Sorry y'all for being out of pocket so much the past month! Our schedule has been jam packed with stuff to do every weekend and work has been really been draining me of energy recently. Since my last post, my wife and I have had three weddings, one week long vacation and other minor social gatherings. I might have mentioned this but my wife's friends all live primarily out of state so we are either flying or driving 4+ hours to every wedding. This traveling really takes a toll on the energy levels since we get back on a Sunday afternoon, have to do the laundry, clean up the house and get ready for the next week of work. It seems like I don't catch my breath till Wednesday or Thursday and we are right back at it either Friday or Saturday night traveling.
All this travel you would think takes a toll on the finances but we have done our best to share hotel rooms with other couples and eat at cheaper establishments which makes a big difference. Over the past month and a half we have had some of our smallest expense totals to date since I have started tracking our combined expenses over 2 years ago!
To top off our travels, we drove down to the shore for a week with my wife's family which is always a great time. This vacation really allowed myself the ability to take a step back, stop going through the motions of my daily life and really relax. I made it a point to really take this week and rejuvenate. I routinely woke up early - 615am - went surfing till 930am and came back to the house to nap until noon. I was able to start and finish two books which I have NEVER done in my entire life while on vacation and I was able to really enjoy the time spent with my wife which we do not get to do much of during our daily lives. This was one of the first vacations I have been on since my journey to retire early and I now want that type of life - wake up when I want, nap when I want, read what I want - for every day of my life.
Once again, our finances did not take much of a hit. My wife did a fantastic job pre-cooking a lot of our meals for the week and we only went out to eat twice. Quality time was spent with family instead of rushing to play mini-golf, or go-karts, etc so we did not spend much money frivolously which was nice.
With that being said, hopefully I'll be able to get back on the horse and pound out some new material and updates to all the usual reports/dividend posts that have need to be developed.
Recent Buy
On September 1st, we bought 33 shares of Dover Corp. (DOV) at $60.00 per share. This purchase adds $55.44 of annual dividends to our account based on .42 quarterly payout. The P/E at time of purchase was roughly 15, the yield is 2.8%, market cap of 9.35B and the stock has fallen roughly 40% from the peak of $96.00. This was a chance to average down on Dover after this purchase at $74.00. I will bring up just one main point from that post ---- Dover has been raising its dividend for 60 YEARS now. I have confidence they will continue this trend into the future so why not average down on this company?
The market has been all over the place the past month and I have seen other bloggers take full advantage of the pullback. I will be doing research thoroughly to try and pick up some companies on the cheap. My watch list in no particular order, looks like this:
ENERGY: EMR, CVX, XOM, KMI
HIGH YIELD: T, VZ, OHI, O, WPC
GROWTH: MMM, UNP, AAPL, DIS
Please pick one stock from each category that you think I should purchase!
How has your last month been? Look forward to talking to you!
ADD
Just added some DOV myself. Like it as a long term dividend hold and with low oil dragging down this stock seems like a much better value and yield play than in recent months. Their oil and gas services division is certainly feeling the low oil price pinch. When oil does turn around the stock should rebound nicely. As long as the divvy is safe I'm happy.
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