Reaping Dividends: July 2017 report
July 26, 2017
My brokerage was TradeKing which was acquired by Ally this year. I’ve been very happy with TradeKing’s low fees and service so I’m hoping that Ally does that and better. There’s one thing I already like the look of. For investors with at least a $100,000 daily balance or execute at least 30 trades per quarter, you can be part of Ally Invest SELECT.
The one tiny perk that I care about is lower fees: $3.95 per equity trade and $0.50 per options contract.
Other perks that I don’t personally care about right now:
Priority routing to our Ally Invest reps. No additional cost when you place a phone trade. We’ll waive the first six months’ advisory fees for any new Ally Invest Advisors account you open, including custodial and joint accounts or IRAs. No fees on requests for 1099s, paper statements, or trade confirmations. We’ll refund transfer fees on deposits of $5,000 or more to your Ally Invest Securities account.
I’d trade a few of those benefits for free trades, really.
Observations this quarter
- Dividends income this past quarter (April through June): $941.20. If nothing changes, we’ll see about $2600 in dividend income this year.
- I love COST and Costco loves me! For a second year in a row, they’ve paid out a special dividend at $7 per share. Delicious dividends, that can go on to buy more dividend bearing stocks.
- For two days, I had a triple dividend from KO but it turns out that was just a dirty trick.
- I was surprised to realize that I’ve been buying more stocks in the “Cyclical Consumer Goods & Services” sector than anything else. Probably not a good idea to be concentrated in retail if I’m worried about a recession.
Year to Date Dividends: $1,365.20, Fees: $9.90, Net: $1,355.30
Income Replacement
For perspective, I like to think of the dividends investing project in terms of how much of our income it can replace, or how much of our fixed expenses it can cover.
At a whopping $1355.30, this year’s dividends can pay 39% of one new mortgage payment. Our old mortgage payment would have been paid in full!
Since I started 6 years ago, I’ve made a grand total of $2,810.00.
I like the look of the trajectory of your dividends graph. Do you reinvest your dividends automatically? Or take the payout and manually reinvest yourself?
I take the dividends and manually reinvest right now.
Awesome work! I’m really liking how steep that curve of dividend growth is this year. It looks like your income is on a rocket ship towards FIRE. keep it up!
Thanks! It’s not much money right now but I hope this keeps up.