June 2015 Dividend Wrap Up

This is the first post I've had that highlights my journey and I'm excited that I am starting to really get the ball rolling on seeing how my dividends are starting to do the lifting for my portfolio.  June is an interesting month for me as it was one that really looked strong last year, but by comparison 2015 saw a reduction in my dividend appreciation.  This will also hold true in September as there were a few things that changed on me with my holdings.  This will highlight an important lesson as investing in stocks that are perceived high quality, with management confirming that they maintain the distribution and changing their stance, and making sure that you understand investment risks is imperative to your long term success.  So first I'll start out with the results per account.

	Roth IRA	IRA	Investments
January	39.87	121.93	172.97	334.77
February	265.53	105.44	110.36	481.33
March	205.87	430.79	82.56	719.22
April	41.46	124.5	159.04	325
May	287.29	118.82	95.75	501.86
June	270.12	341.4	50.83	662.35
July				0
August				0
September				0
October				0
November				0
December				0
	1110.14	1242.88	671.51	3024.53

A pretty descent month overall as I topped $660 in passive income which is pretty outstanding in and by itself.  So let's take a look at it in comparison to last year by account.

My Roth IRA produced $270.12 in dividend income, up from $180.88 which results in a 49.33657673595755% increase (yes oddly specific I know.  However this highlights the improvement year over year and an almost 50% increase in dividend income is amazing.  This truly shows how compounding really helps.

My Investments account income was $50.83, up from $36 which results in an increase of 41.194444444444436%.  What this doesn't show is that the $36 that was income last year at this time was all from Seadrill (SDRL) and they have eliminated their dividend with the price of oil plummeting.  So this is actually 100% new dividend capital that came in in 2015.  Pretty fantastic overall.

This brings me to my IRA, this one is the only account that had negative growth in the month, but that can also be attributed to Seadrill.  The account produced $341.40 in income, down from $634.03 last year.  This resulted in a decrease of 46.15396747787% which really hurts from an income perspective.  This is a hard lesson that the market teaches us on occasion, even when we don't want to be taught.  Seadrill is one of the world leaders in deep sea drilling and provided a generous $4.00 per share annual dividend.  The company committed to keeping the dividend intact while oil plummeted until they decided not to and surprised the market with the cut.  Obviously this really shocked the market and made the stock take a dive.  This is a good lesson though as we as investors tend to listen to the leadership of a company and look to them for guidance.  While I saw deteriorating results, I went against my gut and stood by the company as they "committed" to maintaining their payout.  Not only was this a false pretense, but they axed the dividend completely.  As I owned over 200 shares of the company, this resulted in a very negative downside surprise for me come dividend time this year.

Overall my dividend income fell by 22.1598053848233% this month and was down $188.56, but it's not as bad as it seems as my VIG shares did not pay out in June like they typically do.  This adds about another $100 to the total so excluding my dividend elimination from SDRL the account grew in payout quite nicely.