In 2016, I earned 30K in dividends with a 1.3M individual account.
Background:
- Entered semi-retirement in mid-2015, fairly large severance, individual account was invested for growth only to minimize taxes (fairly high tax bracket with no deductions).
- Funded 2016 through some consulting $$$ and dividend income, started making some small changes to earn more income.
- Approximately 65% of my individual account is in a variety of ETF's (VTI, SCHX, SCHG, QUAL, RPG, VONG, IWF, IWV, VIG).
- The remainder of the account is in a bunch of individual stocks (~12 stocks such as CVX, PFE, LB, PEP, TWX, TMO, AAPL, NTAP, etc) & mutual funds (TWEIX, PRBLX, FDVLX, JAMRX, SPHIX).
In early 2017 I'm planning on selling RPG and a couple mutual funds, to fund the purchase of some income producing assets (~130K spread between a high yield bond ETF, a couple closed end funds, an REIT, an infrastructure/pipeline fund). My hope is that I'll be able to bump up my dividend income a bit (~35K). My plan is to live on a combination of dividend income + ~2-3% withdrawal of my account balance (by selling small amounts of assets like TMO, SCHG, IWF, AAPL, PRBLX, COST, etc., on a yearly basis).