Year Over Year Dividend Growth 2013-2015

As I travel along on my journey to financial freedom and work towards my fiscal independence, it's important to reflect on how far I've come.  I really started to change my thoughts on how I invest starting in 2013.  My idea on investing was very scattered up until that point.  Had I made money? Yes!  Was I really successful at building a long term strategy?  Absolutely not, in fact I would argue that I really didn't know what building a long term sustainable passive income pipeline was really about.  In 2013 I really started to poke around at some online blogs and found retireby40.org  and dividendmantra.com, both really outstanding at getting my butt up off the couch and saving in a meaningful way.  My eyes were open to what passive income can do and how it can essentially free you from your regular 9-5 grind.  So I started to shift my portfolio and investment strategies into dividend stocks and other passive income pursuits.  So how have I done over the years?  Let's find out:

So this is 2013, as you can see it's all over the board with my month to month with December looking fantastic compared to the others.  However, my total was only $1310.53 in passive income.  Not the stuff that financial independence is made of, but what would amount to at least a decent start considering my prior investment decisions.

2014 looks quite a bit stronger, pretty obvious I've done some reallocation of assets and generated some substantially different returns from dividends.  In fact I brought in $6269.18 in passive income.  That's a pretty solid rate of improvement with almost a 4x increase.  This happened from a few things.  I rolled over my old 401k and bought some dividend stocks, probably did a lot of the lifting right?  It actually only accounted for about 40% of what I improved upon.  So my other accounts did some pretty heavy lifting of their own.  

So how am I looking so far this year?  Well as previously noted I've had some dividend reductions from Seadrill, but all is not lost.  Halfway through the year I'm at $3024.53 in passive income.  This makes me about $850 YTD over my total of $2126.55 at the same time last year.  So while my income looks like it has gone down.  I'm actually up considerably in 2015 thus far TYD.