$50 Per Paycheck Dividend Portfolio Update 8/31/19

I forgot to send the $50 to M1 Finance this week, so there have been no new investments in the $50 per paycheck dividend portfolio. I will initiate the transfer today (Saturday), and the next series of purchases will most likely occur on Tuesday, 9/3/19, when the US stock market opens after the long Labor Day weekend.

The lesson here is that automation always beats manually doing things, because automated things get done whether you remember to do them or not. This is of utmost importance for most people when it comes to saving. The best way to pay yourself first is to have the money taken directly out of your paycheck. If that option is not available, the second best way is to have it automatically debited from the account in which your paycheck is deposited. Otherwise, you run the risk of forgetting or being tempted to use the money for something else.

The $50 going into the dividend portfolio hasn't been automated up to this point because M1 didn't offer a biweekly funding option. However, there have been additional improvements to the platform since the last portfolio update, and now there is a biweekly option. I've signed up for it, so we'll see how that goes.

As of market close on 8/30/19, the account's value was $389.89. This includes $4.18 in cash. Per the M1 dashboard, the portfolio has earned $1.82 dividends since it was started in late June. The latest dividends have come from Simon Property Group, BOK Financial, Fastenal, Caterpillar, Westamerica Bancorporation, and Clorox. They are laughably small--in the pennies! But we'll see how they increase over time as more funds are added to the portfolio and (hopefully most of) the companies raise their dividends. That's the point of this project: to see what 50 dollars a paycheck can grow into over time and the income it can produce. Maybe it'll be a moderate success or a colossal failure. Either way we'll learn something.

The SPDR ETF SPY, which I chose as the benchmark, closed at $292.45 on 8/30/19. That makes an equivalent investment in the Standard and Poor's 500 over the same period worth $397.66. The next ex-dividend date for SPY is the third Friday in September, which this year will occur on 9/20/19. It'll be interesting to see how that payment will compare to the dividend portfolio's accumulated dividends during the same period.

Date	Additional Investment	Running Total Investment	Dividend Portfolio Account Value	Additional Benchmark SPY Shares	Running Total Benchmark SPY Shares	SPY Closing Share Price	Benchmark SPY Value	Dividend Portfolio VS Benchmark
6/24/19	$200.00	$200.00	$200.00	0.681107	0.681107	$293.64	$200.00	0.000%
7/3/19	$50.00	$250.00	$252.22	0.167336	0.848443	$298.80	$253.51	-0.511%
7/18/19	$50.00	$300.00	$299.10	0.167320	1.015763	$298.83	$303.54	-1.463%
8/2/19	$50.00	$350.00	$343.48	0.170870	1.186633	$294.62	$349.61	-1.752%
8/16/19	$50.00	$400.00	$385.57	0.173124	1.359757	$288.81	$392.71	-1.818%
8/30/19	$0.00	$400.00	$389.89	0.000000	1.359757	$292.45	$397.66	-1.954%