About this Blog

I started managing my own portfolio while I was still working full time as a computer systems analyst at a financial services firm.  I knew I was going to retire in a couple of years even though I did not have enough capital in my IRA to sustain me for 20 years or so.  I did feel like I could take the limited capital and invest it in dividend producing stocks and produce enough income that with some conservation I could use the dividends to supplement social security and a small pension we had coming in.

I had already taken steps to reduce debt and pay off all credit cards as well as purchased new vehicles and paid them off before retirement. 

I calculated that I would be able to meet all monthly expenses within the guaranteed income that I had coming in but with little to spare.  Then my plan was to invest in dividend stocks to produce about $18,000 per year to handle annual expenses and unplanned repairs etc.

Without going into actual stocks being purchased, I was looking at yield as a primary requirement.  I looked at a lot of financial services types of stocks along with REIT's, CEF's, and MLP's as those are the areas where most of the higher yields were located. 

In some cases I was buying on downtrends because with my limited knowledge, buying low and selling high sounded reasonable to me as well as the lower the stock went the higher the yield went.  What I did not count on was the fact that I was investing in a bull market when stocks were doing well.

Last year mid-2014, the bond market started stalling and the threat of interest rate hikes were getting serious and some of my holdings were taking a beating in price.  While I realized that they were only paper losses and I was still getting the dividends (about $20,000 previous 12 months) I was beginning to fear the downturn in the stock market that was sure to come.  I began to realize that I did not know enough to properly manage my holdings so I began looking around for a way to improve my knowledge. 

Because I use TD Ameritrade as my brokerage account one of the things I looked at was Investools which is a subsidiary of TD Ameritrade.  I signed up for a 30 day free trial and quickly realized how much I did not know and what Investools could teach me.  While it is a little pricey I decided to charge the expense to my brokerage account and jump in.

My investing experience is continuing to be a work in progress and I am constantly learning and adjusting how I invest.  I've learned a lot from my mistakes and thankfully they have not been devastating to my portfolio.  The expense of Investools has more then paid for itself in the year that I have been participating with their courses.

While I am still learning, one thing I ended up doing as a result of my studies is to not rely on dividends for all my returns.  I have since taken half of my original amount and divided that between an annuity with a guaranteed lifetime income and a CD ladder with a good monthly drawdown that will take 18 years to exhaust.

The remaining half is in stock investments with 50% of that in good solid dividend stocks and the other 50% in growth and value strategies looking for shorter term capital growth.

This blog is my way of recording what types of things I look at to get to my investments.  It should also have many interesting things that I am learning about in how to look at various aspects of investments. 

It is not written for others to provide any investment advice or anything like that.  In fact anyone that bought a stock I might post about here without doing their due diligence on their own would be making a HUGE mistake.