Arborbridge wrote:
I check once a week to keep things orderly: to check more often is unecessary; to check less often just means a build up of records to update.
In truth, my system could probably go for ever without updating or checking anything - it would run itself except for occasional takeovers etc. That would be true HYPing but I would find that difficult to do.
I'm still growing my income portfolio, and on some days I allow myself to think I can squint a little and perhaps see a vague light at the end of a working-life tunnel, and as such, I have over recent years taken a close interest in the scale, reliability, and volatility of my incoming dividends, knowing that this is likely to form the basis of any real confidence I might gain that leads towards my ultimate goal of finishing work.
I have a coup!e of very simple and regular routines that I carry out to help with this, one of which is a monthly 'forward look' using the great info available from DividendData, that lists the expected dividends for the month ahead, with which I then perform a look-up against my own income holdings -
https://www.dividenddata.co.uk/dividend-payment-dates.py?m=alldividendsThat very realiably gives me a monthly list of expected dividends, along with payment dates and actual payment amounts, based on my own individual holdings, and about once a week I will verify that those expected payments have been made - a simple overall process that takes minutes per week at the most.
One of the great things about the DividendData link above, is that they will update sterling announcements as those figures are released by individual companies, so this now removes what used to be a niggly complication with this type of data-gathering, where the dividend announcements might originally be made in non-sterling currencies...
At the end of each month, I will copy over the previous monthly details to a set of Excel worksheets that hold account-level dividend payments, for long-term recording purposes, and I'll also then copy the overall monthly total into a separate worksheet that tracks both the rolling 12 month payments received, and also tax-year amounts, to help with my original aim of tracking scale, reliability, and volatility of those ongoing payment levels, and it's great to see those figures build over time, towards the sort of levels I might need them to be were I to allow myself to start thinking about finishing work...
It's that final process that is currently proving the most worthwhile to me personally, at this stage of my working life, as I can clearly now begin to judge the growing level of confidence that I have with my long term income strategy, as I begin to see how I might one day throw my dividend-switch from the current 're-invest' position, and move it over to the 'pay out as monthly-income' position...
Like others, I will sometimes see a slight delay of a couple of working days with some dividend payments, which often seem to affect my Halifax account more than my other sharedealing accounts, but I cannot ever remember not actually receiving the expected payments themselves, so I have a very high degree of confidence over any actual payments being made, and don't fret at all if there's any slight delay - they'll all be there come the end of any given month....
As mentioned earlier, it's still a case of having to squint a little to see that future point in time, but the above quick and simple processes all really help in both planning for that day I might finish work, and also giving me the confidence that the right things will be in place when I decide to do so, and finally throw that payment-switch...
Cheers,
Itsallaguess