Another month has flown by! I hope everyone had a great October and Halloween.
Below is a summary of my activity for the month:
New Purchases: $2,723.61 (NET)
$200 of ESV
$200 of MCD
$300 of V
$350 of BP
$350 of MDT
$400 of TD
$450 of JNJ
$550 of AWR
40 shares of GIS – $2017.60
32 shares of NVS- $2831.04
MOTIF – $3046.83 (this one wasn’t posted)
Posts about new purchases can all be found by following the “Buys” label here.
Sells:
150 shares of OMI – $4999.50
76 shares of ESV – $2972.36 (tax harvesting)
*Note – I originally sold shares of ESV to get some tax credits and used the proceeds to buy ARCP. I bought 300 shares at $9 and watched as shares went from $8 back to $10. I ended up selling the same day in after hours trading after reading more into the accounting issues. I just wasn’t comfortable holding them. The gain helped me get back a little of my losses from the options I had sold. My net purchases were also a lot lower than usual. I’m hoping to be able to put much more capital to work these last couple of months.
Options Trades:
I had a lot of options activity in October. I sold new puts in ARCP, BP, UL and ESV. I closed out puts in ARCP (at a loss), and a few ESV puts. One of the puts that I closed at a loss was rolled forward. Basically I sold a new put further into the future to keep from getting that one assigned. In the end it should be a net gain but currently is a loss for this year. My options profits are now looking pretty small for the year compared to last year. I have $10k in my options account currently.
My total profit for the year is $199.00.
I’ve updated all of these trades on my Options tab and you can find these trades on my options label.
Dividends:
October – 473.14
KO – 68.06
MO – 146.99
PM – 117.10
BBVA – 51.73
MDT – 29.31
TD – 58.12
MOTIF – 2.83
I earned $473.14 in dividends for the month. This is an increase of 49% from the same month last year. My total year-to-date dividend income is $8029.63. This is 80.3% toward my goal of $10,000 in dividends for the year. I’m still on pace to hit this goal.
I’ve updated my dividend income on my Dividends tab.
Forward 12-month Dividends:
My expected forward 12-month dividend income has increased slightly decreased to $11,793.64 from $11,799.56, a 0% increase since last month. So what the heck happened you may ask since I actually invested a net positive into my account? Well the main reason for the decrease was that I manually fixed the dividend of VOD. VOD doesn’t pay a regular dividend , they pay twice yearly where one payment is about 2/3 of the total while the other is just 1/3. So most financial sites report the dividend yield as too low part of the year and too high the other part. The yield was shown to be artificially high on my dividends page. I’ve corrected this manually but it reduced my forward income enough to cause me to slightly go down. 
You can find all of my monthly dividend information from the Dividends page.
Dividend Increases:
The following 4 companies in my portfolio increased their dividends this month.
V – 20% increase announced on 10/22
BP – 2.6% increase (2nd of the year) announced 10/28. I didn’t get a chance to mention this one.
I’ve now had 33 companies increase dividends so far this year.
These increases can also be found on my Dividend Increases label.
Goals:
No new goals completed. My next goal met will likely be to reach 800k in net worth.
These goals can be found on the Goals tab.
Real Estate:
All 3 rental properties are still leased for at least 6 more months. I did have an issue with a check bouncing but the renter had a decent excuse and brought cash to me the next day plus paid for the returned check fee.
You can find my latest electric bill and any other solar updates here.
All of my other real estate posts will be found on my real estate label.
Net Worth:
I’m now at $782k, up from $751k. Note that I was at $775k two months ago but I expect my net worth to fluctuate quite a lot due to the value changes I use from Zillow. Speaking of Zillow, I was asked to participate in an article that should be coming out soon.
You can find the details of this on my Net Worth page.
Looking Ahead:
My expected dividends for November are $644 and over $1500 for December. I’m getting really close to averaging $1000/month in dividend income. I hope to hit that milestone in November.
I’m still using Motif Investing and made another purchase this month that I didn’t have time to mention. I’m really heavy on AT&T currently with about $7500 invested in that account, the rest spread through the other 29 companies in the DOW 30. When T gets to be much larger I’ll probably spend $5 to re-balance.
I’m mainly looking at investing in positions that make up a smaller weight in my portfolio that I want to keep long-term. Some of these include AWR (although they seem to be a little rich here), COP, BBL, APD, GIS, JNJ, UTX and WAG.
The sell-off was short-lived and markets are back at all-time highs, So what are you buying? Maybe it’s a good time to hoard a little extra cash.