I had always thought that I would not be one of those people who will reach six figures or more in capital.
I graduated 10 years ago (actually to date next week, whoa how time flies by), started working, bought an apartment and began paying mortgage.
I woke up, got to work, got home, did something (read: spent money without thinking much), went to sleep and repeat. I did this for maybe 7 years.
I remember the exact day when I really got interested in investing.
While we were on a coffee break discussion session at work one my colleagues said:
"Well you can always buy company X's stocks for the dividend if you have spare change".
I had been one of those "Well I'll start investing some day" and "Oh yea, I should really start investing".
Well I never did. (Actually I had as a kid and had my stocks since the early 90's but forgot about it, like I described in my first post)
Later that day in the evening when I got home from work I opened up a brokerage account at Nordnet and from there on I've been investing. This was two years ago.
From being hand-to-mouth spender (I've have a good and happy life and I could've kept going and being happy no question) and not thinking much about how much things cost I have really changed my mindset.
First I started investing in the Finnish Stock Market with small amounts of capital just to get started and figuring out what investing is all about. I bought couple of stocks and I still own them, they are in my portfolio just to reminder of the beginning and how I did not know anything.
I've studied engineering so finance was or actually is something I do not know much about.
In the beginning I also started to monthly invest on Low-Cost Index Funds which I still do.
Since then I've been reading books, reading blogs and browsing Seeking Alpha and so on.
I started out with a Finnish Best Seller, a classic and a sort of "Finnish Stock Market Bible" "Miten sijoitan pörssiosakkeisiin" by Seppo Saario (rough translation How to invest in stocks). A masterpiece in my opinion.
I recently finished reading a book titled "The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy" by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko.
While reading through the book it gave me a boost and focus on my journey of investing. I'll probably write a more detailed blog post of the book later on. Had some amazing eureka moments during the process of reading this book.
Reading blogs has been helping me enormously. Dividend Hawk's , Dividend Growth Investor's and Warren Fyffet's blogs were probably the most important and fascinating to read. I have learned a lot from these blogs. Great blogs, thank you guys.
When I found out Seeking Alpha it gave me even more material to dive in. Enormous amount actually. After reading articles on Seeking Alpha I built a sort filtered mindset to question and form my own point of view of things and not automatically fully agreeing on what I was reading.
A lot's of good stuff at Seeking Alpha.
Dividend Growth Investing.
From reading and researching all of the above and much much more not mentioned I slowly formed the idea of Dividend Growth Investing and that it would suit me the best.
My goal is to generate a monthly growing dividend income stream and I plan to reinvest dividends to generate additional earnings over time.
I have experienced (and I'm sure most investors have) that it is not easy to sit on the stock and even more difficult to figure out which stocks to buy and when.
As an addition to Dividend Growth Investing I invest monthly on Low-Cost Index Funds to have diversification. I believe that in the most probable case I will not beat the Index.
I hope you enjoyed reading my blog post.
Best Regards
D.G.E.
