2019 Year-End Summary

2019 was another great year for investments and life in general. It was the first full calendar year of marriage, the first full year of being a partner at my work, and the year my wife and I bought land and a house.

The bull market continued through the end of 2019, finalizing the decade of 2010 as one of the best performing bull markets of all time. Fortunately, I am very invested in stocks so percentage-wise my portfolio did great.

While I would actually love to see a temporary downturn in order to buy more stocks at a discount, I’ll take what I can get. The bull market has been great in that I was able to diversify from stocks and use some of that money to fund private investments and to pay down the mortgage on the house/land.

Dividend income for 2019: $11,833.66 (up from $10,408.28 in 2018)
Option income for 2019: $0.00 (the year was so busy that I did not have time to manage any option strategies)

As you can see, the annual dividend growth has slowed. More than anything, this has been due to the fact that I have now roughly $386,000 in non-dividend paying assets, which doesn’t even include the downpayment on the house. Just investing that amount alone in dividend paying stocks averaging 3% would add over $11,500 a year in dividends, bringing me up over $20,000/year. Why wouldn’t I do this? I believe the potential for these private investments should in the long run easily outperform the relatively small gains from investing solely in dividend paying stocks.

I’ll be writing up a post soon on the outlook for 2020. We have been saving up a bunch for the mortgage as well as private investments, but will soon again begin allocating each month to stock investments. Some will be dividend-focused, while others will not.

2020 will hopefully be another year full of other fun “firsts.”

6 Responses

  1. AG says:

    What are the private investments ????

  2. John says:

    Nicely Done!

  3. Hi 2I, indeed 2019 has been a good year for growth stocks. 2020 will be a slowdown due to the corona virus escaped a laboratory.
    How do you choose and select those private investments and where do you find them? Is it just all dividend stocks which are not paying dividends?

    • scott says:

      Hi Financial Independence,

      You could not have been more right about 2020 being a slowdown!! Wow, have things changed in the last couple weeks.

      As far as private investments, I get some ideas from my business partners. Other ideas come from newsletters…I subscribe to Frank Curzio’s and Marin Katusa’s newsletters. They occasionally provide either private placement or IPO ideas. I do also invest in non-dividend paying stocks, but I do not consider those “private investments.” They are more along the lines of growth investments.

      I am quite glad that I did diversify since had I been all in on equities, my portfolio would have been down a lot. While it is still down from a month ago, the private investments have buffered a lot of what could have happened.

      Scott

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CommentLuv badge

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.