Here is the dividend income report for August, 2023.
The monthly dividend income came out to $309.70. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $6589.89.
The income for August, 2022 was $219.36, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of August was $6135.89.
My job situation is up in the air. I am not assigned to a project at the moment, so I might be let go. Part of me would be glad to leave, although I have nothing lined up. If I can stay for a couple of more years, I can get some nice benefits. If you leave the company and you are at least 55 years old and you have been with the company for at least ten years, they will provide health insurance for life. Granted, a lot of companies have rescinded benefits. And I really do not like the direction the company is going in; they are a large consulting firm, and they seem to care more about getting clients to use expensive software from the vendors than building robust applications and teaching them how to use technology themselves. Two and a half years is a long time to deal with this stuff. I am sick to death of anything from Microsoft and I would love to stay in tech and never touch anything Apple or Google or Facebook or Microsoft ever again. And I would love to deal with people where I can say I am tired of Big Tech, and not get the regurgitated response that I have to use big vendor garbage because everybody else does.
If I leave, I will transfer a lot of money from my Roth 401K to my Roth IRA. I might load up on Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF, XYLD. The payout varies from month to month, but I might be able to get $1000 a month from it. I might alternate what I do with that money each month: One month reinvest the dividends and buy more shares of XYLD, then the next month have the dividends go to cash, and use that to buy shares in one of the other ETFs I have. If I could do that, I would be adding as much each year as the yearly contribution limits. The risk is I would be putting a LOT into one fund. I will see what happens in the next few weeks.
If I had ten times as much XYLD as I do now, then I think that could cover my expenses today. Granted, I cannot touch it for a while since it is in an IRA.
There was an article on Yahoo Finance recently saying that if you have assets and/or income to cover your expenses 36 times over then you do not need an annuity. I know a lot of people think annuities are not worth the fees, expenses and restrictions, and the site this article was taken from really pushes annuities. Nevertheless, I thought it was an interesting statistic. My goal is to live off of the dividends and not touch principal.
I saw a few other articles on Yahoo Finance that I thought were interesting. And infuriating. It was more bellyaching about the debt. The kind that only seems to happen when we have a Democrat in the White House.
One of them is ‘Mind-blowing’ US debt binge amid high interest rates is threatening financial stability, Larry McDonald says. This guy runs a site called The Bear Traps Report. I had never heard of this guy before, I just saw an article about him on Yahoo Finance. Where were these guys when Trump and Rethuglicans cut taxes on wealthy in 2017? That had an effect on debt too, and cutting taxes has never made the federal government spend less. There were not too many articles pointing out the conservative bait and switch that happens over and over again, unless you go to Daily Kos. Anyone who tells you the media is liberal is delusional.
Conservatives do the same bait-and-switch all the time with taxes. Cutting taxes (especially on the wealthy) will cause the federal government to cut spending, and shrink the debt, yield more federal revenue, and grow the economy like gangbusters. Likewise, raising taxes or letting cuts expire will cause us to become a third-world country.
Bill Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which raised taxes on the wealthy. Rethuglicans told us it would be doom for us all. Full stop. But I remember the 1990s as being pretty good. Maybe it is because I was in my 20s at the time, but jobs were plentiful, interest rates were low, and people had hope for the future. Conservatives might say that raising taxes on rich people did not crater the economy because of, say, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, or all the spending companies did to prevent their systems from crashing due to the Y2K bug. But that is the bait and switch: they make simple, even simplistic, predictions, and when they do not pan out they appeal to the very complexity they denied when making their predictions.
If you look at some graphs of economic data, it is impossible to see the effects of tax cuts or the expiration of tax cuts. The slopes are not constants, but we do not see the dramatic effects that conservatives always tell us we are going to see any minute now.
Here is a graph of federal expenditures from 2001.01.01 to 2023.04.01. Here they are from 1999.01.01 to 2023.04.01 so we can see the Clinton years as well. Where is the glorious prosperity from the Bush and Trump tax cuts? Where is the crushing depressions from Clinton, Obama and Biden? Hard to say from this graph.
Here is a graph of US GDP from 1993.01.01 to 2023.04.01. If you did not have the years to guide you, I do not think you would know which years were under Democratic or Rethuglican presidents.
Here is a graph of total public debt from 1993.01.01 to 2023.04.01. Yes, Obama’s slope is steeper than Bush’s, but Bush’s is steeper than Clinton’s. And the Trump years look like the Obama years. The graph is noticeably steeper in the Biden years. I guess we are still feeling the effects of that nasty pandemic that Trump told us would miraculously go away in April 2020 [Note 1]. A lot of people think that if a politician has the magic “R” after their name then they know what they are doing. We can safely assume the opposite: Rethuglicans have no idea what they are doing.
And Obama was dealing with the fallout of Bush. I do not think the Great Financial Crisis was caused by tax cuts. Deregulation was the cause. Yes, some of the deregulation happened under Clinton, but then why didn’t the Bush administration undo it? Conservatives are always telling us they know how the world works. At least that what they say until everything falls apart on their watch.
And if the media was even 1% as “liberal” as a lot of people seem to think, none of these bozos would get elected to be dog catcher.
I have written about the conservative bait-and-switch on taxes here and here. And when conservatives realize they have no arguments left, they will usually say, “But don’t you want to pay less tax?” Yes, that would be nice, but I do not think we should pile debt onto ourselves or our posterity. I would like to understand reality as it is as opposed to living in a fantasy world. And if you want to live in a nice country, you have to pay for it.
Note 1: Per this page at CNN (link here, archive here), on March 1 the US was seeing 3 new cases a day; on March 31, it was 19,337 cases a day.
Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each August from the beginning of my records through 2023:
| Month | YTD | Amount | 3MMA | 12MMA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-08 | $6589.89 | $309.70 | $1236.42 | $1053.31 |
| 2022-08 | $6135.89 | $219.36 | $1195.56 | $1001.53 |
| 2021-08 | $5069.04 | $207.39 | $856.33 | $899.01 |
| 2020-08 | $4822.38 | $205.28 | $790.58 | $910.30 |
| 2019-08 | $4373.04 | $63.10 | $788.78 | $697.89 |
| 2018-08 | $2970.08 | $48.14 | $549.51 | $540.48 |
| 2017-08 | $4021.30 | $581.69 | $558.23 | $546.50 |
| 2016-08 | $3539.84 | $522.20 | $493.44 | $493.92 |
| 2015-08 | $3084.90 | $406.45 | $427.26 | $422.22 |
| 2014-08 | $2456.27 | $323.94 | $348.41 | $323.64 |
| 2013-08 | $1978.40 | $305.11 | $279.05 | $287.74 |
| 2012-08 | $2110.57 | $316.04 | $280.53 | $277.00 |
| 2011-08 | $1878.52 | $322.35 | $254.56 | $225.45 |
Here are the securities and the income amounts for August, 2023:
- Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $37.76
- Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $202.52
- Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $18.90
- Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $50.52
Big Jim says he doesn’t care what women think about his dick, as along as they keep thinking about it.
Painting of The Lute Player by Caravaggio (1571 -1610); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain. Other images from St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED site.