The Dividend Family Guy

There have been so many articles flying around about IBM and whether it is sinking or swimming. So I read all of those and then started looking at the numbers. They look good to me so I initiated my first position in IBM and picked up a small number of shares. Even with recent price declines the price is up there. I caught it at $163.79. It has dropped a little bit since then which makes me a little sad. What makes me not sad is the history of the great company. The dividend contender has been raising dividends at least back to 1995 for a run of 19 years. That has averaged a dividend growth rate of 19.4% over the past 10 years and it is slowing down over time. The current year is only 12.1% which is still double digit growth that easily keeps up with inflation.  They are pretty far down my ranking system coming in at #192. Mostly from the value at the time I put it together with September information. That was back when the price was $189. The big thing that caused the h...

Paying into Medicare and Social Security is always a hot topic. I always wonder if I had been able to invest all the money I have put into the systems over the past 20 years of my working life what it would amount to. Let's take a look at what I will have collected or earned by investing if I live until the ripe old age of 90. If for some reason I want to wait until I was 70 before starting to collect it looks like I could pull in $3,323 a month. Collecting that for 20 years (until 90) would equal $773,520 collected over my old man life time. Keeping it simple I am not factoring taxes that I would have to pay on this income or inflation adjustments. Over the past 20 years myself and my employers have put a total of $180,047 into the Social Security and Medicare systems. Wouldn't that be nice if the companies I worked for would have just given me this money and I could invest it as I please. For this scenario I am going to just take the latest Champions average dividend yie...

One of the things you get back after reaching financial independence is your time.  You wake up in the morning and your time is yours.  No having to go to work where your time becomes theirs (someone is telling you what to do.)  Like yesterday.  It had been a long week and I was tired.  Back when I was in college if I were tired I would go and take a nap and refresh myself.  Today, no way.  Gotta get that work done so the company can make more money.  The fact that my time was not my own and I couldn't decide what was best for me really irked me.  It also cause some dividend thoughts to pop into my head. Several good bloggers write about time so it got me thinking about my son.  He started his freshman year in high school this year and I realized how little time I have spent with him recently and even over the years.  I am comparing my time to that of my wife who got to stay home and raise all of our great kids.  I ...

Usually this post is about recent purchases.  I had more than I expected thanks to a blunder on my part.  With ShareBuilder they have these automatic investment plans.  Depending on what schedule you have selected it will purchase your plan that Tuesday.  Unfortunately I had it set to When funds are available .  So my plan kept an eye on my balance and kept on purchasing until I caught it.  Nothing like an email while you're at work that you just purchased more stocks you never intended to buy at an unknown price.  I had to wait until I was out of a meeting then raced back to my desk and secretly logged into my account to see what was going on.  Needless to say it is now turned off.  What did I get (twice)?  Well let's take a look. Date Company Shares Price Entry Yield 9/23 NUS 11.8624 42.15 3.3% 9/23 HMN 17.2117 29.05 3.17% 9/30 NUS ...

I am pleased to announce I broke my 3 month savings slump!  Last month was not pretty.  It was an awesome feeling when I put the numbers in for September and my data bars (Excel thing) were not red .  For the year I have had 4 months of saving money and 5 months of borrowing from the savings to survive.  Well I can't borrow from savings anymore because with last month I completely wiped it out.  This was something I had to do so I could keep my 4 year streak of no credit card debt alive.   For September I really buckled down on the discretionary expenses.  This helped me save a whopping $425.57 <fireworks>.  I have made a few adjustments to my process.  The first being I now add my taxable dividends in as income.  I went back and changed this for the year in my spreadsheet.  Second I was treating investments I had made as an expense when determining my net gain or loss for the month.  The way I look at it n...

Fifteen difference sources of income found their way into my world this month for a grand total of $376.78.  It gives me a bit of comfort knowing as I add companies to my portfolio the sources of income will continue to multiply.  The more steams flowing into my river of wealth the less chance it will dry up just because one of the streams does.  As those streams compound and get bigger they will allow me to take away a stream (income from a job) one day. The majority of it is from stocks held in an IRA.  These profits I will not count as income until such a time where I can take advantage of the IRA without penalty.  The remaining taxable income is $27 bucks.  This is coming from 6 income streams.  All are currently small but with each passing quarter it is slowly growing.  This covers one trip to fast food joint for the family.  Going forward I am going to start counting this income in my budget post.  A community member got me...