I, like most of us, am planning for my financial future. That is a future where I have a source of independent wealth, so that I am not forced to work a job I hate or live in constant fear of losing my active income. This is true financial freedom.

Personally, I view dividend growth investing as one of the most sustainable paths to reach that goal. Here, you can build up a portfolio of investments, which pay a growing stream of dividend income. That is money you can take out as cash and use to pay bills or just add to your savings. However, you can also reinvest those dividends to acquire more investments, increasing your ownership and future income. Over the long-term, this creates a massive compounding effect and surprisingly good returns. In our community, we call this the dividend snowball. If you want to learn more about that, watch my full video on the topic.

With dividend growth investing, you not only earn income, but the market value of your investments appreciate too. That means you are building up a large nest egg, while your dividend payments compound. The goal is to grow this dividend income to where it exceeds your living expenses. That unlocks a new level of financial security. In the worst case scenario, you can pay for your lifestyle without ever touching your principal investment. With dividend growth, those payments will continue to increase and so will the value of your portfolio. Ideally, you can keep reinvesting dividends and continue the compounding effect to even greater results.

I believe this strategy of dividend growth investing is a great retirement strategy. Here you’re not forced to sell off your assets to fund your lifestyle. During recessions, retirees are often forced to sell when the market value has plummeted. This is the worst time to do so. With a dividend strategy, you can continue to hold and even add during these downturns. In fact, your dividend income may even continue to grow during recessions if you invest wisely. This is sustainable wealth that could be passed down generations.

Well, I have a portfolio of individual stocks with a track record of reliable annual dividend increases. Some of these are low yield - high growth, and others are high yield - lower growth. For those less interested in individual stocks, you could choose similar ETFs & mutual funds.

Every month, I invest new money into my dividend portfolio. Some months higher. Some lower. This depends on market opportunities and my income. Right now, I average around $2-$3k a month. I’m 24 years old so I have a long time horizon ahead. That means I need to stay committed to investing for years and decades to come. Consistency is the only sure way to reach this goal. If you take years off from investing, especially at a young age, you will miss significant long-term compounding.

Every month I share the progress of my portfolio & strategy on YouTube. This reflection helps hold myself accountable to my investing goals. Even if I wasn’t doing YouTube, I would still need a practice of accountability. Prior to YouTube, I had a spreadsheet where I would keep track of my portfolio, earned dividends, and important milestones. There is a famous quote, "what gets measured gets done". This highlights the importance of tracking progress to reach a goal.

As I continued investing, I replaced my spreadsheet with a full fledged software tool: dividenddata.com. This started as a personal project, since I studied data science in college. I built a way to track my portfolio with automatically updating prices, projected dividend income, dividend calendar, upcoming payments, yield statistics, and much much more. I would even track my earned dividends, with additional analytics. This is vital if you ever actually plan to live off dividends. You must measure this data and do it consistently. However, tracking is only one part of successful investing.

You also need to know what stocks to actually invest in and when. This is a much larger problem, requiring in-depth stock research. That is why I made it a core focus when developing dividenddata.com.

Here you can view curated financials for over 7,500 stocks, designed specifically for the long-term dividend growth investor. I built every feature I want to analyze stocks. This includes detailed graphs and tables for revenue, net income, free cash flow, dividends, margins, shares outstanding, stock-based compensation, etc. The data is shown both quarterly and annually with calculated compound annual growth rates over multiple time frames. You can view full financial statements with some dating all the way back to 1985. This includes the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. With dividends, you get the full dividend history shown on both graphs and tables. You have the 1, 3, 5, and 10 year compound annual growth rate. For each individual increase and decrease you have the growth rate. You have the dividend payout ratio based on both free cash flow and net income. This shows how sustainable the dividend payment is and how much room there is to grow.

All of this data is crucial to analyze the financial quality of a business and find great dividend growth stocks. It also helps you avoid bad stocks. Those would be companies with consistently declining or negative free cash flow. That by nature makes the dividend payment unsustainable. Other examples include companies who use excessive debt to fuel unsustainable business practices. These factors will not lead to long-term dividend growth.

Still, this is only the start of the features dividenddata.com has to offer. It centers around those 2 pillars: tracking & research. It helps me stay consistent and continue learning. I have my dividenddata.com tab open all day on my computer. I never close it. During market hours, I look at my portfolio to see any notable changes. I’ll read the news feed about my stocks. Look for notable dividend increases or decreases. Upload new buys or dividends as they come in. Much of the platform is constantly updating with new data.

Today, dividenddata.com not only helps me, but hundreds of other investors. It’s just getting started and will only continue to improve overtime.

The service is offered at a monthly and annual subscription, but as I say it pays for itself. This is not some marketing gimmick. It’s the truth. We’re investing for our financial future. So if you can improve that return just slightly, then you’ll receive far more in value. I see this myself. There is no doubt that my research tool helped me identify the financial strength of a company like Microsoft. I bought Microsoft heavily in fall 2022 and am now up over 57% on the stock in just 1 year. That’s $13,897 of value generated. This was not some YOLO risky investment either. It was informed with a low risk of long-term failure. I got a good price on a core holding I plan to hold for decades.

Another example is Broadcom, which I bought in early 2023. I used my research tool to determine the stock had great margins, free cash flow, growth, and was trading at a relative discount. I bought the stock and I’m up 71.39% in less than one year. That’s $4,534 of value creation. While I think Broadcom is somewhat overvalued now it’s still real value creation. Of course, not every investment works out like this. Many investments take far longer to see results, often years or decades. Some will see weaker returns or even losses.

However, the point is that dividenddata.com gives you the tools to keep learning, measure progress, and create value. If you really are investing for your future, then the service more than pays for itself.

DividendData.com is available monthly and annually. The monthly price is $29.99, giving you access to the full suite of features. The annual plan is $299.99 a year, which is a 20% discount. We want to incentivize long-term members with a better deal. These prices are locked in and you will face no future price increases. There is a 30-day money back guarantee if you don’t think you’re gaining value.

After creating an account, your dashboard will load with full features.

The research page front and center. Here you can see a list of the day’s most actively traded stocks. You can click a ticker symbol on the list to view the research page for the stock. You can save the stock, adding it to your watchlist. That is a new feature we will discuss soon. At the top you have a search bar, which you can search and analyze over 7,500 stocks. Here you get the full research tool I showed earlier. You can also save the stock to your watchlist.

On the watchlist page, you keep track of all the stocks you have saved. This can be added to 1 at a time or bulk via a CSV file. On that page, you can see daily price changes, a 52 week price range, 50 day price average, and the 200 day price average. Importantly, you can also see the difference between these averages and the current price and sort them. This lets you identify easily which stocks have had large dips in prices. From there, you can go back to the research page and determine if it’s a good time to buy.

On the portfolio page, you can replace your spreadsheet and track unlimited investment accounts. To start, you click “add new portfolio”. You can start manual tracking or automatically import the portfolio from supported US brokerages via Plaid. With the automatic import, you can then manually update and customize your data. You can choose to exclusively use the automatic import, but you will miss out on some customization features. For manual users, you can use the action bar buttons to add investments, bulk upload, edit, or delete from the portfolio. This is the same for tracking dividend history. There is a complete guide available in the help section which can be accessed via multiple ways. When you have your investment data inputted, you have access to all the tracking features I discussed earlier.

The News Feed page shows you business news for all the stocks you own from various sources. If you have no stocks, then it shows news for the entire market. You can see all dividend news, including increases, decreases and special dividends. With an inputted portfolio, the dividend news can be filtered by just the stocks you own. So news is more relevant to you.

The Valuation page allows you to calculate the intrinsic value of a stock via 3 methods: Simple Ben Graham method, Discounted Cash Flow, and the Dividend Discount Model. The calculator on the left. There is a full video guide explaining each method.

The Projection page allows you to calculate the compounding effect of investing in a stock and reinvesting dividends over 35 years. There is a full video, explaining how to use the projection tool.

On top of all these features, you gain access to a private discord community with over 1,300 members. Here you can discuss investing news with others. We share our buys, dividends, and portfolios. The goal is to help each other reach our goal of financial freedom. It’s a community.

-Zach
Dividend Data