About Me

I am a normal guy in my 40s with a normal day job that has a keen interest in investing. I live in Europe and enjoy life there with my wife and our three children. During 2018, when researching how to provide best for my family, I discovered that the right investing strategy for me is the dividend growth strategy. My journey has just begun, and I believe that it is never too late to start. My goal is to build a passive income portfolio with dividends over the next two decades that should reach 30.000 euros (35.000 USD) in annual income. This blog is to keep me focused on reaching my target, share my experiences and receive feedback from the readers.

My investing activity began all the way back in 2000s when I was at university studying business administration. Some of my fellow students were already investing in stocks and had built reasonably sized portfolios (at least for guys in their early 20s). As we exchanged ideas and investment opportunities, I also started to invest. At that time online brokers became available at reasonable prices – about 10$ per trade.

I quickly wanted to ride on the get-rich-quick wave and switched to warrants to increase leverage. Warrants are quite typical for the German market for private investors. After some unsuccessful trades I realized it took way too much time of mine to follow the market and price movements, but more importantly, I came out losing. I also did not do any risk management and looking back my loss risk was so much bigger than my profit margin, it was a large proportion of luck I did not get burned heavily. At the same time, it was a good learning experience on how to deal with losses.

I then started my first job and pension scheme setups were heavily promoted with additional employer contributions. So, I went for this investment strategy: Building up a value growth portfolio over time with monthly contributions taking advantage of the dollar-cost-average. I continued to do so after moving to a different country under a different set of savings rules. The big advantage of these personal pension schemes is that they are income tax deductible for the time of contribution and deferred to the time of withdrawal. The limitation is that the pension funds would only be accessible from the age of 60 or 65 onwards. On top, the funds you could invest in charged hefty fees of 1.5-2.0% each year.

In 2015, with my first son born, I wanted to setup a savings plan for him and the best solution seemed to be investing in ETFs at low cost with monthly contributions. This worked fine until, in the summer of 2018, I was fed up with the results and looked into alternative long-term investment strategies. This is when I came across dividend growth investing and was hooked immediately. This was the way to go for me. One of the key benefits: the regular dividend payments keep you having a close tracking on your progress.

I found many helpful sites and blogs (check out the blogroll page) that helped me get started. It was great to see that there is a growing community with the same ambition and believes, many of them with a passion to share their knowledge. As I read in one of them, the theory around dividend growth investing strategy is very simple, executing it in a disciplined way is not necessarily as easy. I often must remind myself that it should be relatively “boring”: save money and invest in companies that are undervalued with growing dividend payouts.

Thanks for stopping by and join me on my journey to financial independence.