Best Free way to Track your Dividends

Tracking your Dividends

Do you want to keep up with your dividends in an easy & free way?

There is no need to set up your own Excel Spreadsheet to do this. Enter TrackYourDividends.com.

I personally used an Excel spreadsheet for years. It works, but putting in things manually and constantly updating is a lot of work. It’s kind of a drag to work so actively on your PASSIVE investments. Not only are you inputting things, but you are having to look them up. Without fail, some websites give incorrect or incomplete dividend information. Whenever your company gives a dividend raise, you’ll have to go in and change it.

Earlier this year I discovered the website TrackYourDividends.com that solves a number of dividend tracking problems.

This website is great and most of the features you’ll need to keep track of your dividends are FREE. I looked around for awhile and I couldn’t find anything else that beat it in terms of ease of use and price. Tracking your dividends has never been easier.

Track Your Dividends Dashboard

When you log in, you see a dashboard with the following labels:

It will show the stock/ticker symbol, how many shares you own, and the average cost you paid. For dividends, it shows Dividend Yield, Yield on Cost, and Annual Dividend income from each stock. The only thing that will be missing from the FREE version is the Dividend Safety score. If you’ve done your research, you really shouldn’t need software to tell you a Dividend Safety score.

You’ll see this at the very top:

This will tell you the Dividend Yield of your ENTIRE Dividend account, as well as the annual income of your entire portfolio.

If you are like me, you probably have more than one account. I have a Brokerage account, a Traditional IRA, and a Roth. I have all three of these hooked up to TrackYourDividends.com. Really convenient to have it all in one place.

This is one thing that I was never able to quite figure out with Excel, how to track the dividend yield of my entire portfolio. It just got crazy with constantly changing values after buying new shares. I imagine it could be done with lots of formulas and cell references. However, this website saves you all the time and effort; it makes your passive investing feel like passive investing.

I seriously like the Portfolio Beta function. Seeing how the beta is for each individual account is kind of nice, as well as getting one for all of your accounts. My Traditional IRA has a good bit of bonds, so it shows the beta as much lower than the other accounts.

You don’t have to do anything, simply put in your stocks/ETF’s/Mutual Funds, how many you own, and your cost basis. It does all of the calculations for you.

Dividend Accuracy:

I have caught the dividend yields being slightly off in two cases. When there is a special dividend or bond funds I’ve noticed yields being quoted higher. Other than that, I find the calculated dividend yields accurate and good enough for my needs at the moment.

Upcoming Dividends:

In the Upcoming Dividends section, you get a bar chart with the months and it will show you how much you are expected to get each month. Underneath it will list the highest and lowest dividend months. If you’re thinking about the future and how much monthly income flow you’ll have, this is super helpful.

Below this is the Stock payout Calendar. It will list all of your stock ticker symbols and how much each of them give you and on what month. Very convenient! I remember doing this by looking up pay dates manually, haha. Awful waste of time.

TrackmyDividends Forecast:

Another neat feature of this site is the “Future Value” section. In this section, you can see how your dividends and account value will grow over time. You model this by inserting your estimated Dividend Growth Rate, annual contributions, and price appreciation. Of course, you have no way of knowing these things for certain. However, you can be quite conservative and put in a 3% appreciation just to see where you’ll end up, or try an 8% annual appreciation if history repeats itself. This is really awesome because you’ll be able to see what your dividends might look like five or more years from now. Dividends seriously add up!

Closing Thoughts on Track Your Dividends

In my opinion, Track Your Dividends is the best free way to keep up with your dividends and see it broken down in great detail. We are fortunate to have a tool like this available to us for Free. Very easy to use-add in the ticker symbols, cost basis, and how many shares you own. It does the rest.

Wishing you the best on your investment journey and hope you enjoyed this review of TrackYourDividends.com