The Dividend Family Guy

The first month is well behind us and it is time to update how I did before March and spring come.   With my 3 savings goals pretty much on autopilot it is more challenging to stay within the budget.   By autopilot I mean I have separate savings accounts for those goals and money is automatically moved from them at the beginning of each month.   What is left in my checking is pretty much what my monthly budget is.   I do have some buffer in my checking to handle bills that come up quarterly or bi-annual. Overall for January I was right on target saving 40% of my income.   This beats my goal mostly because of some extra income for the month.   Every year we 'donate' money to our church Christmas raffle that benefits the social committee.   For the first time since we joined the church we won and it was the big one on Christmas day.   My wife was screaming so loud when they called us I thought something bad had happened.   It was just a few hundred dollars but it was

Hungry baby! Did I meet my budget for 2016?  Well the short answer is yes and no.  If I spent only what we needed to live off of (needs) then I was under budget by about $900 for the year.  That is great that I am able to live within my budget to survive.  Now the harder part to talk about.  My family and I continue to fall prey to the consumerist beast.  While not as bad as other Americans it still caused us to go over our GFSM budge t by $1,067 .  While that is not a huge sum when you look at it for the year I had to give it a red cell in my spreadsheet. Where did I overspend?  About half of that went to pay for my daughters candy bar sale money.  Instead of saving the cash I got, I blew it on things like eating out and miscellaneous junk.  Then in the end I had to write the check to pay for it all.  My lesson learned from that is to track cash expenditures so I can see the effects on my budget as the month proceeds.  The remainder of the overspending was just as simpl

Company Name Symbol Industry No. Years Dividend Yield Sector EPS% Payout Span-America Medical Systems SPAN Medical Equipment 18 3.21 Health Care 41.56 Qualcomm Inc. QCOM Telecomm Equipment 14 3.97 Information Tech 64.63 Old Republic International ORI Insurance 35 3.61 Financials 46.88 Donegal Group Inc. A DGICA Insurance 14 3.34 Financials 53.92 Cracker Barrel Old Country CBRL Restaurants 14 2.91 Consumer Discretionary 56.30 VF Corp. VFC Apparel 44 3.26 Consumer Discretionary 58.33 T. Rowe Price Group TROW Financial Services 30 3.20 Financials 45.28 Brinker International EAT Restaurants 12 3.06 Consumer Discretionary 42.24 Target