Floor every month, then let the lumps land on top. A year that only pays in June is a trap you will meet in March.
A fat payment lands and the brain does a stupid thing. It divides by twelve, smiles, and files the year under "solved". Then March arrives, or December, and the account is quiet, and you are suddenly doing arithmetic with credit cards.
The calendar is the fix. Twelve boxes. What actually pays in each one. Not what the annual number would be if it arrived smoothly, because it does not arrive smoothly. Companies pay twice a year. Trusts pay quarterly. One fund in the cave pays every month, on purpose, so the quiet boxes are never empty.
That monthly fund is the floor. The others are lumps. The lumps are allowed to be lumpy. They are not allowed to be the only plan.
The goblin's actual year
The live version lives on the hoard. This is the shape, from the same ledger, so it cannot wander off.
Every month: the monthly income fund. That is the floor. March and December are floor-only. Those are the thin months. They still pay. They just do not pretend to be June.
January, April, July, October: the floor plus the real-estate credit trust, which pays four times a year.
February, May, August, November: the floor plus the high-yield fund, which also pays four times a year. August is the fatter of those four, because that fund uses one quarter as a top-up.
June and September: the floor plus Legal & General. June is the final, the big one. September is the interim, smaller, still a lump. Those two months are why the year looks rich if you only screenshot the peaks.
You can read that back as a sentence: something lands most months because the pillars overlap on purpose, not because any single name is magic. A first buy does not need four pillars. It needs a floor. The rest is Level 3, which is this page.
The dates only work if they are the real dates. I had the monthly fund's ex-div wrong in my head. I wrote April 7th as the cut-off. It was the pay date. The holding's own note still records the correction. A calendar you invent is just June again, with extra boxes.
What a fat month actually looks like
Here is June, with the real numbers. Legal & General paid 15.74p per share in June 2026. I owned 126,000 shares. £19,830 landed. That is the lump. It is not a monthly wage. If you spend it like one, September will feel clever and March will feel like a trick.
The thin months are not a problem to be solved with a riskier name. They are a reason the floor exists. I have been tempted, after a June like that, to treat the next buy as optional. The calendar is what talks me out of it. Twelve boxes, some fat, some thin, none empty if I can help it.
Build yours the same way you build anything else in this cave: on paper, with dates you did not invent. Start with whatever you actually own. Mark the pay months. Circle the empty ones. The empty ones are the next pillar's job, not a prompt to concentrate harder in the name that already had a good June.
[This is the goblin's calendar, not a template to copy name-for-name. Overlap is the idea. The tickers are just what happened to be in the cave when the year started.]
Not financial advice. Just the year as it actually pays, written down so a fat month cannot talk me into a thin plan.
The calendar is how you find out whether income is covering life or just covering June. After that the question gets ruder: what number would make work optional. That's What is a freedom number?.