February Dividend Income

After 34 years of clocking in and out of work and religiously saving 10% annually in my 401K every year, in good times and bad, I have decided to share my monthly dividend income to show what regular saving and investing can accomplish.

Received my annual review at work and my raise was higher than expected.  Since I budgeted to max out my Roth IRA for the year, this is the first time I have ever increased my 401K savings rate from 10% to 11%.  This improved my annual saving rate to 24.6%.  Below is a new metric I decided to include in my monthly updates. You can see 2019 was the turning point in my saving rate and was the first full year I had no credit card and no mortgage debt.

	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021
401K	10%	10%	10%	10%	10%	10%	10%	10%	10%	11%
Brokerage	0.2%	0.7%			0.5%	0.8%	1%	3.7%	4.0%	4.2%
Roth IRA							1.9%	5.4%	8.3%	9.4%
Total Saving Rate	10.2%	10.7%	10.0%	10.0%	10.5%	10.8%	12.9%	19.1%	22.3%	24.6%

10 Year Personal Annual Saving Rate

For the month of February I made $2,837.59; an increase of 9.94% versus this time last year. This increase is a bit illusionary as a couple of typical January payers were pushed into February. First was B&G Foods (BGS) who decided to pay on Feb. 1 instead of the end of the month. The second was Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CM) who did pay a dividend in January however, due to the dividend reinvestment policy at Fidelity it was not credited to my account until February. 

Overall market valuations for the most part remained high. My consistent buys for the month were AbbVie (ABBV), Pepsico (PEP) and Verizon (VZ). I am now at a full position in all three and do not plan to buy any additional purchases. Going into March here are the stocks on my watch list; BCE Inc (BCE), Duke Energy (DUK), JM Smucker (SJM), and Lockheed Martin (LMT).

Date	Symbol	Company	Amount
2/1/21	BGS	B&G FOODS INC	$253.27
2/1/21	CM	CANADIAN IMPERIAL BANK OF COMMERCE	$252.51
2/1/21	GIS	GENERAL MILLS INC	$77.45
2/1/21	T	AT&T INC	$603.10
2/1/21	VZ	VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS INC	$35.15
2/4/21	BLV	VANGUARD BD INDEX FDS LONG TERM BOND	$14.79
2/4/21	VCLT	VANGUARD SCOTTSDALE FUNDS LONG-TERM COR	$15.65
2/5/21	HYG	ISHARES TR IBOXX HI YD ETF	$19.29
2/5/21	PFF	ISHARES TR PFD AND INCM SEC	$50.47
2/8/21	APD	AIR PRODUCTS AND CHEMICALS INC	$30.06
2/16/21	ABBV	ABBVIE INC	$155.18
2/16/21	HAS	HASBRO INC	$31.20
2/16/21	OHI	OMEGA HEALTHCARE INVESTORS INC	$722.72
2/16/21	PG	PROCTER AND GAMBLE CO	$103.16
2/18/21	PSEC	PROSPECT CAP CORP	$155.54
2/22/21	ARTNA	ARTESIAN RES CORP	$189.48
2/26/21	ODC	OIL DRI CORP OF AMERICA	$14.11
2/26/21	SBRA	SABRA HEALTH CARE REIT INC	$83.25
2/26/21	WSM	WILLIAMS-SONOMA INC	$9.61
2/26/21	M1 Finance	M1 DIVIDEND GROWTH ACCOUNT	$21.60