially everything that has to do with money for us. The strategy that I’ll explain to you isn’t one that’s revolutionary or ground-breaking. It’s one that works for us and one that we feel safe in investing in. So without further ado, here it is…

For our retirement accounts, we are invested in well diversified mutual funds that will grow over time since they’re actively managed. For our taxable investment account, I have us in 17 holdings as of the writing of this post. My holdings are all dividend stocks that I can rely on every month or quarter to grow and to be reinvested. I invest $1,000 per month into our portfolio and I buy stocks whenever I find a great value to take advantage of.

That’s all there is to it. I don’t invest in companies that don’t pay a dividend. Which means to all you Tesla bulls out there, I’m not interested. The reason for this is to have our money work for us without having to worry about the overall picture of the stock market. I want to invest in companies that will pay me back just for investing with them because it’s the easiest source of passive income, you literally do nothing but hold your investments and you’ll get income from it.

Ultimately, years down the road, our goal is to be able to retire much earlier than 60 and live off the dividends our portfolio pays us every month or quarter while still growing our account. That is achieving FIRE for us.

For those of you who are new to the blog and new to dividend investing, I’ll give you an example. Let’s take Pfizer which is ticker symbol $PFE. As of the writing of this post, it is trading at $37.79. It has a quarterly dividend payment of $0.38 per share. This means that for every share that you own of $PFE, the company will pay you $0.38 since you are a shareholder in their company. If you own 10 shares, this means every quarter Pfizer will pay you $3.80. This may not seem like a lot, but you can reinvest that money back into $PFE and buy fractional shares with it so then it can compound the next time they pay out a dividend and so on, and so on.

I want to take advantage of the extreme compounding that dividend investing has to offer so my portfolio can grow at a higher rate. There are many different metrics to look at when it comes to finding the right dividend companies to invest in. Numbers like the P/E Ratio, Dividend Yield, Payout Ratio, and Free Cash Flow are very important to determining which companies to invest in and I will be going into depth on each of those in the future.

If you want an investment strategy to just set it and forget it, I refer you back to the Warren Buffet article back at the top of the post. There is nothing wrong with investing in index funds. They are very safe and are fairly consistent with slow but steady growth over long periods of time. There are plenty of people around the world who have done very well just sticking to safe index funds. But I thoroughly enjoy investing and love to actively do research on dividend companies. And hey, it’s a better hobby than collecting expensive cars or buying a bunch of useless crap I don’t need!

With this section of the blog, I’m going to update my portfolio and let you know which stocks I have chosen to invest in when I buy more. I’ll walk you through my thought process to help educate you on what I look for. I’ll also be sharing my progress with the portfolio and share my plans for the future as well as celebrating important milestones.

I’ll wrap this post up there, so with that being said, I really appreciate you following along with the blog and I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus

Categories
About Us

AIM for your FIRE Introduction

Hi everyone, welcome to AIM for your FIRE! My name is Marcus and it’s about time that I give this blog thing a shot and make this essentially a journal for my wife and I and our journey towards Financial Independence. I just want to give a quick background behind my wife and I and where we are currently in our financial journey. I’m not doing this to brag or to boast, I’m doing it so if you’re reading this, you can understand how a very average couple can build wealth and to prove to everyone that you don’t need a six figure income to achieve early retirement. 

I am 27 and my wife is 25. We both graduated from Boise State University in 2017, I obtained my B.B.A. in Marketing and my wife got her B.S. in Criminal Justice. We live in Boise, Idaho and we recently just bought our first house in March. The big thing that we have going for us is that through all that we have been through already, we don’t have any outstanding debt… except for our mortgage of course. Our combined income is nothing spectacular at $81,000. We are very frugal and love our lifestyle! We like to refer to ourselves as AIMs (Average Income Millennials)

We have a few different investment accounts that we currently contribute to every month. I am maxing out my Roth IRA and have been doing this since I opened my account two years ago. My wife just got her Roth IRA set up as well and she is currently maxing out her’s as well. We also have a separate investment account that focuses on dividend growth investments that we contribute to every month so we can grow it to an amount that will help us retire before we get to our 60s. 

Our big goal that we’re always working towards is achieving FIRE. Many of you already know what financial independence is, but for those of you who don’t, I’ll tell you what this phrase means. 

FIRE, Financial Independence Retiring Early, is a phrase that has come up more and more over the past two decades. It essentially means that you have the freedom to live off your assets/investments and that you don’t have to work to make ends meet in order to cover your expenses. This is a goal that many strive to achieve because no one wants to work until they’re in their 60s unless they really enjoy what they do for work. It’s very attractive to many people in the Millennial generation because they want that freedom and to not be tied to work their entire lives. 

Although a lot of my time is tied up in my work and my hobbies like playing pickleball and researching dividend stocks to find my next income stream, I really want to start this blog to document our financial journey and to help anyone else who is looking for additional information on where to start with their finances as well.

In this blog, I’ll be talking mostly about how to achieve FIRE and specifically how to do it with just an average income. It is absolutely doable, all you need is a plan and stick to it. There are going to be many tips and tricks that I will dive deep on to help everyone who follows the blog. I’ll also go over certain dividend stocks and explain what I look for when I invest as well as what the key metrics are to understand which companies are better than others in this specific style of dividend investing. 

I’m looking to post at least 3 times per week especially just starting out having never blogged before. Once I get a schedule going, I’ll most likely be posting every day, but I want to work up to that amount over time. 

I just want to close out this first post by giving a disclaimer. I am not a licensed financial professional. You should do your own research and investing on your own terms. This blog is to document my thought process on investing and to give helpful hints and information to help you make a better financial decision on your own or seek out a professional for yourself. Past performances of all the stocks that I’ll be discussing are not guarantees of future results. 

So now that we have that stupid jargon to help cover my own ass so no one sues me for anything, I finally just want to say how excited I am to get started on this new project and to share my knowledge with all of you! Once I get everything started and going more smoothly, I’ll set up something so we can build this community and have a dedicated home so I can bring everyone more content more often. 

If you’ve gotten this far in the blog, I really appreciate you following along and admire your dedication to reading. 

Thank you so much for following along and I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus

Categories
Frugal Tips

Frugal Beginnings

Everyone is brought up a certain way right? Some have parents that are very wealthy and can afford luxurious vacations or can buy you a car when you turn 16. While some struggle to make ends meet and might work multiple jobs to keep their head above water for their family. My personal situation was a little in the middle but more towards the former situation.

My parents had and still have stable income in their jobs. My mom has worked in health care her entire life and my dad has been a teacher for over 20 years. My parents valued education for my brother and I and they put us in private schools from K-12. It was fairly expensive for them to do it, but if it was something they were head strong on, it was education. Because they spent more on education, we had to share vehicles when I was able to drive and we would go on many road trip vacations, but we would never go out of the country or anything. Looking back on their decision, I can strongly state that I would not have done what they did for my brother and I. There is plenty of amazing public education that you absolutely don’t need to go to a private school for it.

Because they paid for our education over so many years, it set them back financially. If they didn’t put us into private education, they definitely would’ve had enough income to pay off their mortgage early and to invest more so they could retire earlier. Being brought up this way, I knew that in order to be on the right track financially, I would have to be frugal and not make the same mistakes my parents made.

So where does that leave me now? Well, my wife and I both have older cars with no thought on upgrading unless we have to. My car is 20 years old and my wife’s is 13 years old. Our mortgage is just 22% of our take home pay. Our overall expenses every month is around $2200. This means that we are spending only 40% of our income while saving 60% every single month.

Why do I bring this up, if not to boast? Because I care about what people are spending their money on. I care about people making smarter financial decisions. Setting an example for other people earning an average income is something that I want to do on this blog to show others that anyone can make the right life decisions to be in a similar situation that my wife and I are in.

In this section on the blog, I will be going through some of the things my wife and I do on a daily basis with our habits to prevent unnecessary spending. There are a lot of tips and pointers to help the average person save even just a little bit of money every day and I want to be able to bring those to light for you!

Your expenses and being frugal is the #1 component to achieving FIRE. I hope this section can help you build on that frugal mindset!

Thank you so much for reading and I’ll catch you on the next one!

Marcus