October Good and Bad

October was great for our net worth!  And, earnings were great for the most part for my stocks with a few positive surprises.  The only bad part was that I didn't invest much this month.  We had car problems, and had to pay a few bills.  However, I am looking forward to November and getting back on track.  It is unfortunate to not have cash on hand during earnings season, but then again, there weren't really any massive drops in value for any stocks.  I have been tracking report-outs for each of my stocks this time around, and they are about 2/3 done.  There were some nice dividend increases as well.

Hormel's Hit Product

I have slowly added all of the cost-consistent bills to my brokerage account, and will be funding the brokerage from my checking account for their amounts.  As I mentioned in another post, this is in an effort to slowly let dividends pay for my bills.

Today

I also would like to set a goal to have each of my stocks pay $100 a year at least if possible as deals present themselves.  15 out of 28 already do!  And some quite a bit (MAIN $323 a year).  The goal after that would be to have each stock pay at least $100 a quarter.  This way, even if the stock values change, the income should be diversified enough to handle any possible disruption from any individual stock.  While it is possible for more than ONE stock to be disrupted, in my 2.5 years experience, this has not happened!

I'm adding a new section to the blog progress, dividend increases.  Since this is unique to the current month, I will post it here along with purchases.  I will remove the dividends received, as the total for the year (e.g. div-o-meter to the right) is what really matters.  There is a high month and a low month, but if I budget correctly, this should not matter for generating income (only for purchasing).  As I said earlier, my purchases this month will be miniscule:

A Year Ago

Dividend Increases & Special Payouts
AbbVie (NYSE:ABBV) declares $1.18/share quarterly dividend, 10.3% increase from prior dividend of $1.07.

ONEOK (NYSE:OKE) declares $0.915/share quarterly dividend, 2.8% increase from prior dividend of $0.89.

International Paper (NYSE:IP) declares $0.5125/share quarterly dividend, 2.5% increase from prior dividend of $0.50.

Main Street Capital (NYSE:MAIN) declares supplemental semi-annual dividend of $0.24/share.

October Purchases:

JNJ	3
ADM	2
FAST	2
ABT	2
HRL	2
WTR	1