Hey everyone the year already started with some good news with dividend increases and unfortunately, two dividend cuts, one of them I was expecting and is ok for me and the other one was also not unexpected but very disappointing on the other side. But lets first have a look at the companies which increased their dividends.

Being a dividend investor has two major advantages, first of all, you do not rely that much on the changes of the share price and when the stock price is on a very low level you just collect the dividends and maybe take advantage of the low share price and buy even more stocks.

Dividend Increases

• CSCO: Yearly dividend from 1.32 to 1.40 USD 6.06% increase
• ED: Yearly dividend from 2.86 to 2.96 USD 3.50% increase
• ADM: Yearly dividend from 1.34 to 1.40 USD 4.48% Increase
• SSE: Yearly dividend from 0.93 to 0.96 GBP 2.63% Increase

Dividend Cuts

• CTL: Yearly dividend from 2.12 to 1.00 USD 52.83% Decrease
• Daimler: Yearly dividend from 3.65 to 3.22 EUR 10.96% Increase

So the dividend increase were more or less expected, it was not very surprising that Cisco Systems could not keep up with the last years increase rate but I am fine with 6% increase.

Coming to the dividend cuts, I was expecting the cut of Daimler and is not very disappointing as they are still offering a high yield the share price has still a lot of upside potential. But CTL was quite a disappointment, as they have told in November that they will not cut the dividend, on the other hand, the step was necessary.

Will I sell CTL now?

No, I won't sell as I think their business model has a lot of potential, but I will remove that stock from my dividend fund and add them to a tech fund where I will slowly add more companies in the future. As a first start, I thinking about finally buying a small portion of Blackline. But more about that in a later post.

All in all the dividend cuts made it almost impossible to generate a yearly increase rate of 7.5% this year, but let’s see what the rest of the year will show us.

Conclusion

Through the increases and mainly through the cuts yy projected full-year dividend income is now at  2 102.00 EUR or 2 377.36 USD that means I have now an average of 175.17 EUR per month. As you know my goal is to reach a full year projection of 2 750 EUR, so I am still short of 650 EUR but I am very optimistic to reach that goal, although the cuts threw me back a bit. I think CTL is the best example that it does not make sense to chase the dividend yield, as I did last year. Dividend investing is about patience and it is way better to invest in steady growers in the long run you are always better off.