Blog Schedule, Dividend Targets and Savings Rate | Goal-setting for July 2018

Blog Schedule, Dividend Targets and Savings Rate | Goal-setting for July 2018

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The month of June just zipped by. It seems like it was just yesterday that I wrote the goals for June. And it feels as if some of the goals set during that report have already become habitual. Great success!

As such, I plan to continue the monthly goal-setting tradition. But I will improve at it. I will become more specific with the goals and will focus on actionable tasks.

Here are the goals for July 2018:

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💻 Publish 7 Blog Posts Minimum

Naturally, the format for writing content has changed. The original format was to set at least 3 hours aside to write whatever came to mind. Any content that was created during that session was the content that was published. The creativity element of that process appealed to me.

However, now the flow of creating content is more focussed on documenting progress. This is because the blog is more defined now. Instead of writing for the sake of creativity, there are dividend income and blog numbers to track, and the creativity is applied to the presentation. 

Since we’re being specific now, a blog schedule has been created to detail the blog posts that will be published in July. 

Blog Schedule

1. Dividend Income Update #13 — published.
2. Blog Schedule and Dividend Targets for July | Goal-setting — published. 
3. Forward Dividend Income Projection #7
4. Review of the Goals for June
5. Social Media & Email Subscriber Growth | July 2018
6. Blog Report for June 2018
7. One unique post

🤝 Focus on Blog Relationship Building | Comment at least 100 times

Blogging is an opportunity to connect with like-minded people. It’s important to have others in your space to learn from and share concepts with. That’s the same for any industry. 

That’s why commenting on other blogs is such a great opportunity. For myself, there are an incredible amount of dividend bloggers that are 10 years down the road from me. They are proof of concept and opportunity to learn from. 

Plus, there’s not much opportunity to meet folks with a blogger mentality in real life—the type of people that want to write about what happened instead of talking about it. To sum it up, bloggers are f$@king awesome, and commenting on other blogs is great for marketing and for meeting like-minded people.

Regarding the specifics of this goal, the plan is to comment on at least 100 blogs this month. I plan to focus on the core group of bloggers that I read regularly and enjoy staying in contact with. In other words,, I’m more focused on depth over breadth.

📊 Increase Dividend Income by $10 annually

I haven’t published a dividend projection to detail how much income was added in June yet. But I can confirm that a larger than normal amount of annual income was added. In fact, it was one of the highest months so far in 2018.

This month, however, I am lowering the regular target, which is typically between $20 to $30, to $10. The target is not changing because of the amount of money being added, though. It’s changing because I plan to use this month to focus on core positions. 

Furthermore, a few of the higher yielding positions I hold experienced a substantial increase in their share price this past week. This increase means that I’m less likely to continue adding to those positions until another drop in the share price presents an opportunity.

💵 Save 15% of Net Income

I’ll be honest with you—I’m not the best at sticking to a budget. However, the one thing I am good at is paying myself first. 

Be that as it may, the amount I save is not currently enough to reach financial independence in 10 years. It will take 20 years at the current pace. But keep in mind, I’ve mentioned before that the amount of savings will increase a lot in 5 years time.

The long term goal is to achieve a 50% savings rate. That would be impressive. Based on the 2017 savings rate, though, a rate of 20% would be impressive this year. Ultimately, the plan is to increase the savings rate in small increments over time. The benefit of increasing in small increments over time is that I won’t even notice much of a change.

Based on the rate that was achieved last month, the goal for this month is 15%. If 15% is surpassed, then the rate will increase to 16% and so on. Small steps and continuous effort are the most appropriate ways for me to improve.

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Concluding Thoughts

Although there are other smaller goals for the month, I chose to focus on the 4 main objectives for a reason. In short, I eliminated all the BS and focussed tasks. 

With consideration to the core purpose of this blog, the end result is to become a full-time blogger and dividend investor. It doesn’t matter what combination works, all that matters is if I can reach that state. The 4 goals above target the most basic components required to achieve that state—publishing content, connecting with others, and acquiring assets.

Moreover, these goals are basic, measurable and achievable. They’re all small, simple steps that keep thetwo main things moving forward. 

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I am not a licensed investment or tax adviser. All opinions are my own. This post contains advertisements by Google Adsense. This post also contains internal links, affiliate links, links to external sites, and links to RTC social media accounts.

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