Tag: Dividends
Closed-End Funds vs. Dividend ETFs: It’s All About Life Stages
When do you plan on retiring? Are you already retired? These questions will be vital in determining what financial instruments you’ll need to leverage. Investing is all about your time horizon, goals, philosophy, and risk tolerance. The good part is you don’t need to have all of the answers the first day you start investing.…
Passive Income: How Do You Spend Your Free Time?
The main difference between the rich and the poor is how they spend their time. How do you spend your free time? Feel free to answer honestly to yourself. Once I learned this golden rule, my income, and net worth doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled in a couple of years. If you want to create…
Investing for Interest 113: Baby Bonds vs. Treasury Bonds
If you are making the switch from saver to investor, one of the best places to start is with bonds. Bonds provide safe, consistent income with the chance for some capital appreciation. Treasury bonds are a safe haven for investors because they pose no credit risk (meaning they are considered risk-free). However, if you crave…
Dividend Investing 106: Building a 60/40 Portfolio
Receiving dividends is one of the best joys in life, but you can make it even better. As much as I love the stock market, it does have its ups and downs. One of the best ways to counteract (or hedge) the unpredictability of the stock market is to invest in something more solid and…
Dividend Investing 105: Add a Safe Options-Trading Strategy
Trading options get a bad reputation from horror stories of people losing it all in a casino-like fashion. But options trading can actually be quite safe. As you amass a huge portfolio of dividend stocks, you may get the urge to generate some more income. Likewise, you may look to buy dividend stocks at rock-bottom…
Dividend Investing 104: Building a Dividend Payment Schedule
Few things in life are more satisfying than receiving dividends. Although we invest our money to earn dividends, they are still gifts from heaven. As we continue our dividend investing journey, we begin to fine-tune when we receive our dividends. I have been dividend investing for four years and am still tweaking my dividend schedule.…
Cursed Retirement? What is Sequence of Returns Risk?
Most of us spend our working years dreaming (and planning) for retirement daily. We know that to free ourselves from bondage, we must have a solid retirement plan in place. Conventional wisdom has us invest 10% into our 401Ks and Roth IRAs over 35-45 years. Hopefully, we retire with $1-2 million, but that is rare.…
Dividend Investing 103: Picking Your Platforms
Your investing platform will determine how much you invest. You’ll have a blast if it gives you many options and tools. You’ll avoid it like the plague if it is old and clunky. I use five different brokerage platforms because they all offer different experiences. These experiences include depositing money, automated investing, instant investing, fractional…
The Magic of High-Yield Index Fund Reinvestment
Index funds pay an embarrassingly low amount of dividends. However, they are a great product to dollar-cost average over a long time because it’s hard to beat their gains. The problem arises when you need to generate income from your index funds in your working or retirement years. Most people cannot live on a 1.5%…
Dividend Investing 102: Picking the Right Dividend Stocks
Now that you know some basic terms of dividend investing, it’s time to jump into picking the right stocks for your risk tolerance and investment philosophy. Welcome back to the Dividend Investing 101 series (101), where we get you into the passive income game. The three types of dividend securities. I categorize dividend investing into…
Dividend Investing 101: What Are Dividends?
Have you ever wondered how rich people always seem to make money, even when not at work? This magical existence is what we call “passive income.” One of the major types of passive income is dividends, along with rents, royalties, and automated business. But what are dividends, and why should you care about them? You’ll…
Saving & Investing 103: What is Your Investment Philosophy?
Once you get past all the mindset quirks of saving and investing, you will need to formulate an investing philosophy. Your philosophy will lead to your strategy, which will be your rock during tough times. Everyone’s philosophy is different, so understanding yours is paramount. Welcome back to the Saving & Investing 101 series (101, 102),…
Saving is Defense: Investing is Offense
Do you know the difference between saving and investing? What is the difference between having $100,000 in a high-yield savings account (HYSA) and $100,000 in an income investing portfolio? Once they get out of credit card debt, most people become savers. Saving comes naturally because you have complete control of your money—there are no risks.…
Saving & Investing 101: What is Your Risk Tolerance?
I talk to many people who cannot even fathom moving a portion of their money into a high-yield savings account. They fear the thought of not walking into a brick-and-mortar bank to handle their transactions. Other people I know put everything they had into cryptocurrencies back in 2021. They lost nearly all of their money…
Saving and Investing with $1,000 per Month
Welcome to the big leagues! If you can save and invest $1,000 per month, you will eventually become quite wealthy. I remember four years ago (2019) when I didn’t even have $1,000 in my savings account. Even worse, I had $77,000 in debt; those were not fun times. I remember thinking that having $10,000 in…
Rents Go Up: Which Side of the Equation Are You On?
Rent prices across the United States and the world will continue to rise. There is little we can do as the average consumer. Once institutional investors, foreign interests, and the Airbnb crowd entered the real estate game, it changed the landscape forever. So how do we become homeowners in today’s environment? Even better, how do…
Become Middle-Class PLUS: Insert Growth Multipliers into Your Life
Most people fear becoming rich. Somewhere along the lines, they adopted a belief that rich people are bad; therefore, they avoid the path to wealth. However, it’s still not wrong to make a little more money. The problem is that most people cannot fathom earning income outside of a 9-5 job. Most times, people’s jobs…
Create Money, Spend Money, Grow Money: How to Break Your Scarcity Mindset
Growing up, I always associated money with fear. There was a fear of using money and becoming rich. When poor people hate the rich, they limit themselves from becoming rich. How can you become something you loathe? I was taught to dream small. For example, paying your bills each month was a significant accomplishment. Start…
Income Investing vs. Inflation 2
Inflation will stick around for 5-10 more years, so we must fight it at all costs. If your income leaves you behind, expect to have a challenging decade. Income investing is my favorite way to combat inflation because of the level of control it gives you. Each dividend you earn gives you a choice between…
Inflation Ate My Paycheck 112: Inflation for Longer
Now is a great time to be alive, although it may not seem this way. America and most countries are experiencing high inflationary pressures from all sources. However, you have all the tools at your disposal to combat inflation and continue to grow your net worth. Welcome back to the Inflation Ate My Paycheck Series…
