Loading VTI's live yield…
Seeded with VTI's live yield, its measured dividend growth, and 7%/yr price growth; payouts reinvested, taxes off (as in a Roth IRA). Assumptions, not promises. Early years will track your real buying schedule only loosely — lump-sum timing shifts the first few years and washes out over decades. Want taxes and the year-by-year view? Open the full calculator →
Year-one income at the live yield, before taxes — with a payout that has risen most years for two decades on top.
| Invested in VTI | Income / Year | Income / Month |
|---|---|---|
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All 101 payments since 2001, charted with the next expected ex-date, on the VTI dividend history page.
Nothing here is a guessed default: the yield is VTI's trailing twelve months of real distributions divided by the current price, fetched on every load, and the growth seed is measured from the fund's own annual payout totals across 24 years of record (capped at 10%/yr for conservatism). Edit any field and the math follows.
Owning Every Paycheck in America
VTI holds essentially every dividend-paying company in the US market — so its distribution is less a fund's payout than a census of corporate America's. That's why the record reads so steadily: $0.63 per share in 2002, $2.07 by 2015, $3.67 by 2024, across 101 quarterly checks without a missed quarter. When VTI's dividend falls, it means the whole country's did — 2009 and 2020 are visible dips in the record, and both healed within a couple of years.
What the Projection Is Really Telling You
At ~1.3%, nobody retires on VTI's yield alone — $1,000 a month of income needs roughly $900,000 at today's rate. The projection's real message is the handoff: decades of reinvested growth build the principal, and principal is what eventually buys income. Run 20 years above, then take the ending value to the income calculator on any fund payout page to see what that pile could pay as monthly checks.
The Honest Fine Print
A smooth 7% line hides that the market twice cut this fund's price roughly in half en route. The payout record was the calmer passenger — dividends fell far less than prices in both crashes — which is exactly why dividend-focused investors watch payment records instead of tickers. Compare VTI's record against any income fund's in our side-by-side tool.
Want the Full Picture?
Taxes, DRIP on/off, income goals, and the year-by-year snowball chart — the complete calculator does it all.
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