If you’re new to following our journey, our first love was real estate. I wouldn’t say we had a choice in the early days, it was just a case of not knowing or understanding anything else.
We paid off our mortgage in our early 30’s and wondered what we would do with the extra money every month. The thought of going back into debt after just paying off the house was worrisome, but my parents convinced us it was the thing to do. “Use the equity in your home to buy another property”, they said. It sounded easy enough but it was still very scary.
I’m sure my parents had a full-time rental property in mind, imagining my husband and I renting it out 100% of the time so the tenants could pay off the new debt. Instead, we chose our own route and purchased a vacation condo in a resort-type community that we could use for family weekends away.
We knew nothing about renting vacation homes at the time, this being long before Airbnb came on the scene, but we felt more comfortable investing in a physical asset. Plus, being able to use it ourselves felt like a win-win scenario.
We’ve come a long way since then and have owned two vacation rental properties (the original and then later one in the U.S.A) and a student rental.
Although I personally began investing in dividend stocks almost 30 years ago, any extra money we had left over at the end of the month always went to paying down the debt owing on the properties. It was rare to have anything extra to put into the brokerage account.
As someone who has experienced both, being a dividend investor is a lot easier and more money can be made for a lesser initial investment.
Hindsight tells us that we would have ended up with more money had we just focused on dividend stocks right from the start, but emotions tell me that we would have likely missed some contributions over the years and instead used the money for other things.
Our much younger selves were not diligent enough to focus on investing money every month, let alone knowing what stocks to purchase. Real estate was something we understood. It was tangible, which gave us great comfort.
Real estate helped us get to where we are today and, for that, I am thankful.
If I can share any words of wisdom, it’s to choose an investment strategy that you love.
Our February Dividend Income
In February, we earned $2,003 in dividend income. This is split up in the following manner:
The following chart shows the growth of our income for the months of January and February over the last 4 years.
Lower earning months happen in dividend investing. Most of the companies we own pay in January and every three months thereafter. You can see how our January income more than doubled from January 2021 to 2024.
Likewise, you can see the much smaller increase of 34% in our February income over those same 4 years.
Income fluctuations occur when the portfolio changes - with the buying and selling of shares or dividend increases.