Hello there! I’m Peter. This is a site serves to document my thoughts on markets, investing, personal finance, and my journey to become financially independent.
I first stumbled across the idea in the early 2000’s, reading in my local newspaper about some particularly frugal individuals living off dividends. The concept of financial independence appealed to me, but I wasn’t prepared to live extremely frugally to retire early.
My first investments show that I had no idea what I was doing. One was a leveraged ETF tracking natural gas because it was going up in 2007, LNG was the thing, and people needed it. Lo, the big crash of 2008, the shale revolution thereafter, and prices never got back to those levels. I also chased yield, which led me to buying Just Energy around 2010-11, and subsequently losing thousands.
This was near the start of my career, when every dollar was incredibly important and losing that much of my savings stung. After getting burned, I stopped investing other than in my employer’s share purchase plan. I started to read about successful investors such Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, and Peter Lynch, and continued to grow my savings. I also came across sites documenting individuals’ experience with dividend investing; the first I read around the time of the Great Financial Crisis is still around today: Million Dollar Journey. It introduced me to the concept of FIRE – Financial Independence, Retire Early.
It was around 2015 I started investing in earnest, looking for quality dividend paying companies. I’ve had good success picking companies whose dividends were safe and grew steadily. My fear about huge losses seems to be unfounded, for I’ve only had two notable ones after my experience with Just Energy; one was GE (I thought they had successfully cleaned house and believed management before it tanked), and the other 3M (I read about the growing class action lawsuits but stubbornly didn’t sell at all time highs, because I thought it’s a forever stock).
On the flip side, my dividend income is on it’s way to meeting my objective, but I feel as though I’m leaving value on the table by having dividends take primacy. My returns have been respectable, around 9-14% per year depending on account, which is at or slightly below market, but I want to see what I can achieve through learning and actively searching for compounders.
From a humble beginning chasing yield, to finding quality dividend paying companies, I’m now adding a third layer to my investing process which is to make purchases of compounders at value. To this end, I decided to document my research, leading to creating this blog.
In the end, life’s about the journey, and it’s more fun with others. Please join me, on my drive to financial independence!