Dividend Dolphin

The month and with that the year is drawing to an end so it is time to write down my dividend income for December 2016. December was the best month yet, almost tripling November. Five companies paid me for just owning their shares: December 7th Unilever (AMS:UNA) paid €4,13 December 9th Whitestone REIT (WSR) paid €3.83 December 10th Target (TGT) paid €1.92 December 15th Coca-Cola (KO) paid €7.90 December 16th Royal Dutch Shell (AMS:RDSA) paid €26.48 These sums combined gave me a dividend income of €44.26. This brings this years total to €114.56 for 2016. Al these amounts are after taxes. How was your last dividend month of 2016? For everyone, enjoy New Year's eve!!!

Last two weeks I have been thinking about relocating my RDSA stock from my online brokerage account to the brokerage account I have at my home bank. This bank is where I have my mortgage, some of my saving accounts, my payment account and my credit card. The reason why I wanted to move the stocks there was being eligible for the dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP) of Royal Duytch Shell. Owning 60 shares of RDSA I am receiving sufficient dividend each quarter to receive 1 extra share, even now that the stock price has risen significantly over the last few months. However, while my online broker has very low transaction fees for regular buys of shares, I would have to pay €7,50 when I would want to DRIP. Buying 1 share in the regular way would only cost €2. So DRIPping at my online broker is no option and paying 2 euros to buy one share is no option form me as well, because this would mean a transaction fee of over 8%. However, at my home bank, DRIP is free. It has much higher re...

Since owning share of Whitestone Reit (WSR) I've been receiving their dividend every month. To date I have received four dividend payments. Since the beginning I own 50 shares of WSR. And, every month I have been receiving more dividend than the month before. This is not because of dividend reinvestment, but only because of the exchange rate between dollar and Euro. When looking at the dividends received it increase from €3,59 to €3,83 after taxes. This is an increase of 6.7% without the company raising its dividend in dollars. On the other hand my dividend income is vulnerable when the Euro gets stronger again. I don't think that will happen soon as the QE in Europe is still in full force while the Fed is raising interest rates again. Still I should think about that when I want to calculate how much dividend income I'll need to live off the dividends.

This moring I made another purchase of Unilever (AMS.UNA). After the rate hike by the Fed, US stocks were getting much more expensive due to the increasing dollar/euro exchange rate. I didn't think I would be able to do another purchase this year, but paying off a debt on my previous home earlier this month (and saving up the dividends I received) made it possible to do this purchase. That is why I decided to add to one of my Euro positions. Since RDSA is already the largest position I have and has increased in value a lot since the OPEC deal, I decided tot buy some more Unilever stock. I bought 9 shares at a price of €37,75 per share. Including transaction fees this totalled €341.82 and a cost basis of €37.98. The puchase will add €11,52 before taxes or €9,80 after taxes to my annual dividend income. The yield on this purchase is 3,37% and I am expecting a dividend increase announcement before the next dividend payout in march, so it might get a bit higher. However, this i...