UPDATES

Bought 14,800 shares of NCYF at 50.5p, bringing the total to 37,850. Projected next dividend: £378.50 on the November payment, up from £230.50.

The RECI and SMIF dividends will both hit before October is out, and there's a bit more income I can potentially put to work. I don't think I'll hit my goal of getting NCYF to £500 a quarter just yet. But targets are there to be aimed for, and I'm closer than I would be if I didn't have one.

A few difficult things going on in the personal life. Navigating everything in the best ways I can, and onto the next.

I can't believe 2026 is almost over, in a dividend sense.

The account is unrestricted. Saxo lifted the restriction on October 7th, four weeks to the day after it went on, and the goblin can buy things again. That is excellent news, and I'm not going to pretend the month it took was any fun.

Quick recap for anyone who missed the last two dispatches. On September 9th a deposit landed, the account got flagged for a KYC review straight after, and the fourth RECI buy went through smaller than planned because everything after it was blocked. On the 22nd I sent the full pack: every income stream, tax returns, statements, proof of address. I thought that would be it.

It wasn't. Round two came back on October 1st, round three on the 5th, round four on the 6th. Forty-odd documents across four rounds, and every round took five business days or more to hear back. Round three was the one that got me. It re-sent a form I'd already answered and asked for documents I'd already supplied, some of them more than once.

The paperwork wasn't the hard part. The shape of the process was. Every request arrived as a faceless form with length-limited boxes. No named contact, no phone number, no email thread, nobody to ask what they actually wanted. So you guess, you upload, you wait a week, and you find out you guessed wrong. One conversation with a person could have cut weeks off this.

Compare that with Trading 212, who put me through KYC a few months back. Similar questions, but it ran as an email thread with an actual person on the other end. I asked what they needed, they told me, I sent it. Much easier, and nobody lost a week guessing.

Nothing was wrong with the money or the paperwork. The problem was the process, and the process cost me a month of the account sitting still and a fair bit of stress I didn't need. I've put in a formal complaint about being asked for the same documents again and again, and it's still open. From this experience, I can't recommend Saxo to anyone.

The bright side, and it's a real one: I had a full trail of everything. Every statement, every tax return, every proof of address, filed and findable. When a round asked for something I'd already sent, digging it out again took minutes, not days. If one boring habit paid for itself this month, it was that one.

Now, the point of having the account at all. NCYF is next, as planned, and it goes in before the late-October ex-date. That gets its own dispatch when it happens. The dividends kept landing the whole way through the freeze, which is the entire idea. The pile sat still for a month. The goblin brain is very relieved to be feeding it again.

Two paydays in five days. The LGEN interim landed on September 25th, £7,862.40 across the three accounts, and SMIF's September £500 dropped today, the 30th. The machine did its job. The broker, less so.

Second RECI top-up in three days, and it did not go to plan. 3,170 shares at 117p, taking the pillar from 12,600 to 15,770 - a real buy, just not the ~16,700 pencilled in on Monday.

The buy is done. 4,250 shares of RECI at 117.5p, taking the pillar from 8,350 to 12,600. No drama, no timing games this time - just adding to the pile.

The second buildout buy is done. 11,250 shares of NCYF at 52.5p, taking the pile from 11,800 to 23,050. The goal was 25,000 - a nice round number chosen because at the regular 1p quarterly payment, 25k shares means £250 a quarter, matching RECI's £250.50 and levelling the pair up properly. So yes, I fell a little short. The goblin brain noticed.

The buildout push is officially underway. Today I bought 8,500 shares of NCYF at 52.4p, taking the pile from 3,300 to 11,800. The timing was the whole point - the ex-div for the 1.5p August payment is July 30, so every one of those shares qualifies for the big payment of the cycle. That's £177 heading my way in August instead of the £49.50 it would have been. The goblin brain is very satisfied with that trade.

It's done. SMIF is at 100k. But let me be honest about how it actually played out, because it wasn't the clean finish I'd pictured. For the month of June I managed to get the SMIF position to within 1,545 shares of the 100k target - so close, but for a perfectionist like me it was genuinely hard not to have the full round number sitting there. That's exactly why the July dividend lands just short of the £500 mark - £492.98 - because the June ex-div caught me at the slightly lower count. A small thing, but my goblin brain noticed it.

I have dreamt of this day. And whilst it's always nice to see a big dividend like this land - £19,830 from LGEN - it's actually pretty anti-climactic. Because it already has a home. There's no decision to agonise over, no temptation to do something clever with it. It goes straight into SMIF, exactly as the plan said it would months ago. The dividend hit and it just works - that's the whole feeling, and it's a genuinely nice thing to watch happen. Sticking to the plan is the least dramatic and most satisfying thing in the world.

Writing this from Kathmandu. The trip was a bit last minute - threw the bag together and got out. Spent some time hiking in the Himalayas, which has a way of putting everything else in perspective, and I'm now doing a bit of a fitness bootcamp whilst working remotely. The seasonal business has gone into its quiet months so the timing worked out.

Quick one - email from SMIF just landed. The 0.75p dividend for May is confirmed (not the base 0.5p), so that's great to hear. Payment date is May 8th, not May 6th as I had down.

NCYF is officially on the board. The fourth and final pillar of the dividend machine is live. Bought 3,300 shares at 50.1p per share - it's a smaller buy than I'd have liked, but consistency matters more than size. The Iran situation has knocked my earnings a bit, and I had family visiting which meant spending money on actually enjoying life. What's the point of building all this if you never live? I make no excuses for the smaller buy. About £1,025 of new money went in this month.

Happy Easter from the cave. Writing this on a bank holiday while the world continues to be... interesting. The Iran war is still rattling markets and creating this general atmosphere of not really knowing what's happening next. Temperamental, unstable, pick your adjective. But here's the thing - this is all short-term noise in the grand scheme of things. Could I try to pivot strategy and take advantage of the weakness in various positions? Sure. But that's not really what this is about. The plan is the plan.

Quick correction first - I had the SMIF ex-dividend date wrong. It's April 7th, not whatever I had in my head before. Noted.

Put in a buy order for another 4,350 shares of RECI this morning. If it goes through - and I don't anticipate any issues - that takes us to 8,350 shares ahead of the March 12th ex-dividend date. Six days early.

RECI is officially on the board. Pulled the trigger on the first 4,000 shares - I like round numbers. This is the third pillar of the dividend machine and it feels good to finally have skin in the game here. Quarterly payer at 3p per share, so that's £120 heading my way in April. The ex-dividend date is projected around March 12th, so if things go well I'd love to sneak in another 1,000 shares before then to bump that April payout to £150. 5,000 is a nice clean number.

Well... I've been doing a bit of an audit on myself and my businesses. Tax season after all. I ran every single bank statement through AI and found some interesting things. My accounting is now 90% cheaper than it was before and more accurate thanks to some Python script wizardry. This was actually a fun process - it helped me reflect on goals for the year ahead, where I can cut some stuff, where I can add some other stuff, and just how I live.

End of January buy done a little early. Deployed 4,546 shares into the SMIF Hoard - that's the final £4,000 of new money going in. Total now sits at 77,276 shares with 22,724 to go. Base dividend locked at £386.38/month.

First buy of 2026 is in. Deployed 6,530 new shares into the SMIF Hoard at 87p per share - just over £5,300 of new money. Total holding now sits at 72,730 shares with 27,270 to go.

Christmas Eve check-in. December has been more challenging than expected on the business side - exchange rates have been brutal and that always stings. The SMIF dividend payout of £331 is due on January 5th, so the decision on how much goes into the pie will be made then. Projecting it'll still be £5,300 in new money, plus using the full £331 dividend to buy on top of that. Will post the actual numbers once the buy is complete around the 5th.

Just deployed another 6,110 shares into the SMIF Hoard for approximately £5,300. Total holding now sits at 66,200 shares - well on the way to that 100k target. Business had a strong month, and if things keep going this way, expecting to drop a similar buy at the end of December. The pile grows.

Wealth Goblin comes out of the shadows. I am apprehensive to share this as I keep most of my financials bottled up but hey I'm the Wealth Goblin and I'd like to share finally what I am doing. Here it is, laid out in black and white... well... the colors of the site. Expect updates here monthly based on what I have done with income at the end of each month but at the moment, full steam ahead for the SMIF Hoard train.