About

Investing should be simple. At the Dividend Café we want to try to discuss ideas that make investing a lot easier. Over a coffee or two it should become clear that anyone can do this. One of the most important things in investing is to avoid high fees. The “Experts” want us to believe that it is so complicated that it can only be accomplished with their advice. We believe with a little bit of reading and research anyone can do it.

Dividend Café was created for me to write about my journey to financial independence. It is to hopefully generate discussion and opinion sharing by readers. I have my views on investing and will be sharing them here. It is not advice for anyone to follow.

I wanted to be an investor but had no idea as how to go about it. Early on in my working years I remember going downtown in Vancouver and handing over a $2,000 cheque to a broker. That was the Vancouver stock exchange. Pure speculative plays, not investing. After reading the Wealthy Barber by David Chilton, things changed. At the time it was mutual funds that were all the rage and it made sense what they were telling us. You must be properly diversified across sectors and countries. And properly weighted with equities and bonds depending on your age. Sound good right? So, we handed over all our savings and bought mutual funds. We were on our way.

But the more I read about investing, the more I realized what this was costing us. First the high fees that were charged by the managers, then all this diversification over so many areas and emerging markets, the returns were not particularly good. I subscribed to the Money Letter for some time and came across a company called Berkshire Hathaway. That got me to read a couple of books about Warren Buffet the legendary investor. It took me too long but eventually did buy some BRK.B shares and have never regretted it. His way if investing made way more sense to me now. “Buy good companies and hold them forever.”

In 1995 on a trip to Europe I read some articles about dividend investing. We were trying to build investments to generate enough income so that work would no longer be necessary. That is when the plan came together, and we would start investing in good companies that paid dividends. From here we could take the dividends and re-invest in more shares or buy more companies to diversify our holdings.

 I live in Delta BC with my family. Our income in retirement are the dividends from our portfolio, with a small work pension.