There’s a popular phrase in the finance world called Pay yourself first. Before you do anything like pay bills, pay loans or even buy food, your first payment should be auto deposited straight away into your account. This core benefit of pay yourself first is increasing your nest egg every month, which gives people a bigger incentive to continue doing it. Looking at your investment account grow every month is far better than watching your checking account get drained.
It also adds a layer of security in case any one time emergencies pop up and ensures that whatever happens, you have the financial means to take care of it. If your car breaks down, no worries, because you have the cash on hand to get it fixed. This alleviates a lot of the financial stress that people have when it comes to paying bills that need to be paid.
In order to combat that financial stress,you should set up your savings or investment account to automatically deposit funds from your main checking account.
So how do we set up auto-deposit on Robinhood? It’s easy.
Once you’re logged into your account:
1)Open up the Menu by pressing the top left icon
2)Press Banking
3)Automatic Deposits
4)Add Automatic Deposit
5)Select how often you would like it to deposit. (I get paid twice a month, so that’s what I do)
6)Input how much you would like to transfer
7) Review and Confirm
The Robinhood App makes it very easy to set up auto-deposit and I believe everybody should do it. Remember, Pay Yourself First!
I believe it’s time to experiment with a new type of post. I’m not sure how well this will go over but I figure some people might find it interesting on how I spend my money when it comes to buying food. Now, I already talked about my budget and how much I allocate every month to food. I went shopping today and decided that I would post the receipts and talk about what I purchased.
In the past, we would just shop at Walmart for everything and when they introduced their Savings Catcher App, we thought we were just saving even more. I never really bothered with shopping around because I just thought I could afford it. And I can, but it’s not a smart way of getting the most out of our paychecks
I first start off by viewing the grocery stores weekly ads online. I believe almost every store does this now and a simple google search will show you what stores are near by. This trip I decided to stop at Piggly Wiggly and a discount food store named Save-A-Lot since they are right next to each other where I live. The weekly ads on their websites allow you to “Add” items to your shopping list and then email/print them out for use in the store. This makes a convenient way to make lists. You can view the ads for Piggly Wiggly’s and Save-A-Lot if you feel so inclined.
To make it easier, I simply copy each item with the price into a program called Zim. I like this program cause I can easily add check boxes to each item which allows me to simply check them off as I find them at the store. Then I can just print it off like normal. You can do the same thing in notepad or just go off the emails if you want, the choice is up to you!
Here’s what I wanted to pick up from the weekly ads.
I don’t usually go into the store with a plan on what meals to make, even though I probably should. I like to just pick up the things I know my family and I will eat and then go from there. The items on the bottom without checkboxes are just things that need to be picked up. When it comes to meat and vegetables, we just make meals based on whatever is on sale. There’s usually some form of chicken or beef on sale every week and thankfully no one in our family is a picky eater. Dark meat or white meat is just fine for us!
The first stop was Piggly Wiggly. Here’s the receipt with what got purchased.
Click to Enlarge
The cheese was not on sale so I paid full price for it. Up next is Sunny D for a buck each. I decided to pick up two since my son loves to drink juice and I sometimes feel nostalgic for it. The banquet meals for $1 each are what I call “lazy meals.” It’s for when we don’t want to cook but want to eat something. I also use it whenever the wife and kid are gone and I want to eat something.
Up next are two huge bags of crinkle cut french fries for $1.50 each. Everybody loves french fries and this is way cheaper than getting them from Mcdonald’s. I also picked up some pop tarts for 3/$5. I’m not that big of a fan of them but my wife and son love them, so who am I to keep it from them.
The best deal comes from my meat purchases. I bought two packages of boneless chicken breasts for $1.49 a lb. One of the packages was frozen and went straight into the freezer. The other was put in the fridge to be used this week. It’s a great price for chicken breast though!
I also bought a five pound box of bacon for $10. I didn’t know what to expect from them but when we got them home, I was surprised that it’s just a big box of slices. And with bacon prices going up lately (single packages of bacon are going for $3-4), I figure this might be a gamble that pays off. We went ahead and broke the box down and put the bacon in a few freezer bags. Whenever we need bacon, we can just pull out one freezer bag for the week.
I originally went for Bounty paper towels for 9.99, but when getting there realized that their store brand was cheaper per sq ft. There’s a few things that I don’t want to skimp on, like toilet paper, but for paper towels, this is more than fine. I also didn’t pick up the T-bones because, quite frankly, they didn’t look so great.
For a total of $66.91. Not a bad haul from Piggly Wiggly.
Up next is the haul from Save-A-Lot, a local discount food store here in North Carolina.
I picked up quite a few cans of beans and diced tomatoes for some chili that I plan on making in the future. At 59 cents a can, you can’t really beat that. Some notable standouts was a 15-ct box of corndogs for $4.99 which, again, is mostly for that lazy meal that we find ourselves wanting to have. We’re also trying some store brand food with their Mac-n-cheese and their store cheese nips that are both $1.49 each. Also 2 for 88 cent Yoplait yogurt is a heck of a deal.
Again, for $58.72 this is a pretty decent haul. The weird oddity here is the Frozen Pork Tails for $9.78. Not sure why they came up as pig tails since I definitely picked up Ribeyes and I verified the package as well as the price per lb.
This grocery shopping day should last us through the month and put us under our $300 food budget by about $60 bucks. What I’ll do is go ahead and deposit the $60 bucks into my dividend portfolio next month to take advantage of the extra money.
Thanks for reading, I’ll try and do this again in 2 weeks for February!
I’ve been meaning to sit down and write a Robinhood App Tutorial for awhile now. The Robinhood App is alluring to a lot of beginner investors due to it’s no-fee stock trades. If you have no idea what that means because you’re a complete Noob–don’t worry, we all were there at one time.
Almost every stock broker (Schwab, TradeKing, TDAmeritrade) charges a fee anytime you buy or sell a stock. The prices can differ between brokers, but it’s usually around $9.99+ per trade. When you’re just starting out, a lot of times you don’t have a lot of capital (money) and you end up taking a big chunk out of your money every time you buy/sell. Once you get rich and can start doing trades in increments of thousands, the price doesn’t effect you as much but when you’re just starting out, it hurts. That’s where the Robinhood App comes in:
First things first. You have to have a smartphone. The Robinhood App currently supports Iphone and Android devices. It currently doesn’t have a web app, so you’re going to have to do the ordering on your phone. There’s also some Account requirements below:
Be 18 years or older
Have a valid Social Security Number (not a Taxpayer Identification Number)
Have a legal U.S. residential address
Be a U.S. citizen, U.S. permanent resident, or have a valid U.S. visa*
Step 1: Download the App – Yep, you should have known this was coming. Go ahead and open the Apple or Play Store on your phone and download the Robinhood – Free Stock Trading App.
Step 2: Follow the Steps and Enter Legal Information – Enter a username or password to login with along with your real First, Last Name and phone number. From here, more secured answers will be asked such as your Social Security Number (tax purposes), Address, Citizenship and Employment information. There’s some additional questions you’ll have to fill out truthfully as well.
Step 3: Fund your Account– You’ll have to link either a checking or savings account in order to deposit/withdrawal funds to Robinhood. For instance, I hooked up my main savings account that I have from Capital One 360 (affiliate). Before you can transfer money into your Robinhood account, they’re going to make two small deposits into your checking/savings account in order to verify the information is correct. This process takes a few days, so come back once that’s been done. Usually it’s a few cents for each of the two deposits. Confirm the amounts in the App and you’re good to go. Go ahead and make your first deposit in to your Robinhood account.
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Question: How much should I deposit? That’s entirely up to you but the rule of thumb is only invest the money that you’re willing to lose. While most of the stocks I talk about here on Dividend Noob are safe long term, nothing is guaranteed and stocks can go up and down for any reason. With that said, make sure you did your budget and have an emergency fund for those times when you need spare cash. There’s also making sure you fully fund your Roth IRA and contribute to your work 401k, where applicable, but that’s outside the scope of this post. For more details, check out my post on How much Money Do I Need to Get Started Investing.
Question: What should I buy first? Slow down partner. Go ahead and read up on the stocks that interest you and make sure they’re right for you. There’s a plethora of sources to pull information from. I will say this though: Make sure you do your own research before buying a stock. Don’t rely on some random internet person. Trust but Verify goes a long way. If you’re entirely new, read up on the Dividend Aristocrats, Champions and Challengers.
Question: Why is this scary? The idea of losing money is always scary. You’re not exactly paying for something tangible that you can hold in your hands. Our goal here is simple: Buy High Quality Dividend Stocks that not only make us money in growth over the years, but also pays out a healthy dividend to us each and every quarter. Double-dipping like an ice cream, twice the fun.
If you’re interested in Robinhood (affiliate link to support the site), give it go. Hopefully this was helpful. See you guys next week.
Does the Robinhood App allow investors a chance to DRIP? If you’re looking for the Robinhood App to provide a dividend reinvestment plan, you’re out of luck. At the time of this post, Robinhood does not provide any way to do it. They also don’t allow partial shares, so if they are going to implement it in the near future, they’ll have to radically change their overall design for Robinhood. Hopefully they’re working towards adding it in the future but until then, what do we plan on doing with our dividends from our high quality dividend growth stocks?
What I’m going to start doing is manually reinvesting the dividends back into the company. Yep, a manual DRIP so to speak. Every time I get a dividend from a stock in my portfolio, I’ll take that money and apply it to an additional share(s) in the company. While not quite the definition of DRIP, it’s the closest thing we can do with the Robinhood App. And considering it’s free trades, it sort of acts the same.
There’s a few cons to this approach, let’s go ahead and discuss them.
No Partial Shares – With the Robinhood App not allowing partial shares, we’re going to have to provide the transaction with extra equity in order to round it up to a full share. While this is true, I always keep a percentage of cash in my account and I can cover the single share with no problem. I know this might not be the case for everybody, so the cash dividend will have to sit in your account until you accumulate enough to do a transaction.
Not Automatic – The beauty of a DRIP is that it’s automatic. That means you can go about your life and not worry about the money that your stocks pay out to you. For those hands off investors, this is a god send. That just means we’re going to have to do a little extra work. This comes with some added benefit though–if we believe a stock is way overvalued, we can put their dividends to use in a separate stock that we feel is undervalued. Again, this might not be for everybody, but its something to think about.
While not perfect, I believe this is a decent way to get started with doing a Robinhood DRIP. Let me know in the comments if there’s a better way!
You can always check out my current portfolio here. You can also follow me on Twitter.
The year has finally ended and I thought it would be a good to take some time and look back at the dividend portfolio to see exactly how it performed; if there were any big clear winners or clear losers and if there are any lessons to be learned from it all.
Let’s first start our look at the overall market indexes. The S&P 500 had a positive 10% increase for the year with The Dow up over 13%. Even if you remove the post-election surge in November, the market still has a positive return for 2016.
Portfolio wise, my return has been 14.72% for the year with the majority of the returns coming from stock growth. I was lucky enough to purchase a lot of high quality dividend paying stocks on some dips and they have rebounded and have went even higher. The bulk of my return has been since the Trump rally in November however. Before that, i was up about 5%. The following image shows the graph in the Robinhood App on the yearly scale.
Let’s take a look with how much of the return is from dividends vs stock growth. The following image is just a spreadsheet where I keep track of dividends paid out on a monthly basis.
At almost $1k in dividends being paid out to my account, this accounts for over 20% of my yearly return. Not too shabby for passive income.
The biggest winners, growth wise, of my portfolio are MAIN, STWD, T and JNJ.
I first started my position in MAIN in December of last year and have been collecting their monthly dividends ever since. They pay 18 cents a share normally, but add on top of that they also paid a special dividend in June and December of this year, then we can see why MAIN is a fun stock to own. They have had a big year in growth as well since I’m up 26.17% on it. At the time before this is posted, I have sold my position in MAIN to lock in the growth. I hope to maybe get back into it once it’s closer to it’s fair price.
STWD is another stock that I didn’t realize would perform so well when I first bought it in March 2015. It still has a dividend yield over 8% and I’ve received three dividend payments of 48 cents a share. On top of that, it’s also returned 21.3% growth. STWD is another stock that I need to revisit because I’m not sure if the dividend is sustainable. Most analyst have STWD as a hold right now and I believe I will follow that advice for the time being.
T is a telecommunications giant that’s been a dividend champion for 33 years. What’s also impressive is the 25% total return I have as well as the three dividend payments I received since owning it back in January 2015. The stock still has a PE Ratio under 20 and gives a dividend yield of 4.5%. My only regret is not buying more. Hindsight.
JNJ is another monster in the dividend champion list that has been raising dividends for 54 years. Since I’ve purchased them in January 2015, they have given my portfolio a 19.7% return, as well as four dividend payments. Right now, I believe they are fairly valued and I’m looking to buy more if it happens to dip on any amount. A lot of people have been talking about JNJ being one of the “Always Buys” and I can’t find any fault with that.
The biggest lost of the portfolio came from when I finally sold off my position of CSIQ. It had dropped radically and before I pulled the trigger to dump it, I had lost over 1k. This was before I was committed fully to the DGI brotherhood. But it was definitely a lesson that I needed to learn.
Overall, I’m happy with my dividend portfolio. I managed to cobble together a collection of stocks that have beaten the index for the year, which is no easy feat. I have a lot planned for Dividend Noob in the next year, so please stay tuned!
