Seeking the Dividends

Hello everyone, I figured I'd take some time right now to go through some recent purchases for my dividend growth portfolio, to help me along my journey to financial freedom. But first a funny / not funny really short story. So when I was hired at my current job, I was fortunate in that I was given a pension. Unfortunately, direct contributions into that pension stopped recently. The good news, however, is that it continues to compound every year. So every January, I check the balance to see what the new value of it is. Well, part of this process is that the pension company wants you to select certain retirement dates as input for them to calculate the pension value when I stop working. Of course, it calculates this value at the traditional retirement age of 65, but then I also chose a custom early retirement date to see when my benefit would be when I stop working. For kicks, I came up with the year of 2025. I adjusted it to the end of December of 2025, which did not ...

Over the past year, in the organization of my finances, I was able to get a better handle on things, and come up with my own system for saving and allocating money for investing. Of course I don't profess it to be a perfect system, but it works currently (and I reserve the right to change it as conditions change!). I also don't expect it to be the 100% best system for those reading this, but hopefully one can find something useful in here that may help them with their saving process.  As time goes on, if I can make a tweak that can work better for me, it is definitely on the table, and why not improve when I can? Then again, you may hate every part of the system, and wish you had never visited this post. Oh well, now you'll know what not to do!  Though this is not a conventional budget where every dollar has a "home", I have set it up to where I am adding to my savings every week, and I use a spreadsheet to guide me. Some may choose a monthly process, w...

Hello everyone, It's that time again, time for reporting on my dividends for December of 2016, my exercise of accountability en route to reaching my goal of financial freedom. See the details below: Taxable Accounts Intel (INTC): $2.86 Cummins (CMI): $8.20 Emerson (EMR): $4.80 Target (TGT): $18.00 Compass Minerals (CMP): $6.26 Flower Foods (FLO): $18.72 Prospect Capital (PSEC): $19.60 Qualcomm (QCOM): $26.27 Vanguard High Dividend Yield ETF (VYM): $8.70 Vanguard REIT Index ETF (VNQ): $10.28 Taxable Account Total: $123.69 Roth IRA Account  Vanguard High Dividend Yield ETF (VYM): $24.01 Vanguard Growth ETF (VUG):$2.11 iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF (IJR): $3.80 iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV): $14.42 Roth IRA Account Total: $44.34 Overall Total Dividend Income for December 2016: $168.03 Forward 12-month Projected Dividend Income: $1,432.33 My Thoughts I have come to enjoy reviewing my progress for the months of March, June, September, and Decem...