Dividend investing for me is a long-term strategy. I like to buy great companies at good value based on historical metrics, dividend safety & future prospects. Hold them for a long time, re-invest dividends and wait for compounding to do its magic. I am a bit late at this update. 2021 year end was a pretty busy time for me personally and professionally. Here is my dividend income update for the year 2021 & what I did with my portfolio.
Dividend Income Update 2021
I made 3829 USD from my positions in 2020! It came from the following stocks:
This represents a 24% increase in dividends from 2020. Here is a percentage breakdown of dividends from all stocks in my portfolio.
One of my aims last year end was to reduce my reliance on dividend from NATI, MO & T. However, I am still getting over 45% of the total dividends from these 3 companies at end of 2021. I will have to work hard on reducing this in 2022.
If you are interested in these graphs and charts, please check out my post on how to create your own google sheet to track your portfolio across multiple accounts and create such graphs and chart.
My Buys in 2021
2021 was a pretty crazy year. Many stocks were at all time highs. We saw crazy evaluations for companies making no profit whatsoever. I did not initiate any new positions this year. All I did during the year was adding to my existing positions when I saw value.
My Sells in 2021
Nothing. Nada. This is exactly how I like it. No rotations, no sells. Just holding long term.
Performance for the year 2021
Overall I ended the year at 19% gain as compared to 25% in VTI and 26% in S&P 500. This cancels out my outperformance over the last couple of years. I am still pretty happy with the dividend income growth as well as the performance of the portfolio.
Here is a neat timeline of dividends thrown by my DGI portfolio over the last few years which shows compounding of dividend income in action.
Plans for 2022
My first goal is to reduce the percentage of dividends from NATI, MO & T by buying more of other reliable dividend stocks. Another goal of mine is to increase the total dividends by another 25% in 2022. I am also planning on consistently buying more VTI. As I have said before index investing is really my favorite type of investing and it also gives dividends.
Dividends stocks do come with some risk, but with precautions you can avoid the risky one’s and choose the best dividend paying/growing stocks for your portfolio. I prepared a guide where I discuss some key ratios, fundamentals, some important resources to look at while deciding to buy a dividend stock. Also find out how to get free access to Morningstar, Value Line, workaround paywall behind popular news sites like Seeking Alpha etc. Consider signing up for free instant access to the pdf version of the insights into dividend investing.