A few months back – around the end of February, I think – I posted about my new Game Plan that involved 15 “high octane” funds to aim toward reaching $1,000 a month dividends. I covered how awful the weekly dividend traps were at destroying the capital that was put in them and how I would continue to avoid buying more shares. At the time, EARN hadn’t really crashed like it has in recent months, but there’s been an overarching pattern in the majority of the funds I have been using. The share price always plummets which means my dividends are just eating the NAV instead of providing for growth of some kind.

For example I sold my COIW and PLTW shares the other day at at total loss of over $600 after accounting for dividends. That’s massive when trying to run this snowball on a shoestring budget. Together in roughly six months they had produced just shy of $400 in dividends. That doesn’t matter, though, if I still lost over 50% post dividends. They were artificially propping my monthly dividend number up while catastrophically tanking my total return.

I had thought that by avoiding DRIP and pulling that money out, it would come out ahead over a long enough time period; however, even if that were possible, it would take years. I have moved the $900 I got out of the sale over to 10 shares of SPYI and 7 shares of QQQI. This will drop my monthly dividends by around $54 – from $64 per month to about $10 per month – but these funds actually grow.

Of the remaining weekly paying funds, MST, USOY, TOPW, AMDY, GOOY, NVDW, QDTE and BLOX, I intend to sell MST. It’s also at a $400 loss after accounting for $120 in dividends. USOY has held both its share value and had massive payouts, mainly because it is oil-based, but TOPW, AMDY, GOOY, and NVDW are also extremely low share counts. It seems silly to sell a weekly Google etf that pays like $0.08 a week when it’s up $2. The same goes for the others. The only Weekly that is actually buying more shares, because of DRIP, is BLOX. It’s a crypto-tracking ETF, and I’m not entirely sure why it hasn’t “yet” experienced the NAV decay of the other weekly paying funds, but it’s grown in share value and produced good dividends.

Now we come to the real problem. One of the primary goals of this blog was to document the journey to $1,000 a month in dividends. Complexity has its own issues, and I don’t really like bouncing between a dozen funds. It’s hard to track, annoying to manage, and clearly chasing dividend yield is plain dumb. Now, if I had gambled on AMD in January and put my $25,000 into that, I would have over $50,000 in the snowball right now, which is the seductive danger of individual stocks.

This is why I need to target reliable, income-generating and diversified assets to create this passive income stream. While the price-to-dividend ratio is phenomenal on EARN, OXSQ, and ORC, they are also dragging me down by $2,400 in share value that can only be made up over months of dividends. I still feel that EARN will be solid long term, but I think I’ll be rounding if off shortly.

Basically, I think my plan going forward is to reach some set share goals on several funds that I already own that are doing well. Then all future purchases and dividends will flow into the long term, hopefully healthy, ones.

New Goals

Lock Down Funds	Goal Shares	Current Price per Share	Monthly Dividend	Shares Owned
EARN	2000	$4.38	$0.08 = $160	1893
OXSQ	1500	$1.58	$0.035 = $52.50	1202
ORC	100	$6.89	$0.10 = $10	68
PSEC	100	$2.29	$0.035 = $4	62
PFLT	100	$7.16	$0.0833 = $8	93
HRZN	100	$4.50	$0.09 = $9	100

The plan with the above funds will be to finish off their share goals first. This will take roughly $1,200 more to accomplish, producing roughly $243.50 in monthly dividends.

That leaves 9 other funds to focus on, but their costs are significantly higher per share. That’s also ignoring BLOX, which is in the “I’m done buying more but happy to have it DRIP” category. That category currently only has one thing in it. It’s currently at $1,000 in value and is buying about 0.5 shares per week of itself.

Ticker	Current Shares	Current Price	Current Dividends
ARR	100	$17.25	$0.24 ($24)
AGNC	110	$11.35	$0.12 ($13.20)
QQQI	7	$56.15	$0.6572 ($4.60)
JEPI	0	$56.71	$0.38716
MAIN	40	$53.50	$0.265 ($10.60)
O	16	$63.99	$0.271 ($4.33)
DIVO	2	$46.53	$0.18284 ($0.36)
SPYI	10	$53.73	$0.531 ($5.31)

Aside from the weekly mess that I described above, the dividends of my current holdings appear to shake out to $305.90 once the goal shares are reached in the first table. So, how do I evolve that into $1,000 a month? That is a goal that is important, because I do want to diversify into dividend king stocks at some point as well, but I want to break $1,000 a month first. SPYI and QQQI seem to be the heaviest lifters here, but this is a plan that will require about $100,000 instead of the original $50,000 goal.

For this, I’ll calculate off of dividends, as that is the stated goal. To reach $750 more in monthly dividends, lets aim for 25% of that to be ARR and AGNC. These are higher payouts, but riskier positions. Twenty-five percent of that is just shy of $200 a month, so let’s round it up to that. Targeting $100 a month each would require 417 shares of ARR at $7,176, and 834 shares of AGNC at $9,465.

Our next highest paying funds are SPYI and QQQI. Let’s position these at 40%, which is $300 a month. That’s $150 each, so 283 shares of SPYI and 229 shares of QQQI. The costs would be $15,205 and $12,858, respectfully. Then we allocate 20% to JEPI producing another $150 a month. That would be 388 shares at $22,003.

MAIN and O are also on DRIP like BLOX, but if together they were 5% each they would need to generate $40 a month (rounded up). That’s 151 shares of MAIN ($8,078) and 148 shares of O ($9,470). That leaves just DIVO for the last 5%, which we’ll also round to $40. Which finishes us out at 219 shares equaling $10,190.

With rounding this plan would generate $770 a month off of $95,000. If you add the $13,214 from the locked in funds this $108,000 portfolio would reach $1000 in dividends.

I haven’t fully consolidated the order I would buy these items, but I think this is a solid plan moving forward that will allow me to also have growth on top of productive dividends.

~~Miniwing~~
Investor, Stoic, Parent