Passive Income and Pageviews – September 2014 Update

Passive Income and Pageviews - September 2014 - Mountain

Another month in the bag and some cash in the pockets! These really are my favorite posts to write, if only because I get to spend some time reviewing how much extra cash I’ve collected by investing wisely and sitting on the sidelines watching it grow! If cash is king, than passive income is the mountain on which he is perched! September was a positive month all the way around with a record dividend month and solid P2P lending numbers. Doesn’t hurt the readership came back with a vengeance as my posting has become a bit more predictable and regular. So without further ado, let’s dive into September’s passive income and blog update!

September Passive Income and Pageviews:
 
August
Year-to-Date
2014 Goal
Percentage of
Annual Goal
Lending Club
$104.71
$1,077.25
$1,950
55.24%
Prosper
$19.85
$226.15
$400
56.54%
Dividends
$178.87
$1,108.49
$1,650
67.18%
Total
$303.43
$2,411.89
$4,000
60.30%
Blog Pageviews
5,361
41,024
100,000
41.02%
Unique Visitors
1,733
13,441
20,000
67.21%

Blog Pageviews: Whew, check out all those sweet views! After some summer doldrums in pageviews given my few months off due to getting married, things have bounced back quite quickly, turning in one of my higher months in the 20-month history of Write Your Own Reality. Side note: 20 months! Holy moley, time flies! During last month’s passive income update, I set a short-term and impromptu goal of 5,000 pageviews for the month of September and I was able to clear that with a nice margin.

Passive Income and Pageviews - September 2014 - Google Analytics Blog Pageviews

My secondary goal for the year is to hit 20,000 unique visitors, or users as Google now calls them. I continue to track along well with this goal, hitting a total of 13,441 for the year to date. While I’m behind the annualized pace for this goal, I’m hopeful and confident that the increase in readership each month will translate into a late year push toward obtaining this goal. So, shameless plug here, share this post using the sharing buttons at the bottom of the screen! High-fives all the way around for teamwork!

Lending Club/Prosper: Okay, now onto the money portion of this show… As I first did last month, I am combining my two peer to peer lending accounts in one summary for simplicity and brevity. September was a dip from last month’s strong numbers, but continued to chug along bringing in a total of $124.56 across all three accounts. Each account was hit with a default (my Roth had a couple of them) bringing my net interest number down. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just another successful month of triple-digit interest income.

At this point, I am quite confident I will not hit my annual goals for the year; however, as discussed before, this is mostly due to the maturation of my accounts, hence the defaults, and an overestimation of fresh capital. I am getting awesomely close to the $18,000 mark of total assets across all three accounts. Given I expect to earn approximately 10% per year of net interest, my peer to peer lending accounts are really a strong source of passive income. Prior to the end of the year I’d like to see if I can get these close to the $20,000 mark with some fresh capital to kick off 2015 with a bang! I’ll be doing a detailed review of my peer to peer lending accounts this month, so be sure to check back for that.

Dividends: Record setting month baby! Given my nine months of steady investing in my no-cost dividend growth portfolio with Loyal3, I’ve been able to set a record high this September, even without making many large investments this year. Fortunately, that should be changing going forward as my capital should be freed up a bit more for allocation to my dividend growth investments.

During the month of September, I received $178.87 of dividends from 14 different positions! Yes, 14! Compare this to just seven a year ago. Say hello diversification! And I’ve been preaching sharing the benefits of investing regularly with Loyal3 all year, and this month is a prime example as to the rewards of that. Six positions paid me a total of $20.19 in dividends in one month, after only opening the account and contributing either $300 or $500 per month. Every little bit makes a difference and the dividends I’ve received this month clearly reflect that.

Below is a list of all 14 positions, the dividends received, and whether those dividends were reinvested directly.

  • Aflac (AFL): $11.43, reinvested into 0.185 shares
  • American Realty Capital Partners (ARCP): $15.49, reinvested into 1.216 shares
  • Digital Realty Trust (DLR): $26.41, reinvested into 0.425 shares
  • Ensco (ESV): $19.01, reinvested into 0.432 shares
  • Lorillard (LO): $25.40, reinvested into 0.429 shares
  • Mattel (MAT): $4.67
  • McDonald’s (MCD): $5.09
  • Meredith Corp (MDP): $14.41, reinvested into 0.311 shares
  • Pepsi (PEP): $1.49
  • Prospect Capital (PSEC): $20.33, reinvested into 1.998 shares
  • TAL International Group (TAL): $25.99, reinvested into 0.609 shares
  • Target (TGT): $4.49
  • Unilever (UL): $3.37
  • Wal-Mart (WMT): $1.08

As with previous months, I am directly reinvesting all my dividends until my annual dividend income falls between $2-3,000 per year in a particular account, allowing me to reinvest more selectively a few times per year. This of course is always subject to change. For the dividends in my Loyal3 Portfolio, they will be selectively reinvested as earned or combined with additional contributions monthly. You can read about the dividend reinvestment options with Loyal3 in my Snowball City – Loyal3 Dividends post.

In addition to the dividends being reinvested above, I also made $525 worth of purchases in my Loyal3 account. The details of those purchases can be found here: Trades – September No-Cost Dividend Growth Portfolio Purchases. In addition to my Loyal3 transactions, I purchased 18 shares of Deere & Company during September.

When factoring in my dividend reinvestments, dividend increases, and the stock purchases during the past month, my forward 12-month dividends increased to $1,628.76. This represents an increase of $80.72 from August’s mark, and an increase of $389.28 from a year ago. The below chart reflects my dividends received, as well as my forward 12-month dividends since the beginning of 2013, when I started tracking things on the blog. Man, what a beautiful looking chart!

Passive Income and Pageviews - September 2014 - Dividends Received and Foward 12-Month Dividends

Passive Income Summary

During September, I received a total of $303.43 of passive income, well diversified across my two investment types, dividends and peer to peer lending. Overall, my year-to-date passive income earned is $2,411.89, which is just $231.59 away from exceeding last year’s total. For the 2014, I am averaging $267.99 per month of passive income. I should be able to pass 2013’s passive income total sometime in October. You can find below my updated passive income chart showing my overall passive income for the last 21 months, since January 2013.

Passive Income and Pageviews - September 2014 - Passive Income since January 2013

September was a solid month for passive income and a great month for blogging. Looking forward to finishing the last quarter of 2014 strong! I hope all of you are planning a sprint to the finish like I am!

Don’t hesitate to look around; you can find details on the various aspects of my passive income pieces under their respective pages, Lending ClubProsper, and Dividend Growth. Additionally, you can find all of my monthly updates under the Passive Income Updates page, and all my monthly updates and incremental progress towards my 2014 goals on the Goals page.

Flickr: blmlers2

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Comments

  1. roadmap2retire says:

    Some great graphs and fantastic progress on your part. Looks like you are going to get close to your goal…hopefully you will be able to surpass it.

    Best wishes
    R2R

  2. You have several sources of passive income which makes for a great safety net. Hopefully you can turn the page views into a small supplemental income as well!

    • While blog income is not a focus of mine, being able to support and potentially exceed the costs associated with blogging are certainly a benefit of increased traffic.

      Thank you for the support!

  3. Your graphs paint a nice picture of your dividend income. I fully agree with you that these are some of the most fun posts to write. Earning passive income is a great feeling. Happy to see that we have several names in common for receiving dividends. Thanks for the update and look forward to seeing how 2014 will end for us all.

  4. Those are nice clean graphs, I like it. Hopefully we achieve our goals, we have 3 months left and time to get busy! :)

  5. W2R,

    Awesome stuff, my friend. The passive income you’re generating off of your account value is truly stunning. Although, you’ve got a lot of exposure to some high-yield assets, like TAL, ARCP, DLR, ESV, and your P2P lending accounts which are providing the bulk of your income. Some of those investments seem a bit risky to me, but it looks like you’re diversifying nicely from here. Keep it up!

    Best regards.

    • You’ve hit the nail on the head as it comes to diversification. I am in the process of expanding and jumping away from the high-yield stuff into more traditional growth investments. While this will lower my portfolio yield, it will allow for long-term sustainability. When I started building the DG portfolio, it was during a time of great weakness in REITs, so I got pretty heavy and out of balance at first. By the end of 2015, my portfolio will look completely different.

      Also to note, this doesn’t not encompass my full investment portfolio. I hold assets in other accounts which are not reflected here (mostly because they aren’t as fun to write about and track).

      Appreciate you support and comments DM.

  6. W2W,

    That’s awesome that you have a few passive income sources. Talk about diversification. That’s something I’m trying to achieve with our portfolio too.

    Loving your graphs. That’s something I need to incorporate in my updates in the future.

    • Diversification should be at the forefront of every investors mind. Being able to spread risk among different companies with a dividend growth portfolio to sharing the passive income burden between external sources is important, yet requires some planning.

      Glad you like the graphs! I know I do since they provide a great visual snapshot of my progress.

      Thanks for stopping by, Tawcan!

  7. Awesome month!! Congrats on setting a record and many more to come each and every month! As others have noted, I love the graphs! That Loyal3 portfolio is growing nicely.

    • Man, everyone is loving the graphs this update! I do too and am happy to have put them together. I have more stuff plan, and love the visuals when I can put them together!

      Appreciate your support SAD!

  8. Excellent progress, W2R. You’re building an excellent record breaking income machine over here. It’s going to be spitting out some cash in just a few years. Thanks for sharing your progress!

  9. Extremely well documented. You have lots of detail in that post. I was very impressed by how well thought out it was. Looks like you are hitting on all cylinders.

    Keep cranking,

    Robert the DividendDreamer

  10. Impressive. Your blog is really taking off, and your P2P investments appear to be doing well; I should look into doing those myself someday, when I have a more solid portfolio. Those goals appear challenging, and I wish you the best in exceeding them!

    • I am an odd duck in that I love tracking things in Excel, so I try and obtain as much data as possible to support my investments and how they are doing.

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting!

  11. You got yourself a great trifecta going on here and congratulations on record dividend income. You should be seeing more and more on that with some recent dividend raises.

    Good luck.

  12. W2R,

    those are really nice figures all around. What I like the most is the imense diversification of income sources. That safety will bring you a long way.

    I am wondering if you have a method to decide when and where to take action and push harder in order to achieve your goals?

    • Diverisification of income sources is important, and not just between companies within a dividend growth portfolio. I’d like to add another stream or two over the next few years to help supplement those I’ve already started to develop.

      As for more action, it is mostly a matter of capital available for allocation to these particular portfolios. These portfolios do not encompass all of my investments, just those that are fun to talk about. Appreciate you stopping by!

  13. I like your strategy of DRIPing until you have a sizable amount of dividends to selectively invest. That’s exactly what I did. I’m also thinking of adding some ARCP possibly at some point. I just sold a put and we’ll see if it gets assigned.

    Solid month!

    • I am most likely going to continue to DRIP for another few years, and possibly longer, especially in IRAs where I don’t necessarily contribute fresh capital regularly. I think a put is a great strategy here with ARCP.

      Thanks for your support.

  14. I need to set some goals on blogging like you do – gives me ideas.

    Awesome progress overall – you’re crushing it!

  15. Congrats! Looks like your 12 month income is growing smoothly and in an upward trajectory!

    Take care!

  16. W2R!

    Awesome month of September – both with hitting over 5K views and crushing a new dividend monthly income record. I bet your December month will shock you if September was a great month. Good luck to finishing the month of october strong, still plenty of time until year end.

    -Lanny

    • Thanks! I am hoping to add some capital over the next few months, so December might be a nice month indeed.

      I appreciate your support and stopping by Lanny! Keep up the good work yourself!

  17. Looks like you had a great month! Congrats!

  18. Time flies when blogging, huh?! Congratulations on the recent marriage. Does your wife know about the blog?

    • Time flies for sure my friend. As for the wife, she is well aware of this odd little side project. I am very open about my passion for investing and financial topics, and this blog is a natural extension of that passion. While I don’t cover every topic out there with her, I certainly am not shy with her about what my goals are for passive income, and she shares my vision as well.

      Hope things are well with you!

  19. Hi…Enjoy your blog very much. Turned me on to L3 brokerage. Thanks.
    Could you review the financial aspects of blogging, what the page views actually mean in terms of financial return, and what program you are using or suggest (blogspot, wordpress, etc). Thanks much.

    • Glad I turned you onto Loyal3 and thank you for being a reader! I am happy to have you along as I share my progress and journey.

      As for the blog, the financial rewards aren’t significant at this point, but I do cover my hosting expenses each month with a little leftover. Currently my blog is based around the WordPress platform.

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