Ever since I moved my personal brokerage account to Schwab, I’ve been extremely pleased with the ease and clarity that I have in managing my account. I’ve had my 401k rollover IRA at Schwab for a long time, but most of that account was in mutual funds and I didn’t do much trading until I diversified my IRA a few years back.

Now, my personal account is entirely individual stocks and funds make up less than half of my IRA. (That’s because when I first allocated about one-third of my IRA to individual stocks, I was smart enough to load up on major technology firms coming out of the Great Recession. Today, individual stocks exceed the balance of mutual funds and ETFs in my IRA. That’s mostly because of fortuitous timing on my acquisition of Microsoft and Intel shares. Unfortunately, I don’t see such low hanging fruit in the market today.)

But back to Schwab — in the upper left had corner of my individual account screen, where it shows the “personal value” of my account, I can also scroll down now and see “Investment Income.” Voila — a nifty little tool for income oriented investments.

It does not provide much of a breakdown of where the income is coming from (for that you still need to look at the monthly statements) but it does aggregate dividend and interest income, from both individual stock or bond holdings and funds. And if you’re like me, and have both a retirement account and an individual brokerage account, it’s a handy way of seeing total estimated annual income and monthly income in real time.

 

• Uncategorized