Hi Everyone,
So here we are, 2017 has come to a close. What a year it was! Paid off the house, adopted a child, lived in Florida for a month, and still received a nice some of money from dividends!
I am still working up the cost of adoption post so I figured I would throw this one in here first.
In total, we received income from 6 different funds in December and here is what it looked like:
UVE - $27.83
V - $20.71
VWILX - 72.78
VHT - $19.97
FTSE - $156.86
MM - $5.44
Total - $303.59
So, we cleared the $300 mark and best of all, the totals were not so lopsided like they are for my OHI holding. With FTSE being a mutual fund with a basket full of stocks, there is less risk than just one primary holding. Like I posted last year, my company/Vanguard changed up the investment mix for my 401K and 3 of my other funds do not pay dividends or capital gain distributions anymore. We investors are told that they are automatically reinvested into the fund...
In 2017, we received a total of $2,750 in dividends! Our expenses for the last 6 months of the year, not including adoption expenses were averaging $2,500 a month. With recent investments, including TAP, O, SKT and BTI, we are projecting over $3,000 already for next year. Slowly but surely we are climbing our way back to where we were before all the big life changes.
2018 is already shaping up to be one of the best years yet. Having a child is truly life changing and incredible. If we can keep expenses running low and add around $1000 a month to the taxable account throughout the year, we should gather around $500 more per year in dividend income.
If you do the math, obviously you can see that retiring early is essentially out of the question. Like I said in the previous post, having a child and one income changes things. I wouldn't change anything though. We are enjoying every minute of our growing family!
Hope you had a great 2017!
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