The Dividend Family Guy

With the kids back to school and my younger kids not wanting to stay in their beds at night it has been difficult to write.  Getting up earlier means getting to bed earlier (if I want to stay healthy.)  With the current situation I am down to about 1/2 hour of free time just to catch up with my wife and relax a little.  Hopefully everyone will get back into a rhythm and I will have more time to dedicate to one of my favorite activities, investing.  For my July ranking there was a large number of insurance companies in the top 25.  Horace Mann Educators Corp. was one I had not heard of and ranked pretty high on the DFG scale.  Let's take a closer look as to why. The website has it has the Forbes 2014 America's MOST TRUSTWORTHY Companies 2 years in a row.  It was founded by teachers for teachers.  The name comes from the father of American public education system, Horace Mann.  It provides different type of insurance to educators and educational institutions (think school

One picture is where I want to be in life. The other picture is where I am at (literally). I was recently reminded this past weekend while where on a trip for my wife's birthday.  That reminder was the vision of spending more time with my family, traveling and doing things I enjoy (love nature.)  You see my work building (the next picture) is right next door to a dump.  It is a huge mountain of construction debris so while unpleasant to look at, it luckily doesn't smell in the summer.   What it does remind me of is my goal to not have to sit in a concrete building every day away from sunlight in a thing called a cubicle earning money for other people.  If I remain committed to spending less and saving more I will end up at the first picture.  Take a simple example on the power a dividend champ could do (calculations borrowed from Dividend Life .)  If I just plunk down $1000 in a company that pays a 3% yield and grows it by 10% a year or even better a 2% yi

T.J. Maxx is probably one of my favorite frugal stores to shop at.  I recently added 2 dress shirts to my collection that now is at 24 shirts.  These bargain shirts I purchase are always on the clearance rack and have always cost $10 or less.  Some of my favorites are more than a decade old and are still going strong.  If a button pops off I just sew it back on and keep it going.  My wife also gets kids clothes are other apparel off of their clearance racks ever season to keep the kids clothed.  She was also looking at purses and mentioned several high end purses for just a little over $100.  Wow compared with normal retail of $300+ that is truly a bargain.  I have heard other bloggers talk about it so finally decided to take a look at it. The TJX Companies, INC is an off price retailer of apparel and home good (think towels and small - medium size décor.)    They operate my favorite store, T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and the HomeGoods stores in the US and other stores in Canada and E

The Buy On August 5th I bought 12 shares of ConocoPhillips at $80 or an initial yield of 3.65%.  After my review of COP and looking at my alternatives I decided this was a good buy for the price.  This purchase will increase my annual revenue by a good $35 dollars.  This brings my number of positions up to lucky number 13 in my taxable account.  While I did not have enough cash from July I do have some cash saved from earlier in the year to use for the next couple of months.  When that runs out hopefully I will have my budget in better shape and have saved more. COP ConocoPhillips is a major international company in the energy field.  Their diversification in the many areas of energy production and transportation play well nicely with the energy companies I already hold.  This I my first energy conglomerate while the others I hold are more specialized.  Dividend Life did a compare on the stability of the dividend vs. XOM.  XOM won out so maybe that will be my next purchase.

Updated Budget It has been a few to many days since my last post.  I have been spending several evenings working out a better budget because my previous one had some flaws in it.  Listening to readers I think I have come up with a better one (fixed vs. variable).  This fixed budget assumes I will get at least 2 paychecks a month.  These two paychecks should be able to cover all of my expenses.  Anything else is a bonus which would go to savings for investing, vacation or to cover unexpected expenses like I incurred this month. For each month there are certain things that are fixed so those remain.  One of the fixed items that sprang into life this month are braces for my son.  He is getting older and the longer you wait the harder it is for the orthodontist to move bone.  It was a hefty $1,000 down payment and then $145 for the next two years.  That is what I owe after insurance.  So for July you will see the down payment and then going forward it is a fixed expense.  When I hav

What is this thing? Thank you for this prestigious award Living at Home .  Did some quick reading on this award and it is a way for other bloggers to spread the word about new blogs that they enjoy.  The jist is to answer some questions and then formulate your own for another blogger to answer.  Almost like an e-chain letter.  One of the nice things is it bumps you up on the search engines via the chain. The questions (and my answers) If you won a mini-lottery would do choose $1 million in cold hard cash today or  one penny that doubles every day for the next 30 days ?  Basically, you start with a penny on day one.  At the end of day two you have two pennies.  Day there it’s four pennies, day four it’s eight pennies, and so on. Good article which I have already read.  The answer is of course 30 days.  The risk of me passing away in 30 days is pretty slim so that is the better option for me.  If I had a terminal illness or was in my 80's I mig

July was another decent month as the dividends roll in.  My goal is to increase these to a point where I can start focusing on the more important things in life.  I dream of spending time with my kids and their kids playing games, working on hobbies and even getting them into donating their time to charity. Currently I am not even close to that point but that is why I am in it for the long haul.  Month after month I try to plow as much capital into the dividend machine.  It rewards me little by little.  For July the reward was $155.22 to my taxable portfolio and $129.41 in my IRA.  This totals to $284.63 and is a 273% increase over last July.  This is mostly associated with my roll over from my previous job's 401k into an IRA.  Since this was pre-tax dollars it will be staying in the IRA for the foreseeable future. On a side note my "bonus" was delivered into my ShareBuilder account this month as well.  For opening up an IRA with my 401k they kicked me an

Dividend Family Guy Ranking of ConocoPhillips (COP) 6/543 ConocoPhillips is a major multinational energy company sitting on a hefty market cap of 99 Billion Dollars and about $7.5 billion in cash.  Gee that is allot of money.  No wonder energy companies always seem to land in my top ten each month.  I had meant to write this earlier today but as luck would have it I worked an 11 hour day on an emergency.  As always as a busy family man I try to do my analysis when I have time and withing a 1 hour time box. Value The value rank of COP landed in at 100/543.    That has slightly improved since I did my screen at the beginning of the month.  But since my screen is based on the U.S.DividendChampions spreadsheet I am sticking with it.  The improvement takes place in the trailing twelve months price-to-earnings ratio.  It was at 12.67 but is now sitting at 12.4 at the time of this writing.  This has been steadily declining over the past month so it is presenting as a good value