July 2019 Summary

Another month flew by and we are already on the last month of summer. Weather during July was not as hot as in June but I am not complaining. It felt like a relief after all the heat in the beginning of summer. Weather was still nice during several weekends and we had a couple of visits to a nearby lake with family. Our baby daughter enjoys spending time in different places, so we try to spend more time outside.

With weather cooling down, passive income is also slowing down. My annual payers are already in the past so July was a much smaller month compared to the last few. Let’s see what happened with passive income during July.

Dividend Income

This month I received dividend from 3 companies:

Not a big amount, compared to previous months, but it’s still something. First months of the quarter are usually the smallest months.

As always, let’s see what part of expenses, related to the companies, the dividends could cover if I decided to spend them:

• $6.80 from Illinois Tool Works would cover 9% of our expenses in Home category;
• $2.53 from Realty Income would cover 0.4% of our monthly Rent.
• $9.22 from Cisco would cover 16% of our TV+Internet expenses for the last 2 months.

There is long way to go for dividends to cover significant amount of our monthly expenses but performing this fun exercise gives me motivation to keep going.

Year-On-Year Comparison

Let’s compare dividend income to July of last year:

Looking at the comparison to last year, it is looking pretty good. Dividend income almost doubled due to the following reasons:

• New position in ITW;
• Dividend raises from O and CSCO;
• Moving of CSCO to another broker where I need to pay less taxes on dividends.

This is how my dividend income progress looks like since the beginning of 2016 when I started tracking it:

Purchases and Portfolio Contributions

This month I added €700 to my investments account.

I added one company to my portfolio. On the 24th of July, I purchased 15 shares of D for $75.10/share for a total of $1126.50 (including commissions). You may read more about the purchase here. It adds $46.79 to my forward annual dividend income (after taxes).

This purchase briefly passed my portfolio above the €17k milestone which was my goal for the year. It is slightly below this mark after the turbulence in the market but it’s only temporary.

I also added €50 to Mintos P2P lending account.

Dividend Increases

This month none of my companies declared dividend increases, so nothing to report here 🙁

Changes In Projected Annual Dividend Income

As I mentioned in previous posts, I have a goal to increase my PADI to $450 from US companies this year. At the start of the year it was standing at $236. This means that I should add additional $214 (or $18/month in average) if I want to achieve the target.

To track the progress, I monitor PADI increase/decrease from two sources – dividend increases and capital contribution.

Let’s see how forward dividend income changed during July:

It was a record month this year in terms of added forward dividend income. This was mainly to the high yield of Dominion Energy which was added to my portfolio.

P2P Lending Income

Let’s see how much passive income I received from another source – P2P lending:

This month, one of the loans (worth €6.22) in Savy platform was handed over to court (which means that it defaulted, in other words). The month was still profitable for a total of €2.60.

I am not planning to add any more funds to Savy platform. I will probably start withdrawing funds from returned loans from this platform and move them over to Mintos. Savy recently sent some information regarding their Provision Fund which is used to compensate loans that are late by 90 days and were covered by their insurance. It turns out that there is only ~€25k in that fund which is very little.

In general, I am thinking about keeping only ~5% of my portfolio in P2P lending, down from the target of up to 10%. Currently funds in P2P lending are ~6% of my stocks portfolio.

If you would like to sign up with Mintos and receive some cashback, feel free to use my referral link (I would also get a small commission).

Summary

In total (after converting to EUR) I received €19.18 from passive income during June. This brings the total for 2019 so far to €335.52 which is ~70% of my goal to receive €480 from passive income this year. Even though I didn’t receive much this month, I am still on track to reach the goal.

It was one of the smallest months this year but I am happy nevertheless. In fact, I already surpassed total passive income of last year (€255). It feels very good to be in this situation and see your passive income growing.

How was your month? Are you on track to reach your goals? As always, thanks for reading and feel free to leave your comments below! 🙂