Thursday, January 1, 2015

Review of goals in 2014

Last year around this time I put out some goals for 2014. These goals relate to my dividend growth portfolio. A year has passed since then, so let's take a look at how I've done!

Goals for 2014

I roughly stated four goals:
  1. Deposit €300 per month (€3.600 in total)
  2. Receive dividends of €550
  3. Make one purchase each quarter
  4. Reach a portfolio value of €18.000 (least important goal, because I can't control reaching this goal by any means.


1. Deposits
In total I deposited €4.600 dividend into 4 payments. This equates to over €380 per month, which is 27% more than originally planned for. Of course this is great news!

2. Dividends received
I received €600 in dividends in 2014. This equates to €50 per month, which is 9% more than originally planned for.

3. Quarterly purchases
In 2014 I made four (big) purchases. Even though they were not evenly distributed across each quarter, I'll chalk this one up a victory.
4. Portfolio value
The starting value of my dividend growth portfolio stood around €13.400 at the beginning of the year. Right now it's worth €21.400! That means the portfolio grew by €8.000 in one year! I was hoping to achieve a portfolio value of €18.000 but the markets really surged upwards this year. Total return (calculated with the XIRR-function in Google Docs) for this year is almost 21%! Of course this is great news, but it's not something I did personally. Obviously regular deposits and picking solid dividend companies will show results in the long-term, but in the short-term anything is possible really. 

Summary

So basically I've reached all my financial goals for this year! I've made a lot of progress since becoming a dividend growth investor. To see what has happened in the last 1.5 years really gives me a satisfied and happy feeling, knowing that I am taking matters into my own hand and taking steps to be in a much better financial position in the future. 

But at the same time I need to continue investing in my portfolio and in myself to become a better investor. For instance, this means I want to be more active on the Seeking Alpha platform than the last few months. I wrote 7 articles which is slightly more than 1 per month. It was not a specific goal of mine in the beginning of this year, but I will probably use it as one of my goals for 2015! I'll address these goals in my next blog post.

4 comments:

  1. Congrats on achieving and surpassing your goals for 2014! Looks like you need to set higher goals and go for them in 2015 :)

    R2R

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    1. Hi R2R, nice to see you again at my blog ;) Yeah, higher goals would be nice. However I am not sure if that's feasible this year because of our situation at home (wife working less because of the birth of our son). Obviously a great thing but cashflow could be a bit smaller this year.

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  2. Excellent to have achieved (killed!) all your goals. Having learned from the experience, are you thinking about setting more challenging goals for 2015? Whether you do or not, all the best for 2015 and keep up the good work!

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    1. Hi FerdiS, thanks for stopping by. More challenging goals in terms of cashflow and deposits, I am not sure (see comment above). I am looking at more goals related to this blog or writing in general (ie for Seeking Alpha). I'll probably post my goals somewhere next week. Stay tuned!

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