Recent Buy - Reynolds American Inc. (RAI)

Hi Everyone,

Another purchase is in the books.  After my sell of O, I had a decent amount of funds.  RAI has pulled back just a tad off its 52 week high and the quarter looked really good.  Not to mention is that they just raised the dividend 17%!!!  That's what I'm talking about!

Ever since the merger with LO I have been looking to buy this stock.  Turns out a 22 forward PE is above average, but the synergies they should see from LO, the growth in brands, especially Newport and consistent business model is a reason for investment. 

This stock rarely pulls back and I was tired of watching it go up without me being in it.  I seemed to have traded one overvalued stock for another, but the growth in RAI I think will be much better than O at the current prices.  We shall see how things work out.  I lost just .5% in dividends as RAI is 3.5% yield and O was 4% when I sold it.  Currently I have a buy order in for OHI but the stock has taken off a bit the last couple of days.  If that purchase goes through, the combined dividends will be higher than what I was making for just O alone, and I cover 8 out of 12 months in the year.  There is just 4 others that I would not receive a dividend like I did with O.

I'm looking for O to pull back to $55.00 before repurchasing.  I will be saving cash over the next month to make sure I have some capital ready for that purchase.  I love O, just not the price!

With that being said:

I purchased 42 shares of Reynolds (RAI) at $48.04.  This purchase adds $70.56 of annual dividends to our account at the now current .42 quarterly dividend.

Tobacco has now become a pillar of my portfolio.  With roughly $10,500 invested between PM and RAI, I think I am done with tobacco for a while unless they pull back.  The REIT space in general still interests me.  If I can't get OHI, then perhaps something else...   What do you guys suggest???

So there you have it, the next building block on the path to the American Dividend Dream!  What do you think, good purchase, bad purchase?  What are you looking to buy next?

ADD

Selling one of the best companies of all time...

Hi Everyone,

The time has come to sell off my stake in Realty Income Corp (O).  This is the first sell in my portfolio and of all the investments I have, I never would have guessed this would have been my first sell.  A staple of consistency and tremendous capital appreciation, Realty has all its mojo working.  However, that mojo has made the stock pop 17% to start off the year.

They reported good growth numbers as of their last quarterly earnings statement but with a 21 P/FFO ratio currently, I think its a good time to let this go.

Other REIT stocks, namely healthcare REIT's are down significantly this year (see OHI, HCP).  I firmly believe that O has gotten a bit ahead of itself here and there are other opportunities that could use some more capital.

I sold 48.3150 shares at $60.65 totaling $2,923.24.  I will lose $9.59 per month in dividends or $115 per year.

With this sell, I now have some decent ammunition in my "BB gun" and will be looking to make a purchase soon.  Realty had a dividend yield of just 4% meanwhile a REIT like OHI has a yield of 8%.  I could look to using half the sell to purchase OHI and the other half to get a faster dividend grower like MMM or AAPL and will come out ahead.

This by no means I will not be an owner of Realty in the future, but I plan to be one at a cheaper price!!

We shall see what happens, but what do you think?  Good sell?  What are you buying next?

ADD

How did we measure up? 2015 Goals Review

Hi Everyone,

Another year is in the books!  Growing up, I constantly heard the phrase "enjoy life, it goes way too quick" but being young and naive, I just wrote it off and said "yea right"...   Boy could I have not been more wrong. 

Sure, when your 5 or 6 a year seems like an eternity, however, in high school things (at least for me) started to change.  In those 4 short years, I vividly remember thinking to myself wow, that year went faster than the last.  Throughout college, it seemed life slowed a bit, but ever since joining the work force, it has picked back up in a big way!  Now at age 28, going on 7 years in the workforce, a routine has developed and the days just seem to slip by.  I blink and all of a sudden a month is gone. I take a nap and the season has changed.  A full nights sleep and here I am writing a blog post reflecting on the past year... 

The previous paragraph illustrates the importance of the journey that my wife and I are on right now.  It is the daily routines and monotony of our lives that make things go by so fast.  Trying to retire early will not only let us live the way we want, but will also alleviate us from going through the motions and allow us to never have a routine again.

In order for us to achieve the life we want, we must set consistent, SMART, goals.  Without goals, we could sway off the path and hurt our ability to reach freedom from the 9 - 5 job.  I believe goals need to be challenging, yet achievable.  If you continually set goals that are too extreme, you will continually disappoint yourself which could hinder your ability to keep going.  With that being said, lets look at how our goals for 2015 turned out:

Recent Buys - UA, UNP & AAPL

Hi Everyone,

The month of January got away from me a little bit so this post is well overdue.  I did not expect to invest nearly this much money the past month but my wife and I did well on expenses in December  and used significant credit card points to keep the expenses down in January!  Come to think of it, I don't even think I told my wife what I bought!  Surprise babe...  we spent $4,000 last month :)

So I'll keep this quick:


On 1/4/2016:  We bought 12 shares of UNP at $79.00 per share - $950 total

On 1/4/2016:  We bought 13 shares of UA at $79.25 per share - $1,037 total

On 1/21/2016:  We bought 15 shares of UA at $68.65 per share - $1,036 total

On 2/1/2016:  We bought 10 shares of AAPL at $96.00 per share - $970 total

Total new dividends from these purchases stands at just $47.20 per year.  Definitely does not have the wow factor like buying REIT's or Telecom's but I'm hopeful that UA (down significantly from the all time high) will become the next NKE, UNP has been beaten down hard and the same can be said for AAPL.

With a substantial time frame to let compounding and growth continue, I believe above average dividend increases from UNP and AAPL plus a potential dividend initiation in UA will propel our dividends greatly in the future.

As more capital becomes available, UNP and AAPL are on the list to average down on if they continue to stay depressed.

So there you have it, the next couple building blocks on the path to the American Dividend Dream!  What do you think, good purchases, bad purchases?  What are you looking to buy next?

ADD

Dividend Income - January 2016 Update

Hi Everyone,

The first month is in the books and boy was it quite the rough month!  Stock market took a pretty good tumble and the east coast was hit by one of the biggest blizzards/snow storms in the history of records.  It was a pretty calm month for us all together.  Only a couple purchases (that I did not post about) and our expenses were quite low.  We were able to book another vacation...   Charleston, SC... that was completely paid for through the use of credit card points!!

In the past week, I made the mistake of finally visiting Spoonman's journal!  If you have an hour or two to kill, it is a fantastic read.  I started from page one and went all the way through the end in the course of a day.  I call it a mistake because at the end of reading it, I told my wife I want to sell everything, invest in dividend stocks, move in with my parents for a year to save money, and at the end of it all...  retire!!!  It could probably be doable but we would still have to find some work where ever we moved to but man is it fun to dream!


We ended up making four purchases in January! UNP, UA, UA again, & AAPL.  These all add up to roughly $4,000 of investments to start off the year!  I wish I had more capital to invest during the selloff, but the truck purchase last year hurt us in that regard.  We are still trying to build back up our savings a bit.  

We want to thank all of you readers out there who have stopped by and congratulated us thus far.  You are the reason these posts keep coming out and continue to get better and better!

So with that being said, lets get down to the numbers.