My Passive Income for 2019 – Portfolio Dividend Yields!

I’ve got great vibes for blogging at the end of the year. It has been the 3rd year since I’ve been tracking my financial health, and the 3rd year’s always a charm. I guess it has become more significant now what style of investing I am more comfortable with, which is why I decided to start the year-end blog posts with my passive income. I’ll give the readers a little headstart at Miss Niao before they scout around at other financial bloggers and check out how they are doing. And well, because the passive income part of my portfolio is more predictable in terms of numbers, rather than something like my expenses that varies every month.

So I was scouring through my past blogs and it took me like 5 seconds to find my FY2019 goals. Hmm, I wonder why that was so. :p Anyway, just a recap.

FY2019 Goals

My income goal

1. Increase total income by 10%.
2. Increase passive income from dividends to $4,500

My expenses goal

1. Reduce total expenses to $20,000 (I can do it!)

Overall goal

1. Increase Total Passive Income over Expenses to 20%
2. Increase Savings Rate to 75%

The two goals that are more appropriate for this blog will be the ones that are in blue.

Miss Niao’s Passive Income 2019

Okay so I generally break down my passive income to be from a few sources. Now, obviously you already know what passive income means to me, and investing your money is not really actually truly ‘passive‘, but hey, as long as I use money to earn more money, it’s gonna fall into this category for me.

1. Dividends
2. DBS Multiplier Interest
3. Singapore Savings Bond

And yeah! These three musketeers will make life easier for me… eventually. Now let’s break them down even further.

1. Dividends

It was difficult to achieve the goal that I initially set at the beginning of the year. I had to try to achieve total dividend collection of S$4,500. If we were on a conservative 4% portfolio dividend yield, I would need a capital of $112,500 at the start of the year! I wasn’t even close to 6 digits in my portfolio then, but I did have a sustainable war chest sitting closely and quietly behind me. So yes, I did manage to increase my total dividends collected, but when it came down to the final numbers, I am expecting a total of $3,359.77 for FY2019.

It is a 56% increase YoY from 2018, so I’m counting that as progress for now.

*Note: Subjected to assumed currency exchange rates if dividend is not collected in SGD.

Now this number isn’t supposed to mean anything much if you’re not comparing it to your investment returns. If my investment portfolio were return some $3k+ dividends based on a capital of $300,000, that wouldn’t be very impressive, would it? I could get twice as much return if I just invested it all in SSBs if that was possible, considering it as a ‘lower’ risk investment than stocks.

Dividend Yields

I consolidated all my dividend yields for each of my current holdings as follows, in alphabetical order:

1. AIMS APAC Reit – 7.38%
2. British American Tobacco – 6.08%
3. ComfortDelgro – 4.49%
4. Hongkong Land – 3%
5. Keong Hong – 4.63%
6. Kraft Heinz Co – 3.23%
7. Nikko AM STI ETF – 3.9%
8. Tat Seng Packaging – 4.62%
9. Valuetronics – 6.55%

I’ve managed to score at least a 3% dividend yield on each counter, though there might be opportunity to increase Hongkong Land’s dividend yield with its ever declining price due to the situation in Hong Kong. Yum.

2. DBS Multiplier Interest

Say yes to hassle-free, no-brainer high interest savings accounts like the DBS Multiplier! For doing almost nothing, I earned $788.59 (estimated)!

Yes it was not maximized, especially when I pushed much of my capital to the stock market, but still, it is soooo satisfying to know that amount of money could possibly fund half of my yearly insurance term plan.

3. Singapore Savings Bonds

Total collection from my aggressive fund injection into the bonds from last year amounted to a decent $374.65.

Total Passive Income : $4523.01

So I did not manage to achieve Goal 1 through dividends alone, but I managed to scrap through to achieve it from my total passive income! And now, I’ll have to wait for the real end of the year to see how much I’ve spent to see if I achieve Goal 2. But right now, it’s only 17.31% (estimated)…

Miss Niao xoxo