FI Anonymous

When I talk about investing with people, I always get the same comment. "It just sounds too risky. What if the price goes down?" I mean, it's a valid point, right? Nobody wants to lose money. The whole point of investing is to make money. And unfortunately, the risk of losing money is enough to keep some people out of the stock market completely. If only there was a way to avoid the pain of seeing your market value decline, while still getting all the benefits of a roaring bull market. What if I told you that there is a way? Well, sort of. Dividend Growth Stocks: Rewarding Shareholders In Any Market If you've read some of my other posts about investing, you may have picked up by now that I typically invest in dividend growth stocks. So not only am I usually looking for stocks with a better than average yield, but I also take into consideration a company's consistency of increasing their dividends on an annual basis, and projecting whether I think it is pra...

It finally happened. My first "bad" month of 2019 has happened. I'm sure I'm not the only one in this position, with the S&P 500 declining over 6.5% during the month of May. Just about all of my investments declined in value during May, but I'm not stressing too much. In fact, in some ways I'm a little excited by the recent market declines. Why is that? Let's take a look at the past month and find out! Comparison A quick look at a comparison of my financials from April to May shows a lot of red, which is different from the other months this year so far. My cash is down big, my investments are down - in fact, all my asset categories declined during the month. The lone bright spot was a decrease in my liabilities of over 6% since April, but even with that, my net worth decreased nearly 2%, my first month over month decrease since I've begun tracking on the blog. However, it's not all as bad as it looks. Sure, the value of my investment...

There's a link I keep up on my favorite bar, a list I visit very frequently. In fact, it's often one of the first places I go when I've got some extra cash on board, and I'm looking to invest. And when I looked at the link recently, something jumped out at me! What is this link I'm talking about? Let me share it with you here . If you haven't clicked already, the link takes you to a listing of the 'dividend aristocrats', sorted by their current dividend yields. NOTE: Please ignore the error on the VFC yield (sorry, it's not yielding 26%). I checked a number of others on the list, and the rest seem to be accurate. Dividend Aristocrats: What are they? To be considered a dividend aristocrat, a company must not only pay a dividend for 25 consecutive years, but increase that dividend for each of the past 25 years. As you can gather from the criteria, these dividend aristocrats are mature, cash generating companies, the likes of AT&T, Exx...