How Much My Dividend Portfolio Paid Me in December! ($150,000 Account) transcript

2023 was an amazing year for my dividend portfolio. My portfolio easily hit new all-time highs. I saw some amazing growth from the positions in my portfolio. My dividend income on an annual basis is now sitting at an all-time high, and most importantly, I was able to add some high-quality companies at really good valuations to my portfolio in 2023. And in this video, I'm going to be going over exactly how much dividend income I made in the month of December in 2023, and it was by far my highest amount of dividend income in any single month.

I'll also be talking about how changed over the course of the year and how much dividend income I made in 2023. And like always, if you'd like to join a community of investors and get access to this dividend portfolio tracker, then you can head over to my Patreon page at the link in the description. I'd also like to say thank you to Seeking Alpha for sponsoring this video, but more on that later. Now, I release these monthly portfolio videos every single month, and part of the purpose is to show transparency with how real money is being invested.

And for example, I've been putting out these videos for a few years now, and if you go back and look at my portfolio in October of 2021, I was actually in the red. I had negative gains. That was a difficult year for the stock market, and that in particular was a very difficult month. But what I understood was valuations at that time were very good. So, I started loading up on a lot of high-quality dividend growth companies.

And you can see, fast forward to now, again, my portfolio is sitting at an all-time high of 152,000, and I've seen over 20% gains, which has led to over $27,310 in gains with my dividend portfolio. And while these gains are very fun to see, it's important to remember that I am a long-term dividend growth investor with the goal of one day being able to live off dividend payments. And through extensive research over the past decade, I found the best way to do that is by buying high-quality dividend stocks that can increase the amount they pay out in dividends every single year.

So, while it's tempting to put all of this portfolio value straight into high-yielding dividend stocks, I know dividend growth stocks will provide me with more dividend income long-term. And for example, if we look at one of my favorite positions in my portfolio, Broadcom, stock ticker AVGO, if we look at their dividend history, we can see their dividend payments have increased dramatically over the past decade, going from 19 cents per share payout quarterly, all the way up to $5.25 every single quarter.

Again, dramatic dividend growth and this will help us achieve my goal of living off of dividend income faster. Now, let's go ahead and start breaking down my portfolio a little bit more. Now, if we come down here, we can see my allocation currently sitting around 10.3% cash and stocks at around 89.7%. Now, just a few months ago, I was sitting on a cash position of around 17 to 18% and then I unloaded quite a bit of cash on some companies I felt were trading at a very good value and I put my cash position closer to around 4%.

So, the past few months, I have been focused on increasing my cash position, so I haven't made many additions to my portfolio during that time. Now, again, over the past few months, I've seen phenomenal gains from my portfolio, but that's strictly from reinvesting dividends and also seeing some amazing growth from the positions in my portfolio. That's part of the fun of dividend growth investing. You can see gains in the form of capital gains, you can reinvest those dividends, and you also see dividend increases from the companies in your portfolio that can dramatically increase your dividend payments over time.

Now, the current total holdings for my portfolio sitting at around 32. Over the next year, I'd like to cut a few of the stocks out of my portfolio that I do feel are a little bit weaker long-term. So, the goal will be to get that closer to around 25. Now, here we have my future portfolio outlook, but we'll come and look at this a little bit later in the video. Two important charts right here. We have my cost and market value.

This is essentially showing the cost versus the market value of different positions. So, if I blow this up, for example, here we have Microsoft. You can see my cost basis is around 8,600, but the current market value sitting at over 12,000. Another example of a company I've seen good gains from. Now, if we come over here to the growth tab, I'm really happy with how my companies have performed over the past year. I have very few losing positions and my best position over the past year, Broadcom, I'm up around 120% pretty phenomenal gains from this position.

Now, the interesting thing about this buys when I bought it, it was close to all-time highs, but after doing more research, I still felt it was undervalued. It's another good reminder that just because a stock is at a 52-week high, doesn't mean that it's overvalued. Now, some other positions that have done very well for me, Caterpillar, I'm up around 67 to 67%. We have JP Morgan, I'm up over 60%. We have companies like Microsoft, I'm up over 42%.

Apple, up around 40%. And the newest position I added to my portfolio was Waste Management. I'm already up around 18.65%. So, while it is fun to see short-term gains, it is important to remember that I'm buying this company for the long haul because I think it will help me achieve my goal of living off dividend income. But as you can see here from the list of stocks in my portfolio, most of them have performed very well with the exception of MPW, of which I'm down around 55%, which is no doubt a very large amount, but it does make up a very small position in my portfolio.

Speaking of my position sizes, let's go ahead and look at my allocation chart. Now, the first thing you'll notice, SCHD makes up by far my largest position in my dividend portfolio, and that's something I'm completely comfortable with. This company has a phenomenal history of seeing solid gains year over year and increasing their dividend payments dramatically every single year, and also has a nice starting dividend yield sitting at around 3.5%, and the combination of those three things make it an ideal candidate for anyone looking to one day live off dividend income.

Now, some of my other larger positions in this portfolio, Microsoft, currently makes up around 8%. If we come down here, we can see Texas Instruments around 3.6%. We have Realty Income around 3.5%, and VICI Properties sitting at around 3%. The other positions are sitting close to around 2.5% for the most part. We scroll down, we can also see my stock allocation by industry. Now, again, I have ETF listed as an industry.

That's technically not the best way to show it here as SCHD has a lot of different types of companies within it, but again, other than that, we have technology coming in around 16.2% real estate at around 8%, financials at 8.3, consumer cyclical at around 6.2, and consumer defensive around 5.1, and then a couple of other smaller positions such as healthcare at 2.3%, industrials at 3.8, and then we have communication services at 0.9% making up a very small amount of my portfolio.

If we zoom out just a little bit and look at my total win amount, you can see my winning positions here in the blue far outpaces my losing positions in the red. So, overall, very happy with how my investment dashboard is currently showing how my investments have performed. Now again, we need to look at my dividend dashboard. This is going to give us a lot more insight to how my portfolio has performed over the past year and whether or not I'm going to be able to achieve my long-term goals.

So, let's go ahead and zoom in and answer the big question everyone wants to know, how much dividend income did I make in the month of December 2023? And right here, you can see it was by far my largest amount of all time. I made $934.25 in purely passive dividend income. This shattered my previous all-time high of $594. And a large part of this was because I received my largest dividend payment ever from SCHD, and my dividend payment from SCHD was sitting at around $712.

I received it earlier in the month of December. So, over the past 6 months or so, we're definitely starting to see a trend. We have a high month of dividend income followed by a couple of months that are a little bit lower with another high month, couple lower months, and then a new all-time high. Again, that's because I'm reinvesting all of my dividends, so my SCHD payment continues to increase. Due to dividend growth, I continue to add capital, but I also reinvest those dividends.

Now, like I mentioned earlier, I added very little capital to my portfolio over the past 3 months now, but regardless of this, my portfolio is continuing to hit new all-time highs. That's because of the phenomenal gains I've seen from some of the positions from the market rally we've seen over the past 2 to 3 months. Now, this puts my expected yearly dividend income for the year sitting at $5,118.76. That's extremely exciting to see.

My all-time dividend income sitting at 5,249, and my average monthly dividend income sitting at $426.56. That's another number that is extremely exciting to see, and my portfolio dividend yield on cost now sitting at 3.87%. If we look at my dividend income by industry, we can see 54% of my dividend income comes from ETFs. Real estate makes up around 12% of my dividend income. We have financials making up around 8.4% of my dividend income.

Consumer defensive around 10%, and technology around 8%. If you're a dividend investor and you're not tracking your dividend income by industry, this is really something you should consider tracking. Because you don't want all of your dividend income to be exposed to any one industry. And for example, if we jump back over to my investment dashboard and scroll down here, we can see technology does make up around 16.2% of my portfolio, but it only makes up around 8% of my dividend income.

So, there are differences there. You want to make sure all of your dividend income isn't exposed to any one industry. Come down here, we can see my dividend yield on cost on different positions. I have a couple of higher yielding positions, but for the most part, I like to focus on high-quality dividend growth stocks like we see right here. And again, this is yield on cost. So, for example, look at AVGO again. My dividend yield on cost for this position is sitting at 4.04%.

But if we jump back over to Seeking Alpha and look at the current dividend yield for the company sitting at 1.88%. And again, that's because I was able to buy the company at a really nice valuation, and they've also been increasing their dividend payouts since I bought the company. Both of those things will allow you to achieve a high dividend yield on cost. Now, down here we have another one of my most exciting charts, in my opinion, the projected annual dividend income month by month.

And again, because I haven't added much capital in my portfolio over the past few months, it hasn't increased a whole lot for the past few months, but I have seen some dividend increases from the holdings in my portfolio. So, there are still some gains. In October, I was sitting at around $4,931, November $5,032, and in December, I'm now sitting at $5,118 in projected annual dividend income. And from the time I started tracking this, I've really come a long way, going all the way from $1,345 all the way up to $5,118.

So, now the final chart we'll look at is my dividend income by stock. And basically, we can see how much each position in my dividend portfolio is paying me in dividend income, and it's pretty clear SCHD, by far my biggest dividend payer, coming in at $2,580.20 every single year. But, we also have some other large payments coming in from Altria, like $333, Realty Income coming in at around $288. We have Texas Instruments around $167, and VICI Properties around $240.

And while some of these companies don't pay me a whole lot every single year in dividend income, because they increase their dividend payouts year-over-year, and I reinvest dividends, we'll continue to see these numbers grow every single year. Next, I want to look at my dividend calendar, which is one of my favorite ways to track dividend income. But first, let's look at Seeking Alpha. Seeking Alpha is my absolute favorite stock research platform, and I've been using it for years now.

And the sale currently makes the platform cheaper than the price I originally bought in at. I'll go ahead and show you a few of the features, but again, I use this in all of my videos, so you can easily see it featured. But for example, we're looking at stock ticker AVGO, Broadcom. We have a summary tab here, where we can easily see the gains over time, and a lot of key metrics right here. We could look at the financial statements with ease, with over a decade of data.

We have the income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flows, and they have tons of insights into upcoming quarters' earnings, and the latest quarters' earnings, and historical earnings data as well. And of course, you know I want to look at the dividend metrics. This is one of the easiest and quickest ways to look at dividend metrics. We scroll down, we have our dividend summary tab, but we can dig deeper into these things, like the dividend yield, dividend growth, dividend safety, and of course, I want to look at that dividend history.

We have different valuations and ratios here. We have growth rate projections, and of course we have a profitability tab right here. And like always, one of my favorite features about this is the charting tab. We can easily compare the different companies and select the metrics we want to see. So, for example, because we buy dividend stocks, maybe instead of price return, if we jump to performance, we would want to see the total return.

I could easily update this chart to look at AVGO's total return versus the S&P 500. So again, link in the description to get a huge discount on Seeking Alpha's New Year Deal. Okay, again, so the next tab we're looking at is my dividend calendar. And this is one of my absolute favorite ways to track dividend income over time. And I know it looks a little bit messy right now because I've been tracking this for a while, but again, let me break this down for you.

We'll go ahead and zoom in and I'll show you exactly what we're looking at. Here we have the months over the past few years. We have the total amount of dividend income I've made each month, and the total amount each position has paid me in dividend income. So, these are all great metrics. And here we can see exactly how much we received in dividend income from these different positions on that specific month. So, while all that is great, the key thing that makes this so important to track is that allows you to easily see how your dividend payments are increasing over time.

And Realty Income is a good example for this because they increase their dividend payments every quarter or so, but I also reinvest my dividend payments every single month. So, you can easily see how these dividend payments are increasing every single month. If I scroll all the way over here, you can see this dividend payment has increased all the way up to $25 every single month now. Now, I just want to focus on the past few months, so this isn't so messy.

So, I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit, and we'll hide some of these tabs over here. I'll come down here and hide these columns. And now I'll go ahead and zoom back in. So, now I can see over the past 3 months the dividend payments I've received. You can also see how these dividend payments have increased over time. So, for example, IBM paid me $7.24 in September. Jump forward to their next dividend payment, it's now $7.33 in December.

Again, take Johnson & Johnson for example. They paid me $18.33 in September of 2023, but in December of '23 it was $26.80. Again, you can see the compounding effect taking place here. But moving forward and looking at all my payments in December, I received $1.74 from KHC, around $20 from Coca-Cola, $24.32 from Microsoft, $25.14 from Realty Income Corporation, $3.37 from SJM, $6.41 from 3M, I received $21.04 from Bank of America, Domino's Pizza close to around $10, INTC around $2.36, $12.57 from Jeffy, $10.21 from Target, Visa paid me around $6.78, T.

Rowe Price around $11.48, Broadcom paid me $16.18, then here's my huge dividend payment from SCHD coming in at $712.61. And the final dividend payment I received was from Waste Management, sitting at $16.10. So overall, again, by far my highest month ever at $934.25. Another way that I like to track my dividend income is by using a daily dividend calendar. And you can see all my data for 2022 and for 2023. And this is basically just a way to see exactly how much dividend income you were paid on each day.

Over time, I can see my dividend income year over year and the highest day of dividend income. So for example, in 2022, again, you can see exactly what days I was paid dividends and how much. My highest day in 2022 was a $42.11 day, and the total dividends I received in 2022 sitting at $1,310. So let's go ahead and compare this to 2023 now. We can see here my highest day $730.15 in one single day of dividend income. It's pretty mind-blowing to see just how far I've come in just one year's time.

And my total dividend income in 2023 was sitting right at $3,500. And again, that's super exciting to see, but what's even more exciting is look again at my now expected yearly dividend income sitting at $5,118. Again, that will just continue to increase as I make new contributions, reinvest dividends, and the companies in my portfolio increased their dividend payouts. Let's go ahead and look at all of these days in December.

I'll zoom in and you can see I had a $12 day on the 1st. Pretty good day here on the 5th at $26, $12 on the 6th. Here is my huge day on December 11th at $730. Smaller day here, but on the 15th you can see a really nice day at $61.23. And then I only had one more dividend payment and that was on the 29th. That was $60.26. So with all that being said, the big question is how far am I from being able to one day live off dividends?

Unfortunately, this is something I have studied in-depth over the years and built out a model to help us answer that question here on my portfolio projection tab. This is basically going to project out what my dividend portfolio will look like over the next 10, 20, and 30 years. So if we go ahead and zoom in here, we can see the variables that we need to plug in. My starting portfolio size sitting at around 150,000, current dividend yield sitting at around 3.5%.

I'm aiming for average monthly contributions of around $2,500. Now over the past few months it actually has been a little bit lower than that. That is pretty close to what it is on average. I'm assuming a price growth rate of around 7% and a dividend growth rate of around 7% as well. And keep in mind, I think it's completely possible that I see higher price growth rate and dividend growth rate than 7%. And for example, over the past decade or so SCHD has seen far higher price growth rate and dividend growth rate than just 7%, but I do want to be somewhat conservative with my projections.

So if we jump over to my live off dividends tab, I'll zoom out just a little bit so we can see what's going on. But this chart right here, the black line is showing my cost of living, which as you can see slightly goes up over time due to inflation, and the red line is my monthly dividend payments. And the place at which the red line passes the black line is the time I would be able to live off of dividend payments forever.

We have it broken down pretty well here. I'll go ahead and zoom in so we can see how far I am. I'll start scrolling down here. We want to see at what point I can live off dividend payments. So I'll start scrolling down and you can see I'm more than 5 years away, more than 10 years away, but if we keep scrolling down, it looks like I'm around 15 years away from being able to live off of dividend income. It's because my average monthly dividend payments would have then surpassed my monthly cost of living.

And one of the questions I get is would I stop reinvesting dividends at that point? It's possible, but I may continue working at that point, but the reality is even if I quit reinvesting dividends at that point, I would still be able to live off dividends forever because my dividend growth rate would be higher than the rate of inflation because I buy dividend growth stocks. We can also see at this point my account value would be sitting at over $1.8 million, and the total amount of dividend payments I'd received up to that point would be over $424,000.

Another one of the most commonly asked questions I get here when I put out these monthly portfolio updates is why don't I just put my capital into high-yield savings accounts which are currently yielding higher than the portfolio dividend yield on cost of my portfolio. And that's a great question and I'll show you exactly why. If we jump back over to my portfolio projection tab, let's go ahead and plug this in. Now, if I put my capital into a high-yield savings account, we'll see 0% price growth rate and zero dividend growth.

Let's go ahead and say it's yielding around 4.5%. If we now jump over to my live off dividends tab, we can see it's no longer feasible to live off dividends in just 15 years. We'll have to keep scrolling down and keep scrolling down, keep scrolling down and you can see I wouldn't be able to live off dividends at this point for 23, almost 24 years. This would essentially add over a decade of waiting to be able to live off my passive income.

And so, if we zoom out and look at the chart up here, you can again see I would essentially start making more passive income every single month over the short term, but over the long term, it would take way longer to surpass my monthly cost of living. That's also not to mention my account value would not be anywhere near to being as close as it would be if I invested in a high-quality dividend growth stocks. In fact, it looks like it'd be about 50% less.

And the reason the high-yield savings account performs so much worse than dividend growth stocks over time is because it doesn't increase its dividend payments over time like dividend growth stocks do. Dividend growth plays a key component in the compounding effect over the years. So finally, if we come back to my investment dashboard and scroll all the way down, we can see my my future portfolio outlook and we can toggle between reinvesting dividends and not reinvesting dividends.

But at this current point, assuming those same assumptions that we looked at earlier, in just 5 years, I could be receiving over $15,400 every single year in dividend income and have a portfolio value of around $445,000. In 15 years, I could be receiving $61,000 a year in dividend income with a high portfolio value of around 1.76 million. And in 30 years, this is where things start to get really crazy. I could have yearly dividends of around 324,000 and a portfolio value of 9.29 million.

And again, this projection just goes to show you the power of long-term dividend growth investing and exactly what the compounding effect looks like. So there you go. That's exactly how much dividend income in the month of December and how much I made in 2023 overall. I think 2024 will prove to be another very exciting year for my dividend portfolio. While valuations remain pretty high right now, I definitely think we'll be able to find the opportunities as they come.

So again, like always, if you'd like to join a community of dividend investors and get access to this spreadsheet or any of my other spreadsheets, then you can head over to my Patreon page at the link in the description. I also put out a free newsletter every single week where I go more in-depth into the buys and sells of my portfolio. So be sure to check that out if you're interested. And again, thank you Seeking Alpha for sponsoring this video.

So with all that being said, thank you guys so much for watching and please don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel.