We finally hit $1,000 a month.
Five years of buying, holding, and reinvesting — and April just made it real.
I'll be honest — I wasn't sure this month was going to do it. But there it was on the statement: $1,075.93. Over a thousand dollars in dividends. In one month. I had to read it twice.
When I started tracking this back in 2021, the total was $446.87. That felt like a win at the time. And it was — but it also felt like this big, abstract goal was still way out in the distance. A thousand dollars a month in passive income seemed like something other people did. People with more money, more time, more of everything.
Turns out patience is the only thing you really need a lot of.
The $307 jump from last April is what really gets me. That's not just the portfolio growing — that's the compounding actually starting to show up in ways you can feel. An extra $307 a month is a car payment. A grocery run. A weekend trip somewhere. It's real money doing real things.
A big chunk of the growth this month came from positions I added more recently — HOOY kicked in $71, NVDW added $40.59, TSLW brought $36.54, and PLTY contributed $32.46. These are higher-yield instruments and I'm watching them carefully. High yield can mean high risk. But for April, they showed up.
The real backbone though? FXAIX at $161. The boring index fund that just quietly keeps growing its payout year after year. It was $75 back in 2021. Now it's $161. That's what compounding actually looks like — not exciting, just relentless.
I keep a few positions that don't get talked about much but never miss. KO raised again. O (Realty Income) jumped $3.60 year-over-year — small but steady. JPM, CSCO, ITW — none of these are flashy, but they all grew their payouts without any drama. That's exactly what I want from the core of this thing.
WDS is worth a quick mention. That position wound down after paying $13.25 last year and zero this April. Same with LADR, which went quiet in 2025. Cutting positions that stop performing isn't fun — there's always a little second-guessing — but the capital that came out of those went somewhere better. The numbers bear that out.
The new higher-yield positions are the ones I'm keeping my eye on. HOOY, NVDW, TSLW, PLTY — these aren't your grandfather's dividend payers. They generate big distributions, but those distributions can move around a lot month to month depending on what the underlying assets do. April was great. I'm curious to see how May and June look before I get too comfortable with those numbers.
The core positions — FXAIX, MO, CINF, JPM, KO, CSCO — those I'm not worried about. They've been growing quietly for five years and I expect them to keep doing exactly that. Boring is beautiful when it comes to dividends.
If you're early in this journey and staring at a $40 or $60 monthly dividend, I get it — it feels like it's never going to be meaningful. But it will be. You just have to keep going and not mess with it when the market gets weird. April was proof of that for me.
See you next month.
