Dear DTA,
I’m tired of being broke. How do I invest so that I can become rich one day?
-Danielle K.
Hi, Danielle.
Thanks for writing in to us. We sincerely appreciate your readership.
First, I’m terribly sorry to hear about your financial situation.
Being broke isn’t fun at all.
While money doesn’t really buy happiness, not having any money is a sure path to unhappiness.
I say this as someone who was once in your shoes.
Yes. I was once broke, too.
Like you, I became tired of it one day.
And I decided to take action, just like how you took action by writing in to us.
The actions I took to turn it around are best described in my Early Retirement Blueprint.
That step-by-step guide to early retirement thoroughly explains exactly how I went from below broke at 27 to financially free at 33.
So you took action by writing in. It’s now time to take those actions to the next level.
If you want to stop being broke, you’ll have to stop living the lifestyle that has led you here.
That means taking action and making some radical changes across your entire life.
We’ll get into investing in a moment, but we first need to get into some basics.
Investing is important, but you can’t invest what you don’t have.
Being the world’s great investor isn’t much help if you don’t have capital to invest.
Before you get busy investing, you’ll want to get busy saving.
Start tracking every single penny you spend.
It’s imperative that you start to budget.
You can’t cut fat if you’re not aware of where the fat is.
Once you’re budgeting, aim to save at least 30% of your net income.
I know that sounds like a lot, but it’s basically a baseline level of spending in order to become fairly wealthy in a reasonable amount of time.
I personally saved 50% to 70% of my net income – for years on end – in order to become financially independent.
Saving that much will likely require you to rethink your entire life and what’s truly important to you.
But if becoming rich is important enough, you’ll see excess spending as incredibly wasteful. Spending more than necessary is harmful, and it’ll only hold you back from accomplishing your long-term financial goals.
Once you’re saving, it’s time to invest.
There are many ways to invest. Numerous strategies exist.
I can tell you that I’ve personally used dividend growth investing to get to where I am.
Where am I?
Well, as noted earlier, I became financially free and retired at 33.
I’m now living my early retirement dreams.
I’m able to do this because I’m able to live off of investment income, which means I no longer need a job or paycheck.
I’ll even show you exactly what that looks like in real life.
Check out my real-money early retirement stock portfolio, the FIRE Fund.
It’s chock-full of high-quality dividend growth stocks.
And it generates the five-figure and growing passive dividend income I need to cover my essential expenses in life.
Controlling that much wealth at such a young age might seem like an impossibility, but it’s really not.
It’ll just require you to save and then intelligently invest the savings.
To help you with the latter, take some time to read through the Dividend Growth Investing Lessons put together by fellow contributor Dave Van Knapp.
This series serves to educate investors on exactly what this strategy is, why it works so well, and how to successfully implement it.
Knowledge is power.
These lessons will give you the A-Z knowledge you need to become an intelligent and wealthy investor.
Once you’re ready to put capital to work, we have you covered from top to bottom.
You’ll never be short on ideas. I can tell you that.
The Dividend Champions, Contenders, and Challengers list is the most robust collection of information on dividend growth stocks that I know of.
It contains invaluable data on more than 800 US-listed stocks that have raised dividends each year for at least the last five consecutive years. Plenty of long-term investment ideas here.
Dividend growth investing is a fantastic long-term investment strategy for many reasons.
I believe it’s the perfect strategy for becoming financially independent. It creates ripe conditions for wealth. Otherwise, I wouldn’t invest this way.
But I believe perusing that CCC list will quickly clue you in to what’s so great about DGI.
After all, there are numerous blue-chip stocks on that list.
That’s no surprise.
It takes a wonderful business to be able to sustain growing cash dividend payments to shareholders for years – or decades – on end.
Just imagine running a terrible, unprofitable business for yourself, while simultaneously having thousands or millions of shareholders demanding ever-growing cash payments. It doesn’t work.
Dividend growth investing essentially “flunks” the poor businesses out there.
It practically eliminates them from contention, more or less.
This while simultaneously allowing you to generate the totally passive and growing income you need to truly become wealthy and free in life.
Of course, the CCC list is just a list. It’s a set of data. Handy, but we take it a step further for our readers by providing vetted, quality, and actionable investment ideas.
These ideas are shared by yours truly via the Undervalued Dividend Growth Stock of the Week series.
Every Sunday, I provide an in-depth analysis on a high-quality dividend growth stock that appears undervalued at the time of publication.
It’s up to you to decide what businesses are worthy of your capital. But this series provides a great starting point for further due diligence.
These are fantastic resources. And they’re free.
But you’ll need to take more action, Danielle.
Get started today.
I wish you luck and success.
Jason Fieber
Disclaimer: Jason Fieber is not a licensed financial advisor, tax professional, or stock broker. Please consult with a licensed investment professional before investing any of your money. If your money is not FDIC insured, it may decline in value. To protect the privacy of our readers, any names published in this article are under aliases. In addition, text may be edited, omitted or paraphrased for grammar or length.