WOOHOO! We just joined the 1,000,000 club!!!

A BIG "Thank You" to everyone that has supported, and continues to support and visit our blog...whether you have been with us from the beginning or you've just recently joined the journey, we would like to thank each and every one of you for your support.  

We started blogging about our frugal family's journey roughly 72 months ago, on March 15, 2014. Our blogging journey started out as a hobby and simply a way to keep on track of our progress. Flash forward 6 years and roughly 1 month later, I am thrilled to announce that because of each and every one of our readers, we just reached yet another milestone.  Just yesterday, our blog crossed over the 1 MILLION page visits mark! Although we are not as active as we had been during the past, it's humbling to see we still have some loyal followers who continue to click on our posts to see how we are doing on our journey to financial independence. Old or new, we thank each and every one of you for your loyalty and support.    

It took approximately 15 months to reach our first milestone of 100,000 page visits to our blog. The next milestones took:

• 6 months and 28 days to reach 200,000 page visits 
• 7 months and 0 days to reach 300,000 page visits
• 4 months and 22 days to reach 400,00 page visits 
• 3 months and 17 days to reach 500,000 page visits
• 5 months and 20 days to reach 600,000 page visits
• 7 months and 15 days to reach 700,000 page visits
• 5 months and 20 days to reach 800,000 page visits
• 4 months and 15 days to reach 900,000 page visits

As you all may or may not already know, we have found a few side hustles that were simply more lucrative than blogging so we decided to switch gears about two and a half years ago. As a result, the last 100,000 page visits took the longest at 10 months and 15 days. Nevertheless, as of Friday-April 24, 2020, I am elated to announce that our blog had seen a total of 1,002,933 all-time pageviews! What a milestone. 

Since I am somewhat of a stats nerd, below are some additional stats behind our 1,000,000 visits.

Top Referring Sites

Google searches and internal cross-links within our posts play a vital role in our blog traffic. But we also want to recognize and give special thanks to our twitter followers, as well as My Dividend Pipeline, Captain Dividend,  Passive Income Pursuit, and Rockstar Finance for the traffic from your respective blogs. Lastly, although not present on the list above, I would like to also thank a few other fellow bloggers and friends, Roadmap2Retire, Dividend Diplomats, and Dividend Hawk for your continued support and friendships.

Also, thanks to all that have tweeted or re-tweeted our posts.  Our additional presence and our followers on Twitter continues to keep our blog active and relevant. In case you would like to follow us on Twitter, we can be found under: @FrugalFamilyof4.  Although the numbers have not changed much lately, we currently have 2,079 followers on Twitter. 

Most Popular Page Visits

Our top four most popular page visits are: 1) Dividend Stocks Portfolio with 33,223 page views; 2) Blogroll with 17,913 page views; 3) Background with 135,186 page views; 4) 2015 - Collection of Recent Buys with 14,568 page views.

Most Popular Posts

Our top three most popular posts are: 1) Stocks Added to Collection of Stock Analyses - December 2016 with 28,864 page views; 2) Stocks Added to Collection of Stock Analyses - November 2016 with 28,621 page views; and 3) JANUARY 2019 (Recap) - Dividend Received with 3,249 page views. Wow...What a drop from 2nd to 3rd! I'm thinking we might need to bring back the Collection of Stock Analyses!? What do you all think?

Top Page Views By Countries

We are tremendously grateful that our blog has seemed to have a worldwide presence as evident by the chart above.  However, the top page views to our blog came from the following top four countries: 1) United States was the clear leader with 604,448 page views; 2) An Unknown Region was in second with 68,620 page views; 3) Germany was in third with 38,141 page views; 4) Russia rounds out the top four with 36,598 page views.  

The Unknown Region had previously jumped three spots to be in second on our last milestone post. It looks like they continue to distance themselves from the pack and they now hold a solid position in second place. And Canada and Russia were previously neck and neck but it looks like my Russian readers have helped distance themselves from my Canadian readers.  It will be interesting to see if my Canadian Readers can reduce the gap by the next milestone post.  You'll just have to wait and see!

Its fun to look at the stats and maybe even create a little friendly competition with them.  But the reality is, near or far, first or tenth, we truly value each and every reader.  Thank you for visiting!! Our blog and posts received the page views they did because of you (our readers and fellow bloggers).  Thank you for reading and/or sharing our post with others. We truly appreciate each and every one of you for the support! Now into the next 1 MILLION page views!!

AGAIN, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR HELPING US 

REACH YET ANOTHER HUGE MILESTONE!!

New Blogs Added to the Blogroll!

Admittedly, its been a while since we have updated our blogroll. So we recently decided to utilize a little downtime, courtesy of the COVID-19 Stay At Home orders, to look through our blogroll. We found a few blogrolls that no longer are actively posting and have purged some of them from our list. At the same time, we also added a few new, up and coming bloggers, that have been active in our dividend investing community.  We plan to continue refining our blogroll in the coming weeks but thought we'd at least share with you the six new blogs that we have added to our blogroll. 

Without further ado, please help us welcome the following new blogs:

Dividend Power

Dividend Power is a self-taught individual investor who has been investing in stocks for close to 20 years. Dividend Power focuses on dividend growth investing with a long-term horizon and through undervalued large-cap stocks with sustainable dividend growth and capital appreciation potential. 

More Dividend

Jason began investing in early 2015 with his first brokerage account with TradeKing. After doing his research, he decided that the best investment strategy would be a combination of value and dividend growth investing. Since opening that first account, he has opened several other accounts including a RothIRA, Loyal3, and Robin Hood. Along with these accounts, he also has a Roth401k and HSA account but I do not currently list those assets here on MoreDividend.

Dividend Cultivator

Jimmy is an entrepreneur father with four boys and a software engineering background. His blog was born out of an elusive problem: generating passive income. Like many people, Dividend Cultivator earns a salary. However, he was looking to build a passive income stream outside of traditional retirement accounts like 401(k)s, 403(b)s, and the vast assortment of IRAs (Traditional, Roth, SEP, etc.). He has dabbled in blogging, building apps, and selling products online, but nothing has really stuck, nor has any of those side hustles provided him with the “passive” income stream that he is striving for. 

Seeking the Dividend
Seeking the Dividend is an engineer in his early 40s who recently decided to get serious about finance. He starting his journey in 2014 and similar to our family's blog, Seeking the Dividend uses his platform to document his journey.  As he continues to invest and growing his money, the blog provides his readers with many insights into his DGI journey, both successes as well as lessons learned.

Dividend Farmer

Dividend Farmer is a husband and a father of two. He is a technology product manager but also an occasional pilot and educator. The is striving to learn as much as possible about dividend investing and the blog is a place where he shares what he's learned to his readers. The blog is based on the tenets of Value Investing fathered by Ben Graham and made famous by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.  Researching dividend-paying firms using conservative fundamental analysis rather than technical analysis, momentum investing, or day trading techniques is at the core of Dividend Farming. 

Capturando Dividendos

Nandy, also known as Capturing Dividends (or Capturando Dividendos), is in his early 30s. Before starting his blog to document his path towards Financial Independence, he was living paycheck to paycheck. His blog documents both the achievements and failures throughout his FI journey, which began in August of 2014. Through hard work and maintaining a frugal lifestyle, which Nandy documents through his income and expense posts, he hopes to continue improving his passive income and one day be financially independent.

We always welcome new dividend bloggers. So please feel free to leave a comment and we would be happy to add you to our blogroll.   

Mortgage Balance (UPDATE) April 2020

If you have viewed our family's Net Worth Page, you probably already know that it does not include the equity in our home.  Although we do realize that it is technically part of our overall net worth, we decided that since our home equity is not an asset that we can count on for income (unless we sell and buy something cheaper) we would exclude it from our net worth calculation.

For the purpose of this blog, we are more interested in documenting our loan balance rather than our home equity.  With that said, we will use the current Zillow value as our estimated home value and use it to figure out the percentage we owe on our home. For those interested, we will include the amount of our home equity but know that we are less concerned with the equity since we have no plans to cash out or otherwise sell our home. Our main goal is to pay off our home on or before my retirement date. 

HOME VALUE:

According to Zillow, our home is currently worth $884,479 (up $8,289 in the last 30-days). 

Mortgage Balance (As of April 1st):
$213,690 (down $2,002 from March post)

Percentage Owed:
24.1% (down .5% since our March post)

Home Equity: 
$670,789 (up $12,739 from our March post)
   

Mortgage Background:
For those that have not read the Preface on our home equity, we currently hold a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage at the incredibly low rate of 2.875%.  My goal is to retire within 7 years and 2 months (86 months) so we are setting out to pay off our mortgage on or before my retirement date. Right now we are a few months behind the target retirement date. Currently, we have approximately 8 years and 3 months (96 months) left on our mortgage. Nevertheless, I would like to have it paid off in roughly 5 years. If we accomplish that, I plan to use the money we use to pay our mortgage and aggressively build our passive income to help supplement our retirement and defer tapping into the 457K for as long as possible so it can continue to grow. 

Right now we are not putting any extra money towards the principal given our low 2.875% interest rate. We feel that we could make our money grow faster by investing it and while keeping the money more liquid. At a certain point, we may consider using some of the money from our investment accounts to wipe out the remaining mortgage balance.  Until then, we will continue to grow that money outside, rather than have it locked into our home.

March 2020 (Recap) - DIVIDENDS RECEIVED

The only good news I have to share is that in the midst of this COVID-19 (otherwise known as Coronavirus) outbreak, our family is still receiving our dividend payments.  For now at least! Let's see how many companies cut their dividends in the coming month or two. Fingers crossed that it isn't a huge majority. 

Right now, our family is trying to pile cash and remain on the lookout for some quality dividend-payers to buy and hang onto for the long haul. We have set a few limit orders and now waiting for the company stocks to reach our target price.  What is everyone else doing? Are you buying?   

Now for what you all came to see, below is a list of the dividends/partnership distributions that we received from our family's dividend stocks portfolio –March 2020 (recap).

DIVIDENDS 

During the past month, 13 companies/ETFs/Partnerships. The total monies received from those 13 companies/ETFs/Partnerships was: $281.73. 

Below is a breakdown of the dividends/partnership distributions received this past month:

WELLS FARGO INVESTMENT ACCOUNT:
3/02/20 - WFC (WELLS FARGO & CO): $7.65
3/02/20 - HP (HELMERICH & PAYNE INC): $10.65
3/03/20 - ENB (ENBRIDGE INC): $54.06
3/10/20 - IBM (INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINE CORP): $9.72
3/10/20 - XOM (EXXON MOBIL CORP): $17.40
3/10/20 - CVX (CHEVRON CORPORATION): $6.45

3/20/20 - CTL (CENTURYLINK INC): $15.00
3/24/20 - RDS.B (ROYAL DUTCH SHELL PLC ADR B): $13.16

3/25/20 - BBL (BHP GROUP PLC ADR): $106.60
3/26/20 - SU (SUNCOR ENERGY INC): $14.60
3/26/20 - EDIV (SPDR S&P EMERGING ETF MARKETS DIVIDEND): $18.54
3/27/20 - NOV (NATIONAL OILWELL VARCO INC): $4.50
3/30/20 - GILD (GILEAD SCIENCES INC): $3.40

EDWARD JONES INVESTMENT ACCOUNT:

N/A

OVERALL DIVIDENDS TOTAL THIS MONTH: $281.73

How did you all do? Hopefully you all continue to see your dividends growth month after to month, year after year! 

In case you interested, our family's dividend stocks portfolio 
may be found by clicking on the link below:

Dividend Stocks Portfolio