This blog started many years ago, when I just graduated from graduate school, hence the name "Young Dividend". However, it's more than a decade now since I started, and I am no longer that young anymore. I started this blog as I wanted to share with people of the community my thinking and journey with investing and becoming independent. And over the years, my portfolio has grown from both income invested from my job, capital appreciation of my holdings, and dividends and interests paid from my holdings. There were many ups and down cycles, learning first hand while holding these positions taught me a lot about my personal risk tolerance and tested my investing thesis. Looking back, I started this long journey broke, with $0 to my name. There is a sense of nostalgia and I get a slight tear looking back at where I started, and where the portfolio is now. As of today, my total assets, sits at around $1.71M USD. To get this amount I will need to win a $6.84M USD lottery ticket (i.e. take the immediate payout which cuts the amount in half, and then pay half of that amount in taxes), or get a $3.42M USD pay check from my employer (i.e. pay 50% in tax) to net this amount.
Unfortunately, growing up has caused changes in my life. I no longer have time to post what I am doing and over the years, I have become more and more preoccupied with my job, as the company I work for keeps assigning me more responsibilities and higher roles. Juggling my job with my personal life, there is just not much time left over to do much else.
I am currently financially independent and no longer need a job to sustain myself. Working right now and doing a job, is no longer focused on income and making ends meet or churning the portfolio higher, working for me is about finding something I love to do. Even if I work in a regular job, the income from the job will not really budge the portfolio total net value anymore, it will take a long time or it will need to be a high level management position. So this changes my perspective of work and optimizing my time and value, verses before when I started when I was really selling my time for money, doing the daily grind. Having this portfolio, really helps me choose what I do and what I don't want to do, it gives me some freedom of choice. I can so "no" to things, instead of worrying about saying "yes" to everything.
Moving forward, the portfolio will continue to grow as I continue to invest heavily my take home income and my expenditures are quite low relative to income. My assets have diversified over the years to have larger position in cash and high yield savings accounts, as I am looking to purchase a home with the cash saved; when I started almost everything was in equities. However, after this house is taken cared of, the portfolio will continue to grow with more and more positions of stocks, and likely other asset classes as I look to diversify my income stream (i.e. real estate and rentals), and asset holdings beyond just traditional dividend producing equities to hedge.
I want to thank all my fellow readers and contributors on my dividend income investing journey. I will continue to keep this website up, as I find the charts useful when I am investing in stocks.
I will be stopping posting updates on the portfolio and net worth pages, as I am now receiving more income from my working life, and would like to keep the numbers more private now.
Consistency is the key (investing during good times and bad), hard work and keeping expenditures minimal, and focusing on growing assets and not liabilities all help move things quickly. And following the investing rules are important, and to not give out to herd mentality pressure and emotions. A contrarian mentality is also important, often the best time to invest is the time when nobody wants to invest. And the time to be aggressive is when nobody wants to be aggressive.
I wish all investors who are just starting out, to keep it going in bad times and good times, and best of luck on their journey.
Thanks,
-YD
