I hear that robots are standing by to run the world.
Fine—just have them send us a nice, neat report on our dividends. Preferably daily. Thanks.
Seriously, my fellow contrarian, enough with the hype. I tried, albeit briefly, to use ChatGPT as a research assistant for this column. Really it was a softball that I knew the answer to:
Hello ChatGPT, how much did iShares 20+ Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) drop in 2022?
The answer, of course, was 31%, but the robot hadn’t been fed the info so didn’t know. I lost interest and carried on as usual, “manually” verifying my numbers.
My top wish list item—a tool that projects dividends easily and automatically—was delivered by our talented development team before ChatGPT was all the rage. And it’s way more useful to us income investors.
Goodbye spreadsheets, hello Income Calendar. It’s a dividend dream.
When I proudly state that one of our premium portfolios is paying an 8.2% yield, I’m not using a spreadsheet. (Sorry, 2003.) Nor am I using ChatGPT, which doesn’t have this information. (Sorry, 2023.)
No, I’m using a tool handcrafted by our team here at Contrarian Outlook. Income Calendar is a one-stop shop for dividend tracking and income projections.
And best of all, it’s automated. Which means we can literally set it and forget it.
The set part is easy. Existing premium subscribers can use one-click shortcuts to import all of the tickers from, say, Contrarian Income Report or Hidden Yields:
Own another dividend stock? An old flame like Arbor Realty Trust (ABR)? Or a stack of Altria Group (MO) you’ve had on hand since the 1970s? We don’t judge at IC. We simply let you add the tickers and share counts for your tracking purposes:
Really, that’s the setup. It will take you five or ten minutes just once and you’re good to go. Plus a minute or so when you buy or sell something. (If you buy or sell—again, we’re not judging, we’re just tracking and projecting income here.)
Once complete, you’ll see helpful information such as the 8.2% portfolio yield I mentioned at the outset:
And how much projected income you’re looking at by month for the next 12 months:
Now let me show you some cool features, and reasons why you won’t actually forget about Income Calendar. Let’s click July 2023 to see what’s ahead. (And by the way, I am going to swap to a generic Contrarian Outlook portfolio out of respect for premium subscribers. So here we go with a portfolio set to pay $4,976.55 in dividends in July 2023.)
Everything we need to know for July is here. Dividend declarations, payments, earnings reports—you name it, IC has it.
And by the way, no need to even click into the app for this information. I personally have IC setup to send me emails about income events I want to know about. For example, when a position declares a payment, I want an email—especially when that payment is a raise!
This email alert feature is why I was the first to know about Alerian MLP ETF’s (AMLP) recent dividend raise:
This was, by the way, the third consecutive dividend raise that AMLP has dished since we gave the energy fund a shout out in these pages (and an outright purchase in CIR.)
When I say three payout hikes in a row, I mean every quarter. Ninety days between raises. Awesome!
Tracking this activity on a spreadsheet would be tedious. No thanks.
Relying on third-party websites would be sketchy. Quality of data is important. I don’t trust many sites, to be honest, without verifying. Which takes time and is another layer of monotony.
I trust Income Calendar because I trust our data sources. This tool saves us time. It tracks and projects our money. Does it get any better than this for a dividend investor?
Income Calendar is now available for you to try on a risk-free trial basis. Why not take it for a spin?
I recorded a short demo video that will walk you through how I use this easy, powerful dividend tracking tool. Please click here to watch my video demo walk through.
