Dividend Investing - Month 12

With a new month starting, I get the chance to see how the new average monthly dividend is coming along.  It looks like the portfolio is now averaging $63.27 monthly!  Compared to month 11, I'm noting an 11.56% increase! 

Since new purchases occur in $500 intervals, the $63.27 will really help make it easier for me to accumulate the capital needed for future purchases. 

The increase in the dividend was the result of WMT increasing their dividend by 20%, and my switch from UHT to PER. 

One thing I never mentioned on my post about the stock switch is the fact that an initial $500 investment grew over the last year and now results in about $100 annual dividend payment.  PER may be a risky oil play for many individual investors, but when I factor in my yield on cost with the original UHT investment, I'm getting over 20% for my money now.

UHT for PER

This morning I initiated a quick trade.  UHT was sold for 55.80 per share, the realized gain plus initial investment was then rolled into additional shares of PER.

UHT is basically a healthcare REIT that focuses on hospitals and medical facilities.  UHT has been significantly overvalued in my opinion.  I first got the shares at the beginning of 2012 for 42$ and had a yield just shy of 6%.  Now, a year later the company has not changed at all really.  Small dividend increases with little to no growth in sight.

I made this trade for a couple reasons.  The first is the fact that RSO, being the aggressive REIT that it is, already occupies a good portion of my portfolio.  I wanted to start cutting back on REITs to prepare for interest rate hikes in the years to come.

The other reason for the trade is PER has been my biggest loser of the portfolio so far, and I felt like now is a good time to cost-average down my shares (even though I just missed the ex-div date - lol).  PER is a royalty trust in the Permian Basin by parent company Sandridge Energy.  The parent company is poorly ran in my opinion, and its other 2 royalty trusts, SDR and SDT have too much natural gas production at this time to generate profits.  The trust expires in March 2031.