Weekly Newsletter   Challenge account   Weekly Newsletter   


Dividend Investor: How to track a dividend growth portfolio

ROTH IRA
 

Finally, I was able to finish my DGI (dividend growth investment) portfolio tracker in Google spreadsheet.

There are many other fellow investors out there who use Excel or Google Spreadsheet to track their portfolios and when I browsed the internet to find inspiration and knowledge on how to automate my portfolio tracker so I can analyze my portfolio without having it updating manually I came across many great web sites and blogs.

I consider myself a spreadsheet geek who loves to create a plenty of spreadsheet to gain all sorts of possible point of views to see the portfolio from different angles. Of course, in the past I overdone that and since many of my tracking spreadsheets required manual update soon it became tedious and boring work.

So I scratched it all and decided to start over.

I found a great inspiration out there in the blogosphere. A great source of all sorts of spreadsheets to track and analyze your dividend portfolio comes from Scott and his Two Investing blog. He says that he got an inspiration from my calendar page but for sure, he uplifted those spreadsheets into perfection. Definitely, you must check his spreadsheets out.

I also found a good inspiration at No More Waffles and his spreadsheets, I liked the currency tracker since the investor is from Belgium and thus invest in different currencies. I liked his sector charts as they ended up really better indicating what sector goes over the roof in your portfolio and which sectors are underinvested. If you use a pie, you end up with a nice colored circle, but that won’t help much in my opinion.

And of course a good resource to creating my spreadsheet was The Dividend Meter with a pretty cool way of visualizing your dividend progress.

But what inspired me the most was a discussion with a dividend investing blogger about his model portfolio and how the stocks in that portfolio would do in the future. The discussion went on about to see what the entire portfolio would do.

And because I am an old man and I forget everything I now do not remember who that blogger was and what actually we were talking about in details. But one thing inspired me, and it was an idea of creating metrics so you can evaluate the entire portfolio and based on that you can predict the future size of that portfolio and what dividends you would probably receive.

So I created my spreadsheet as shown above this post.

What’s exciting here is that all data which are in yellowish cells are automatically updated. Only the blue cells are those I have to insert manually and I am fine with that. It is only the number of line (also showing how many individual stocks I hold), stock symbol, quantity and trade price. These numbers need to be uploaded from my broker’s account manually and I am OK with that as of now. Everything else uses formulas from either Google finance or Yahoo.

 
You can see the entire document with live data here.
 

What I consider great with this spreadsheet is that now I can see what my entire portfolio does as far as dividend income and dividend growth!

As you can see, my entire portfolio yield on cost (YOC) is 7.23% and my entire portfolio dividend growth is 7.73%.

Of course, all this will change since for example my KMI dividend yield hasn’t been updated yet to the new cut dividend, same goes with LGCY distribution suspension, but that is OK as I have enough data to calculate my portfolio future.

I can now use the existing data and once the new data come in (once Yahoo updates them) I will be able to recalculate the new portfolio future.

And what is my portfolio future?

Here is my future YOC and Income if I reinvest dividends (with no further contributions):

 

Year Income Yield on Cost Holdings Value
1 $1,271.93 7.23% $18,864.31
2 $1,469.32 8.35% $20,333.63
3 $1,706.19 9.70% $22,039.81
4 $1,992.31 11.32% $24,032.12
5 $2,340.33 13.30% $26,372.45
6 $2,766.76 15.73% $29,139.21
7 $3,293.34 18.72% $32,432.55
8 $3,948.90 22.45% $36,381.45
9 $4,772.12 27.13% $41,153.57
10 $5,815.35 33.06% $46,968.92
11 $7,150.16 40.64% $54,119.08
12 $8,875.48 50.45% $62,994.56
13 $11,129.64 63.26% $74,124.20
14 $14,108.31 80.20% $88,232.51
15 $18,091.73 102.84% $106,324.24
16 $23,486.62 133.50% $129,810.86
17 $30,891.28 175.59% $160,702.13
18 $41,198.67 234.18% $201,900.80
19 $55,761.73 316.97% $257,662.53
20 $76,663.05 435.77% $334,325.58

As you can see, if you start investing as early as you can, even small money, your account will grow into a big money making machine and you will be literally able to retire in 20 years.

It is not the value of your portfolio but income it can generate. My portfolio, unless something disastrous happens, will be able to grow my yield to the original cost to a whopping 435.77% in 20 years!

Today, I started with $17,592.38 portfolio and I will end up with $334,325.58 for a total gain of a whopping 1,800.40%. Over 20 years of my portfolio life that will make my average annual gain 90.02%.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account any future contributions which will increase all numbers faster. Let’s see how this portfolio will do over time. At least, today I have created a baseline to my portfolio.
 
 





6 responses to “Dividend Investor: How to track a dividend growth portfolio”

  1. Jeff Wishmyer says:

    are you sharing your spreadsheet?

  2. Tim Tavani says:

    Hi
    Your dividend growth investment portfolio tracker looks graeat.
    I have been looking for something like this.
    I even went to my broker trying to find something.
    Is it possible to get a working copy of yours?
    You did an excellent job.
    Thx

  3. Tim Tavani says:

    Hi

    Your dividend growth investment portfolio tracker looks graeat.

    I have been looking for something like this.

    I even went to my broker trying to find something.

    Is it possible to get a working copy of yours?

    You did an excellent job.

    Thx

  4. Lucky7 says:

    Hi,

    Thanks for that template i include dividends and purchasing price and some other details a bit different.

    Very simple you can find a template on my Blog.
    http://www.financial—–freedom.blogspot.com

    Cheers
    L7

  5. Scott says:

    Thanks for the mention, Martin!

    I really like the look of your spreadsheet as well. Out of curiosity, how are you going about calculating the dividend growth and the expected 10- and 20-year YOC?

    Scott

Leave a Reply

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