Just a few quick notes regarding my long-term income-portfolio...
My rolling 12-month dividend income continues to steadily and reliably rise, and my spreadsheet monthly-table and long-term chart of that rolling-income progress continues to give me a very good level of confidence that my largely income-focussed investment strategy is going to fully deliver on it's long-term intention of supplementing an early-retirement plan that's now quite rapidly beginning to take shape.
I'm still working at the moment, so a combination of re-invested dividends and fresh capital from wages is continuing to help provide a good boost to that ongoing dividend-delivery, accompanied by a reliable level of long-term dividend-growth itself, from within existing portfolio holdings.
All my dividend-generating investments are now within two ISA accounts, which will provide some account-level diversification when I eventually come to draw on that income, and my non-ISA shares account now only carries three holdings, all designed to keep me within the current relatively low unsheltered interest and dividend allowances -
- TN25 UK Gilts (0.25%) - a low-coupon gilt holding that's due to mature at the end of January 2025, and which will feed eventually into my 2025 ISA allowance investments
- Vanguard LifeStrategy 80/20 - a long-term capital-based holding to capture some hands-off growth with spare cash where ISA allowances have already been filled
- JP Morgan Indian Investment Trust (JII) - A zero-dividend Investment Trust facing the Indian market that's outperformed it's intention as another soak-away for spare unsheltered investment capital, as discussed last October here - https://tinyurl.com/22orum2d
I continue to track month-to-month dividend income, with a very reliable forward-month view being provided by the excellent DividendData website - https://www.dividenddata.co.uk/dividend-payment-dates.py?m=alldividends
Clashing that ongoing monthly list against my income-portfolio holdings provides a concise table of expected dividends on a forward-looking basis, and around 30 minutes is spent at the end of each month confirming those expected dividends against actual delivered dividends in my two ISA accounts, with the monthly amounts then also feeding into my rolling 12-month income table and chart.
In terms of company and dividend news, I've spent a little time setting up a free RNS News account with the London Stock Exchange, which then delivers highly reliable company-level news emails related to my specific portfolio holdings -
https://www.londonstockexchange.com/personal-investing/tools/email-alerts
One of the long-term issues with that approach to RNS News harvesting has often been the amount of unimportant regulatory announcements that listed companies have to make, often making granular announcements that are well outside the more important results or dividend-announcement areas that are likely to be of more interest to income-investors.
This often puts people off using this very reliable holding-specific RNS News emailing facility, but to counter that issue, I've set up a free email account with ZOHO (https://mail.zoho.eu/signup?type=org&plan=free), which can be used separately to my main email account, and when set up to receive the relevant portfolio-level RNS News announcements from the LSE link above, it can also then be configured using the ZOHO email web-interface to provide a very good level of server-based pre-filtering, thus allowing the automatic deletion of any RNS News emails that are of no general interest.
This means that huge numbers of RNS News emails are automatically deleted for me by those user-defined ZOHO filters, and the important result and dividend-based ones that are important to me then get forwarded on to my main email account.
Setting up the ZOHO email filters doesn't take any time at all, but there was an initial period of a number of weeks where the word and phrase filter-list was built up from the initial incoming RNS News emails, but things very quickly settled down, and I now reliably receive the small number of portfolio-specific RNS News-related emails that I'm interested in - it's a process that works very well indeed.
My long-term move away from UK-facing single-share income-holdings to more globally-diverse Investment Trusts has been a process that continues to deliver good results, and my one regret is perhaps not seeing the possible benefit of that shift a little sooner than I did.
I've gradually come to the conclusion over recent years that I get a great deal of satisfaction owning a much more self-sufficient and hands-off IT-based income-portfolio than I ever did having to micro-manage my UK-facing single-share portfolio, with all the regular accompanying 'excitement' that type of portfolio often provided.
As I now begin to properly plan for a life outside of paid employment, I'm happy to be in a position of good confidence that my long-term investment plans are likely to be able to deliver on their initial intentions, with very little hands-on management now being needed except a few top-ups a year from any spare funds that might be available.
In terms of my involvement with this site, I'm enjoying my break from participating more fully, and whilst I intend to maintain that, I will hope to nip in from time to time and provide updates on how things are going regarding my income-strategy.
Cheers,
Itsallaguess