As I step into my 40s, income generation has been a growing priority in my investment accounts. As such, I’ve started to build an income focused portfolio with the goal of growing to $1M invested @ a 5% dividend yield. The goal is to build another income stream that can protect me both when markets go down, but also in case I have an unexpected break in my W-2 income. While the portfolio is still small, I’m confident in the approach I’m taking to build it. I’ll continue to use this blog as a way to give updates on my Income Portfolio, where I’ll measure (1) Total Asset Investment (2) Net Growth % and (3) Expected Annual Income. My goal is not to beat the market so I will not be tracking against the S&P500 as I normally do, but rather my goal is to build an income stream to support in all market conditions.
Income Portfolio as of 8/19/2024
Return of 2.62%
The Return over the past month is 2.62% primarily coming from my investment in VNQ (Real Estate ETF). However, most of my investments performed well. I should note that I am reinvesting dividends in all of these investments except for JEPI, which represents over 70% of the portfolio when I set it up. My goal is to take the high yield JEPI delivers and reinvest it into the other assets to better balance the portfolio as it grows.
Yield of 4.98%
The portfolio is still yielding around 5% (my goal) although it has declined a little since July. I’m still okay with that balance because I’m not going to react to short term changes, but I am hoping not to see the yeild drop significantly from 5% which will be tough when I start to better balance my portfolio away being so heavily weighted in JEPI. I may look for additional investments that have strong yields that can help diversify. The other call-out is that some of these have lower dividend yields in part because they’ve grown / appreciated so I won’t ding the portfolio for that!
Total Assets Invested is $8,355, +213 since 7/7/2024
Still a really small investment as I’m growing this incrementality to my other portfolios. I expect this one to take a little while to get off the ground, but hopefully will help pay for itself as I continue to reinvest the dividends back into the portfolio. Again, the goal here is $1M invested which I anticipate will take a few years, but a long-term mindset has proven successful for me in the past and I plan to leverage that here, too.
Share Your Income Strategies
I’m not an investment advisor and my portfolio are not a recommendation. However, I’m curious to hear how you all are approaching your income-based portfolios? What assets are you find success with that I may not be considering on my side? I love to learn!
