Recent Purchase - GGN

I didn't make any deposits into any stock trading accounts this month, but Friday I was still able to make a purchase.  I made the purchase completely through dividends accumulated in my Roth IRA.  I bought:

75 shares of GAMCO Gold and Natural Resources (GGN).  This is a closed end fund from the Gabelli fund family.  I made the purchase at $14.34 a share.  This purchase will provide 9 dollars a month of dividend income in my Roth IRA.  The fund invests primarily in shares of gold and natural resources companies, and makes additional money by writing covered calls on shares in its portfolio.  It pays a monthly dividend of 12 cents a month.

More purchases coming next month!

All quiet on the home front

September's been a pretty quiet month for me on the investing front.  On one hand, the market has been on fire, which results in less value to be had.  On the other hand, September has been a pretty expensive month for me, with car insurance, new tires, a wedding last weekend, and quarterly taxes due. Because of all this, I haven't made any new purchases, and the blog has been pretty quiet.  But fear not, activity is brewing.  If I don't buy anything next month, I'll definitely be making some purchases next month.  On top of that, I've started looking at some affordable houses to buy.  I just can no longer make sense of paying the amount of rent that I do and keeping a ton of money in a bank account doing next to nothing, when I could be living in a place of my own, building equity for not that much more money than the rent (if anything more at all).  This does not mean that my dividend investing days are over, I still plan on investing as I always do.  Wish me luck!

August Dividend Income Update

Yet another month has come and gone, meaning that its time to update my monthly dividend income.  Another great month:

Taxable account
ERH - 63.30
O - 10.23
CLMT - 408.87
LINE - 644.53

total - $1126.93

Roth IRA
ARR - 111.00
STB - 18.69

total - 129.69

Total Dividends for the month:  $1,256.62

As I said, another great month. This compares to August of 2011, where my monthly total was $714.01.  I think almost all of my purchases in the past year have been of companies that pay distributions in August, so the increase is a little bit skewed, but its still nice to see good progress.  September is never the best month for me from a dividend perspective, so it won't be as good as this, but I'm working on it.  How was your month?

Recent Purchase

Well, the markets are still running wild, and its been tough for all value investors to find deals.  However, I was able to get in on a slight dip this week in one of my favorite stocks:

I picked up 60 shares of Linn Energy (LINE) at 39.18 per share.  This will add $43.50 per quarter to my dividend income.  My projected dividend income for the next 12 months is now a staggering $21,368.01.  I don't think that I'll make 22k by the end of the year, but its still impressive none the less.  On deck for next week is my monthly dividend income update - its another good month! 

Happy Birthday!

Earlier this week, The Dividend Lifestyle Blog turned one year old!  Its been a great year, filled with ups and downs, but one thing is for certain - my finances are back on track, and its been a great experience being able to track my progress towards accumulating great dividend paying stocks.  Now, my monthly updates will include a look-back at at where I was 12 months ago to monitor progress.  As far as a purchase this month, I have a good amount of cash sitting in my account as of right now, just waiting on a good price on some certain equities to use it.

Why I'm hanging on to Chimera (CIM)

One of my stocks, chimera (CIM) is a real estate investment trust holding both agency and non-agency (not backed by the government) mortgage backed securities.  The non agency portion poses a lot of risk, and with interest rates so low plus a poor housing market, its tough to make a lot of money on such speculative investments.  Further, this particular REIT has failed to report results since the third quarter of last year, which has caused investors to become nervous and sell.

How has this affected me?  Well, I purchased CIM at $4.02 a share back in 2009, and at the time, it was paying a dividend of 11 cents a share per quarter.  Now, its trading at $2.38 and paying 9 cents a quarter.  Most dividend investors probably would have cut bait on this stock when the dividend cut, but I decided to stay the course.  Why?

Well, a few reasons.  Lets look at the fact that until earlier this week, CIM had failed to report results for almost a year.  I felt like the stock was oversold based on this results reporting, and it looks like I was right:  what they reported this week wasn't pretty - net income fell by 695 million in the past year, yet the stock went up 8.3% just due to the fact that the report was filed.  This tells me that there was certainly a "wall of worry" phenomena going on with this stock.

But simply reporting results does not make a good stock (obviously).  So what keeps me on board?  Well, I still have faith in the management.  CIM is owned by another mREIT, Annaly (NLY), which is one of the older, more successful REITs.  Secondly, the housing market cant stay down forever.  I honestly feel that with the help of decent politicians, we will finally get back to the old mantra of "if you can't afford a house, you can't buy one."  Not everyone needs to own a home, it shouldn't be a dream of our politicians!  I feel as we slowly get back to this line of thinking, less and less "bad loans" will be made to purchase homes, and companies that make money from these loans will recover.  Finally, its not like I'm talking about a lot of money here, the initial investment was only $6K.  I acknowledge its a risk, but certainly not one that can wreck my portfolio.  Trust me, if I took my portfolio to have it analyzed by an "advisor" they'd have far more problems with it than my investment in CIM.

What do you think?  Would you have sold before now, right now, or hang on like me?  

New Swag Bucks Gagdet

A few months ago, I wrote about a new stream of cash flow, here.  Since that, I've earned about 350 dollars from this, which is pretty good for just sitting around the house answering a survey here and there.  Today, I stumbled upon a new way to make some extra spending money, using swagbucks.  Its a lot easier than the survey taking (which isn't very hard), you sign up, install a toolbar, and do searches using the toolbar for the chance to earn "swag bucks."  You can also sign up for free offers on swagbucks.com, take surveys, watch movies, like on facebook, etc, all to earn swag bucks.

So what are swagbucks worth?  Well, there are a lot of gift offers, but for me, the only thing worth it are the 5 dollar amazon gift cards, which cost 450 swag bucks.  I envision buying silver/gold coins from amazon after amassing a few of these cards.

How many rewards do you earn for the different tasks?  As you could predict, the simple stuff, like using the search engine, watching commercials on the site, taking a one question poll, earn you anywhere from 1-10 swag bucks.  Signing up for the site and doing some short surveys earn you 50 swag bucks.  Signing up for free offers and trials can earn you anywhere from 100 to 1200 swag bucks.  One example of this is signing up for a free month trial of netflix for 1000 swag bucks (just remember to cancel it within the trial period if you don't want it).

Again, just a way to make a few extra bucks while lounging around the house.  Like I said, amazon has a ton of stuff on it that I can probably use, if I can't find anything, I'll simply buy a few more late issue coins/bars of silver.

If you feel like this article was useful to you and you want to sign up for swag bucks, please click the gadget on the right side of the page.