My Dividend Journey: Update 3

HOW MUCH “FREE” MONEY DO I GET?

On average, I’m getting almost $900/mo in cash flow for doing absolutely nothing, and it’s awesome!

What I’m about to say is not financial, tax, or legal advice. This is simply something I did and my own observations and opinions on what has happened. In Summer 2021, I decided to try high yield dividend investing. This was an idea a buddy of mine had and we had talked it out, and then I researched it on YouTube and decided to try it.

This is an update after having been doing this for 1.5 years now.

HOW TO GET SPARE CASH?

I quickly discovered that I didn’t want to use my day job money to invest in this experiment last year. So, I picked up a side hustle of doing food delivery for Door Dash, Grub Hub, and Uber Eats and decided that any money I made from that, I’d put into the investment account. I also do online surveys and affiliate marketing to generate spare money. All this cash gets sent straight to the investment account. On top of that, I’m re-investing the payouts from the investments every month, so the pot of cash is constantly growing. If you want to get started with this, I’d find an easy side hustle like I did and use that to play with. On average I can make an extra $800-$1000/mo with a few extra hours of work a week and use that to grow my assets.

WHERE MY CASH IS STASHED

You must do your own due diligence and never blindly listen to some random guy on the internet (me) - Because my situation is not necessarily your situation, and with investing you are never guaranteed to make money, you may even lose money!

Over the past year, I’ve made some modifications to my holdings by selling off some holdings and buying new ones. I gave up some yield and went with holdings that are more stable and reliable and have some growth over time. I split up my money into the following investments and I have managed to generate about 10% returns in the form of MONTHLY cash flow. That’s right, at the end of every month, I’m getting cash back for holding these asseets. So if you put $10,000 in, you’re getting back $80/mo for doing nothing. I’m using this as a glorified extra savings account right now..

WHAT ABOUT GROWTH INVESTING?

I’ve been asked this a lot over the past 12 months. To be clear, my 401K and Roth IRA are basically very simple and focused on growth. I want to grow that pile of money as big as I can. Using the 12% annual compound rate that Dave Ramsey touts and finding funds that pay that, you can expect to have $1M-$4M by the time you retire depending on when you start and how long you go for.

CONCLUSION

Now that I’ve been doing this for over a year and have been growing the pot of cash over there, I’m a believer in dividend investing. It’s very freeing knowing that you could rely on the monthly income to help cover things like Utilities, Food, Gas, and Phone bills.