Every year or so my brain tells me that I have a hankering for some deep fried chicken from the Colonel. So I indulged my craving and I went there for supper this week. It only takes one meal to remember why I never eat there but this trip was a little unnerving. Six years ago I could get a ten piece meal for $23. Now they sell the same meal, with only 8 pieces of chicken for $30. That’s a huge price jump let alone you get even less chicken. It’s like a double inflation squeeze by increasing the price and decreasing the amount of product. I’m no math scientist, but that’s a hell of a lot more than the 2% inflation rate my government keeps reporting to me each year.
I left actually feeling slightly panicked thinking about my future; taking my possible future grand kids to “Soylent Fried Chicken” and paying 800 credits for a meal. I’m sure it would end in a stern lecture to the kid working the counter about how in my day, it would only cost $23 and that I remember when the internet never existed! I know a lot of people my age don’t even think twice about inflation but they should be very, very concerned. Keeping your money in a savings account making .5% while everything is going up 4-5% means you won’t be eating any Soylent Chicken…it means you WILL be the Soylent Chicken!
If companies keep inflating their prices, then their dividend increases should keep up with it. At least that’s what I’m betting on. Just recently Emera increased their dividend 6.9% from $1.45 per share to $1.55 per share. That doesn’t seem like a whole heck of a lot, but if you look at the big picture it’s actually pretty sweet. I bought some shares of Emera for $23 which means my yield on cost is now 6.74%. Next year I’ll bet you I’ll be making over 7% on that same investment. When’s the last time you had and investment that increases your return every year without having to sell it? What about an investment that pays you that return with cash money and is not just some statistic in a graph that your adviser points to, saying you made that much?
I love Dividends!
No matter how much time passes, I still get excited about dividend investing. It’s a slow process to build up your wealth but getting paid along the way sure helps build confidence in it. Why, this time last year I was tallying up the dividend income to be $398 for September. This year my dividend income for the month of September was:$525
That’s enough dividend income to pay for a car payment or a year’s supply of sardines and crackers if I were to retire tomorrow. I would need to be really hungry to make that work but I’m sure I could. That makes my year to date total dividend income to be $4815. Not quite enough to hang up the old cover-alls just yet, but someday it will be. Until then, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing; becoming wealthy one dividend payment at a time.
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