The Dividend Family Guy

I remember when I was sixteen my parents said if I wanted to drive I would have to cover my part of the insurance.  Twenty-six years ago I think that amounted to $100-$200.  Even as a kid I thought that was really expensive but didn't know much about how the world works.  So I had a job and handed the money over to my parents when the time came.  Life was good. Then I went off to college and eventually bought my first car.  Sorry to say but my financial skills were poor and I actually used student loan money to pay for that $900 piece of steel.  At that time I switch from my parents insurance to my own.  I was able to find a company that provided the same coverage but costed less.  Then I started looking at the coverage amounts and they were in excess to cover my clunker.  Did I really need full coverage or just liability?  So I continued to learn and find ways to save money. Fast forward to today and the cycle continues....

I am back from a great family vacation.  We headed up to Niagara Falls for a few days to spend time with my wife's side of the family.  The cousins had a blast seeing the sights and hanging out.  This was a budgeted vacation so we will see how the FrugalMaster 2000 performed in next month's results.  June however was a different kind of spending.  There were changes in my insurance that set me over my normal budget.  There was also my birthday weekend away. It was a weekend away at a great state park.  Being a state park it was very low cost compared to any other tourist trap.  I think it was $109 a night (2) for a recently renovated cabin that slept 6.  It was very clean and modern.  The kids (and me) enjoyed swimming, fishing and hiking.  We did all of the cooking with dinners around the campfire.  That also kept costs very low. The entire weekend cost us around $300 which I think is great. Fixed spending was ...

I am on a mad dash to get my usual posts done before the end of the month.  Since I will be out on vacation this week here is my very late stock screen results.  I am not sure what happened but I usual like to create this motif in the beginning of the month when the data from dripinvesting.org is the freshest. Oh well here are the results for July!   The chart should start to fill in within the next couple of days as data is collected by Motif.  The 10 companies in this list have been showing up recently and are still presenting themselves as bargains for the dividend growth community. The all follow my screen found on my blog.  The have all been paying dividends for 10 or more years which makes them less riskier than the newby dividend payers.  I have fallen to the high growth high yield curse before only to see the dividend cut.  This year we changed that and if you look back at my past motifs they are all doing well.  That is proba...

This will probably be the smallest dividend month since I started dividend investing in 2010.  It will probably also be the shortest post about my dividends.  The main reason is the shifting of my accounts that I talked about in this post on Merrill Edge and its rewards program. Some stocks did transfer so their income was not interrupted.  The grand total was a whopping $2.76 !  I don't think that could even buy me lunch but I am still grateful for the income.  For these guys it was cash as I could not setup reinvestment yet.  I have now.  It will of course grow overtime as the dividends are reinvested and start the compounding machine. Company Held In  Dividend Amount Received Shares of Life Purchased June Notes ORI Tax 0.1875 0.75 MCD Tax 0.89 0.89 CNRL Tax             0.23 1.12 ...

In late May and during this month of June I have made some changes in my life that will generate some additional income and savings for the DFG family.  It all started when another frugal minded person mentioned in their blog about different investment platforms that were low cost.  After reading the article and doing some research the winner was Bank of America Preferred Awards . The move is not easy and involves lots of account setup and transfers of funds from my old banks.  As I write this in July I still have not transitioned all of my bill payments over so my old checking lingers. The only thing left behind were my kids savings and investment accounts.  That will be another project to undertake when the snow flies this winter.  All in all I was able to transfer over enough funds to make the Platinum level.  The catch is the funds have to be with BoA/Merrill for 3 months before you can sign up for the rewards program.  For me that will la...