Every month I take an honest snapshot of where I actually stand — the real numbers, what moved, and the one or two stories that shaped it. Here’s July 2026. And I’ll be straight with you: this was a down month.
The numbers this month
- Current savings: $106,514 — down about $3,286 (roughly 3%) from last month’s $109,800.
- Average dividends (trailing 12 months): $153 / month — essentially flat.
Here are the actual charts from my homepage this month, frozen here so future me can look back:
My Real Monthly Dividend Income
Actual dividends received, trailing 12 months (Aug 2025 – Jul 2026).
Total ≈ $1,834 · Average ≈ $153 / month · updated monthly
Hover a bar to see the exact amount. Converted at ~1,500 KRW/USD.
Where My Money Is Invested
A snapshot of my retirement-account portfolio by asset type — the whole pie is my total. Updated monthly.
Cash is dry powder waiting to go in through my weekly automatic buys. Not financial advice.
What changed
The headline number went down, but the story underneath is not all bad.
- I kept buying. My cash cushion fell from about 27% of the portfolio to roughly 18% as I put money to work on schedule. My S&P 500 slice grew to 29%.
- The core held up. My two S&P 500 ETFs and my dividend-focused (Dow-Jones-style) holdings actually finished the month in the green.
- The damage was at the edges. My long-term U.S. Treasury position and my small thematic bets — a quantum-computing basket and an AI-power-infrastructure fund — were the biggest laggards. Long-dated bonds got hit hardest.
The story behind the month
The Federal Reserve meets on July 28–29, with its policy rate sitting at 3.50%–3.75%. Markets mostly expect the Fed to hold, but the risk of hikes later this year has kept pressure on long-dated bonds — which is exactly where my portfolio felt it this month.
It is tempting to react to a red month. But a ~3% dip in a month where I actually bought more of the index isn’t a crisis — it’s just the market breathing. My monthly buy doesn’t move.
That’s where I stand this month. Slow and steady, one step at a time — see you next month.
This is my personal story, not financial advice. Just one 40-something engineer keeping an honest monthly record of his own journey.
A down month is not the same as a bad month
The headline is a 3 percent drop. I want to be precise about what that does and does not mean, because a recap that only reports the direction is not much use to anyone — including future me.
Three percent of a six-figure balance is a number that would have alarmed me a few years ago. It does not now, and the reason is arithmetic rather than temperament. A portfolio that compounds at any reasonable rate spends a large share of its life below its own high-water mark. Down months are not the exception in that pattern; they are most of the pattern.
What matters is whether anything structural changed. In July, nothing did. I did not sell. I did not stop the automatic buys. The number of shares I own went up, not down. Only the price tag on them moved.
That distinction — shares owned versus price of shares — is the one I try to keep in front of me every month. The first is something I control. The second is not.
What actually moved the number
Two forces move this balance, and they are easy to confuse because they arrive as a single figure on a screen.
The assets themselves. Prices of the funds I hold went up or down.
The exchange rate. My accounts are held in Korean won and reported here in dollars. When the won weakens against the dollar, the same portfolio prints a smaller dollar number without a single share changing hands. When it strengthens, the reverse.
For this July recap I converted at roughly 1,500 won per dollar, the same rate I used the month before. Holding the rate constant makes month-to-month comparison honest but hides the currency effect entirely, and I have since decided that is the wrong trade-off. From the August recap onward I am separating the two — reporting how much of the change came from assets and how much came from currency — because a portfolio that looks healthier only because the won moved is not actually healthier.
If that sounds abstract, I wrote a whole post about being confused by exactly this effect in my own account: Stocks, Rates, Currency.
What the dividend chart is not telling you
The trailing-twelve-month average sits at $153 a month, and $1,834 for the year. Those two numbers are calm. The underlying months are not.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Lowest month | $110 |
| Highest month | $233 |
| Ratio, high to low | 2.1x |
| Best four months | $837 (46% of the year) |
| Worst four months | $445 (24% of the year) |
Nearly half of a year’s dividend income arrived in four months. That is not volatility in the scary sense — it is just how funds schedule distributions. Some pay monthly, some quarterly, and the quarterly ones cluster.
The practical consequence: a single month tells you almost nothing. July was the lowest month of the twelve at $110, and if I read that as a decline in my dividend income I would be reading a calendar, not a trend. This is exactly why the chart is a trailing twelve-month rolling figure rather than a monthly one.
How I actually calculate this
People sometimes assume a recap like this comes out of software. It does not. Here is the whole method, in case it is useful.
- Screenshot every account on the same day. Same day matters more than which day. Different days means comparing different market closes.
- Add the balances by hand. Four accounts, one number.
- Record dividends actually received — not projected, not annualised. Only money that landed.
- Convert to dollars and note the rate used, so the conversion is auditable later.
- Update the two charts on the home page and freeze a copy in that month’s post, so the record cannot be quietly revised afterwards.
That last step is the one I care about most. It is easy to write an encouraging story about your own money after the fact. Freezing the chart in the post means the version you are reading is the version I saw at the time.
What I did in July
Nothing.
The automatic purchases ran on schedule. I did not add a position, drop one, or move money between accounts in response to the drop. The cash portion of the portfolio came down from roughly 27 percent as scheduled buying pulled from it — which is what that cash is for. It is not a market call. It is a queue.
I know “nothing” is an unsatisfying answer for a monthly update. It is also the honest one, and the strategy I described in Dollar-Cost Averaging only works if I actually do nothing when doing nothing is uncomfortable.
The number that keeps me honest
At $153 a month, this portfolio produces about $1,836 a year in dividends. The goal at the top of this site is $100,000 a year.
That is 1.8 percent of the target. The gap is 54 times over.
I put that number in writing on purpose. Personal finance writing has a habit of making early progress sound closer to the finish line than it is, and I would rather be the site that states the multiple plainly. Compounding does most of its work late — I ran that arithmetic in The Rule of 72 — but “late” is a description of the shape, not a promise about the outcome.
Two notes on how I report this
Two things about this format are worth explaining, since I get asked. I report in dollars even though the accounts are held in won, because the goal itself is stated in dollars and most people reading this site are not in Korea. It costs me a conversion step and one source of distortion, which is why from the August recap onward I separate asset movement from currency movement rather than reporting a single blended number.
The other is why I publish a month like this one at all. A record that only contains up months is not a record. The entire point of the series is that future me can go back and check what actually happened, including the parts I would rather skip. A 3 percent monthly drop doesn’t change the plan either — the plan changes when the reasoning behind it changes, not when the balance does.
