There are many reasons why I hold AT&T ($T) for my passive income goals. The first one is that it was around during the Great Depression and the second, it will probably be around during the next Great Depression. I can be pretty sure that AT&T will weather the storm if another future event like the Great Depression strikes the markets. Sure, all the stocks will drop in price, including the ones with dividends, but think of those skyrocketing dividend yields!

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about the Roaring 20’s and how they’re here now. I guess people are seeing a market near all-time records and are getting scared. Is 1929 right around the corner? Should you buy now? Sell? …and by passive I don’t mean lazy. What a great question! You know that there’s no right or wrong answer here. What’s my advice? Read this book (affiliate link) and then go do your favorite hobby.

This is my second monthly report on how my passive income journey to $100,000 a year is working. This month my passive income was a lot lower. QYLD didn’t have a dividend payout and RYLD’s payout is happening tomorrow. However, my Adsense experiment and Medium produced the most non-dividend income. The downside was that it wasn’t enough to exceed last month’s total income. Overall, I expect there to be blips and bumps along this $100,000 journey and that’s ok.

Today is the day I want to write about Johnson and Johnson ($JNJ) and why I’m holding it for the long term. One, it’s a well-established company that cranks out great products that everyone uses, and two it has amazing dividends. For each share of JNJ, you get $4.04 of dividends per year. JNJ hits all the sweet spots for building my $100,000 a year passive income portfolio. Let’s dig a bit deeper as to why.

Building a dividend producing passive income portfolio requires thought, time, and education. Today I’m sharing 5 tips for building a dividend passive income portfolio and how you can figure out the right strategy for you. As I’ve written before, this idea came to me after my wife and I reviewed her 401k at the end of 2020. She had by accident generated a large sum of dividends without even trying. This was the same for me in my 401k as well and we generated $800 in dividends by accident in our trading account.

Today I’m writing a short but important post for myself. It’s to assess how my passive income strategies are working and if I’m on track to building up a $100,000 passive income a year portfolio? Considering I ‘accidentally’ made $800 of dividends last year in my taxable account, I wanted to see if I could build up enough passive income before I retire at 59. Yes, I’m on track to retire by 59!

I continue to collect dividend producing stocks and ETFs on my journey to generate $100,000 a year in Passive Income. Earlier this month I picked up $RYLD, another covered call writing ETF that invests primarily in the Russell 2000. This one has a higher Beta though, so I’m taking on more risk but I’ve kept my initial purchase small. Stock Price RYLD is trading at its all-time highs. Everyone is thinking the Bull Market is getting a bit long in the tooth and are starting to wonder when the Biden bump will fade away.

My quest continues to earn $100,000 passive income in a year. Supporting my strategy is $QYLD, a monthly dividend producing ETF that uses a Covered Call strategy by owning and selling Nasdaq 100 stocks. It’s not one for the faint of heart, but it fits with my passive income strategy and I went long. There are two things that jump out at me risk wise. For my readers, I’ve written covered calls before, and they’re a great strategy to amp up your returns.

I added $GILT to my passive income portfolio at the beginning of 2021. I did it because the ex-dividend date was on 1/8/2021 and I saw that it had a low price with a history of big dividend payouts. Albeit it is a short dividend history. I’ve written that my goal is to build up a passive income portfolio. My measure of success will be when I generate a $100,000 a year income, and right now GILT is part of that strategy.

I spent the first week of 2021 reacquainting myself with Dividend Reinvesting and I’ve concluded that it makes a ton of sense for someone like me. Retirement isn’t here yet but I can see it coming on the horizon. I’d need to think about stabilizing my investments against volatility and start thinking of long term income. When I first started investing I put a small amount of money in Dividend Reinvestment Plans (still long INTC, thank you very much) and focused on growth inside my retirement accounts.

As 2020 was ending I took some time to look at our 401k balances. This was a good year for our investments, all things considered, but one thing surprised me. There was a line item for “dividend’s earned” and it was quite a large number. My wife’s 401k earned more dividends than what I made as a salary in my first year out of college! This got me thinking about a passive investing strategy that I first read about decades ago.

I’m a reader of Reddit and I found a subreddit that makes me sad. It’s called r/WallStreetBets. Everyone is posting on how much money they make or lose from trading ‘stonks’ using put or call options. I ruminated about this in a video that I’m going to post soon. Everyone get’s making money confused with the real thing, time. You can’t make more time, you can always make more money.

The markets have been in a complete freefall over the past few weeks. The likely culprit is Trump’s mishandling of the Covid-19 (aka Coronavirus) response and overinflated prices. Who knows what is the real market contagion here but I think it’s time to make a shopping list. With free falls in some of my favorite holdings (MSFT and AAPL), I can’t but help think it might be time to add to these long term holdings and buy more stuff like ETF’s and Mutual Funds.

Right before the New Year I posted an article on Medium titled “Is Passive Investing Going to Kill Us?” It centers around one particular chart where the amount of money flowing into passive investing is staggering. While I’m a big fan of Passive Investing and I’ve been riding its success, I can’t help but wonder if I was just plain lucky. I know that markets love to correct imbalances but the question is when?

**Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. When you purchase a product or service using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep my content free of charge to you. I recently picked up the late John Bogle’s book, “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” and I plan on reading through it despite knowing the basic jist of it.

I’ve written about this countless times but I’m a big fan of passive investing in the markets. By doing less, I actually gain a lot more in returns. That’s all great and wonderful but currently it’s not ideal for me. What I really want to do is turn that passive investing into passive income. So even in their golden years, they have to budget carefully. Passive Investing != Passive Income What’s the deal with passive investing and what is passive income?

The r/investing sub cracks me up sometimes. This guy has had enough of the sub because all it spews is how great Buffet is and dollar cost averaging. If you ask me, all the things he complains about are good. ETF’s are good, low cost(ish), and easy to get in and out of. Dollar cost averaging has really helped me build a good size 401k nest egg but it required consistency and time.

My wife owns Dodge & Cox’s Stock Fund (DODGX) and its been a great performer for her account. I just wish they offered it in my 401K! Despite the nice trending chart below, DODGX is not without its risks. I ran a quick Monte Carlo simulation and discovered quite a few nasty negative return outcomes for DODGX. In fact there’s 0.04% chance for a nasty -51% rate of return over the past 10 years.