Dear Readers,
If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you would have noticed that I am quite late with my monthly income report. Well, firstly apologies. A lot is happening on the home front. Closer to the long weekend, when I was planning to post this blog update, I had to rush a family member to the ER due to a medical emergency. While things are looking better now, we are still not completely out of the woods. Hopefully, the situation will improve from here on out. Fingers crossed.
Work is (thankfully) not as hectic, although that can/will change pretty quickly. But I used the downtime to do a fun project with my Raspberry Pi 3 device that was sitting in a corner collecting dust. It is summer time for the kids and with the ongoing heat wave around the country, kids are stuck at home watching TV, playing games and generally getting bored. This brought me back to my child hood when I would play Super Mario World/Bros on my old Nintendo console with my family during my summer break. This was the lightbulb moment for me. I explored if I could run a Nintendo emulator on my Raspberry Pi 3 and download an existing ROM for a game and run it via the emulator. A little bit of research work, some engineering and….
I still have to figure out a few gotchas with this setup but thanks to the folks at RetroPie, I can go back to being a kid again :). I can’t wait to show this setup to my kid and have him go nuts!
Okay, let’s get into the numbers for the month.
Dividend Income Received
| Sl. No. | Company / ETF (ticker) | Amount |
| 1 | Aflac (AFL) | $20.35 |
| 2 | Duke Energy (DUK) | $13.38 |
| 3 | Home Depot (HD) | $34.26 |
| 4 | Intel (INTC) | $4.40 |
| 5 | Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) | $73.95 |
| 6 | Lockheed Martin (LMT) | $51.77 |
| 7 | Microchip (MCHP) | $4.21 |
| 8 | 3M (MMM) | $55.70 |
| 9 | Microsoft (MSFT) | $37.70 |
| 10 | NextEra Energy (NEE) | $3.36 |
| 11 | Pepsi Co (PEP) | $14.46 |
| 12 | Snap-On Inc. (SNA) | $18.08 |
| 13 | Southern Company (SO) | $13.30 |
| 14 | Target (TGT) | $21.25 |
| 15 | T Rowe Price Group (TROW) | $105.14 |
| 16 | UnitedHealth Group (UNH) | $13.27 |
| 17 | Union Pacific Corp (UNP) | $28.60 |
| 18 | Visa (V) | $17.53 |
| 19 | Whirlpool (WHR) | $67.82 |
| 20 | Waste Management (WM) | $0.72 |
| 21 | Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM) | $2.89 |
| 22 | Schwab US Equity Dividend ETF (SCHD) | $64.35 |
| 23 | Realty Income Corp (O) | $33.67 |
| 24 | JP Morgan Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPI) | $10.35 |
| 25 | STAG Industrial (STAG) | $4.09 |
| Total | $714.60 |
So a total of 25 companies/ETFs contributed a total of $714.60 towards monthly income. This turns out to be a yet another record breaking month with the portfolio for the first time breaching the $700 mark. This also marks the first time where one of my positions in the portfolio contributed more than $100 (for this month, it was TROW). At the same time last year, the portfolio made a total of $463.56. The YoY progress continues to be significant with a large portion of the growth is due to my invested capital.
There are two new entries in this list: MCHP and UNP. Both these holdings were introduced in my portfolio earlier this year. MCHP is my bet in the microcontroller embedded control solutions market and has been a strong performer in this segment. UNP is a vastly under-discussed stock but it operates in the Class-1 railroad space which is of paramount importance to the US economy.
Dividend Increases
- UNH hiked their quarterly dividend by 13.9% to $1.88/share.
- O hiked their monthly dividend by 0.2% to 0.2555/share
- There is also news reports that state that JPM is planning to hike their quarterly dividend by 5% after performing quite well in the Fed stress tests.
Buys and Sells during this month
Lets cover the sells first. As discussed in my last post, I decided to completely sell out of INTC. I have already elaborated on my reasons for doing so in that post, so I will not repeat them here. I also completely sold out of CAT. I sold this for a profit. This was a difficult decision, especially because CAT also happened to hike their quarterly dividend by 8% immediately after my sell. But I am happy with my decision to take my profits and exit out of this position. Why? My research shows that CAT has genuinely struggled to grow their revenue organically over the last decade. And heading into potentially rocky times ahead, I did not have confidence that CAT would be able to weather the storm and provide appreciable dividend growth.
I also sold a major chunk of my 3M stock this month, again at a loss. This was a tough pill to swallow but I really cannot see how 3M can get out of its litigation troubles and lackluster growth while keeping this mountain of a dividend. And with the dividend not being safe, I am not seeing a good reason to keep my capital held up with this company.
Buys were fairly limited. I continued averaging down on TGT and made some more “staying-in-the-game” purchases on some of my core stocks. But there were not too many interesting bargains out there.
Summary
Another month in the books. This one has been a roller-coaster with plenty of moments to celebrate and plenty of moments to forget. However, the dividend portfolio continues to chug along breaking new records.
How did your month go? Let me know in the comments below.
Thank you so much for reading thus far and see you in the next post!
Cheers,
LWD
lifewithdividends.wordpress.com 