The Dividend Family Guy

It is week 3 of my unemployment.   House projects are coming along nicely but there seems to be an endless stream of them.   The stream is a result of having lots of kids I prefer to spend time with and putting off most of the stuff until now.   No complaints here though as it gives me something to do in between phone screens. It appears that I have aged myself out of most jobs.   By that I mean I cost too much and am over qualified.   While that is flattering I may have to set aside my ego and take a step back in my current career to provide for the family. In short I won't be buying any stocks this month.   With cash now being king I am saving every penny I can in case I need to dip into emergency funds once the severance package is spent. I am still working out (free weights) and talking to friends which keeps my spirits high.   Also we had an Easter celebration with my side of the family last weekend.   Seeing all of them...

Needs work but only $45k Back in September it was made known to our office that the mother company would be shutting us down.  No good reason was given other than they did not wish to renew the lease on our building??  That made no sense and no one questioned it at the time.  I have been through this before but had never seen the ax fall on my head in my 19 year career.  So in 2018 on April Fool's Day I will become job-less. Following the stages of grief I was at first shocked, then angry, then freaked out and am now at a place of calm acceptance.  I haven't really bothered to look for another job yet as I wanted to enjoy my holidays stress free. Stress free because they are giving me a very small severance but more importantly because I have savings and the ability to vastly reduce my expenses.  I have already halved my internet/TV, cell phone and car insurance bills.  In a tighter squeeze all unnecessary spending would be cut....

I write this after being up since 3 AM with 3 sick kids.  Sorry for the bad grammar.  I was watching a movie the other night while wrapping presents for the kids and it dawned on me that the movie is what I want to do for the rest of my life.  The premise of the movie was something like a well-to-do family with a single income loses that income.  The spoiled kids loose everything and the family looses the house.  The father had been kind to a stranger and the stranger crosses paths with them while they are homeless.  He takes them into his house, he dies, and leaves his estate to them.  Through the process of being homeless and working for this guy they learn that things are not important in life.  Being kind is more important and the family heals and becomes super awesome.  The estate is basically a Christmas tree farm.  The guy was rich (but frugal) and gave the trees away for free to anyone who stopped by (and he also took trees ...

My wife would argue that title since that is her favorite food group.  That was the best title I could come up with this morning.  It was that or my usual FrugalMaster results for April and I felt like a change.  I have mentioned it before but my brother (who was only 3 years older than me) was diagnosed with brain cancer.  The surgery went fine to remove the tumor and he was slated to go home the next day (after many weeks of recovery.)  They had removed him from any monitors so in the middle of the night his brain decided to start bleeding and he silently passed away. When God calls you home I suppose that is the best way to go.  He was a good man which I already knew but I didn't know he was a great man.  The line at the wake was 3 1/2 hours long of people he had affected come to offer their condolences.  His wife stood through the whole thing never taking a break.  Ah yes he did leave behind a wife and 3 kids (one of them who...

Recently I was reading a post by Dividend Life regarding his expenses .  There was one sentence in particular that caught my eye and finally got me thinking about how much I really need to save if I am ever to become FIRE.  I have been blogging about my FIRE approach through dividend growth investing and frugal living for a couple of years.  I even claim I want to retire by age 55.  What I never really did was figure out what I need to do to get there. Let's start with what Dividend Life said. " Note that based on my $3,900 budget, one Work Freedom Day requires about $128 of dividend income which in turn requires about $4,000 of capital." So based on that if there are 365 days in a year that would amount to total capital (including reinvested dividends) of a mere $1,460,000.  Wow that is a lot of money I need to save!  Currently I can't even support the family on $4000 a month.  My base 2016 budget is $4975 a month.  Sure I c...

I had read an article that stated it would roughly cost me 250 thousand dollars to raise a kids these days.  I found this chart on Wikipedia that gives a breakdown on costs by income bracket and expense type.  Very interesting stuff.  With that said I am pleased to announce my daughter was born a week early.  My wife and the baby are doing fine and we are all adjusting to lack of sleep (hopefully for the last time.) People are asked us if we were crazy to have another child.  At times I wondered that myself.  How could I afford to raise another child in consumerist America.  The key is to reuse as much as you can live like are parents were raised.  When I was a kid we never ate out.  My mom or dad cooked all of the meals.  We still eat out maybe once or twice a month so if things got tight that could easily be eliminated.  I am finding my cooking skills are better than all fast food places and even most chain restaurants....

It has been a busy past couple of months for the Dividend Family Guy.  My wife is due with our next installment of the clan in August and I switched jobs in June.  What I thought was a good decision turned out not to be.  Less stress is good right?  Not so much. The 10% loss of income I talked about some time ago created more friction between me and the Mrs. Than I thought.  Sure we didn't go deeper in debt but my budget was so tight you could bounce a nickel on it.  We weren't living on mac & cheese but we weren't doing much of anything except for free or discounted family fun things.  That didn't really bother me since we had fun regardless of how much it cost.  What has been bugging me is I haven't had any cash to invest no matter how much I trimmed the fat. Could I have trimmed more?  Sure but it wouldn't have been enough to invest again on a regular basis.  To do that you either have to earn way more money or cut a bi...

What is wealth to you?  For most of the frugal and seekers of financial independence it means having more time to spend enjoying life.  Whether that is traveling or spending time with your family you have that choice.  Both my parents worked until they died (father) or retired (mom).  The time they spent with us kids was precious and my mom always says her happiest days in her life were raising us kids. The problem I have is I also enjoy time with my family but between working for the man and the responsibilities of being a parent I find little time to spend having fun with kids.  With that in mind I guard my time wisely at work so that I don't have to bring it home while still doing a good job.  I also constantly look for ways to save more money at home to invest while not compromising our current standards of living. Everyone values things differently.  For me wealth is time and who I spend that time with.  How do I increase that weal...

Hello All, I just wanted to do a quick post letting the dividend world know that yes I am still around.  Work on top of a nasty cold that hit me and the family has slowed down things at the DFG household.  On top of that the project I am driving at work has picked up a lot of steam.  So my lunches have been squeezed to a few minutes here or there.  More incentive of course to free myself from the chains of corporate life.  I will hopefully return soon with my February totals and what I "should" be looking at this month. Later, DFG

What is this thing? Thank you for this prestigious award Living at Home .  Did some quick reading on this award and it is a way for other bloggers to spread the word about new blogs that they enjoy.  The jist is to answer some questions and then formulate your own for another blogger to answer.  Almost like an e-chain letter.  One of the nice things is it bumps you up on the search engines via the chain. The questions (and my answers) If you won a mini-lottery would do choose $1 million in cold hard cash today or  one penny that doubles every day for the next 30 days ?  Basically, you start with a penny on day one.  At the end of day two you have two pennies.  Day there it’s four pennies, day four it’s eight pennies, and so on. Good article which I have already read.  The answer is of course 30 days.  The risk of me passing away in 30 days is pretty slim so that is the better option for me.  If I h...

Budget Organization Some time ago I read a book (Name has been lost to me) that aligned how you use your money into five categories. If someone knows where this model came from let me know so I can give the person credit please. These categories fit into how most people could divide up their income.  I used to go overboard and categorize every expense in Quicken. This led to a messy budget I never adhered to. Last month I decided to start putting all expenses into one of these categories. That would be my budget going forward and hopefully help me save more. Let's take a look at each one and then I will share with you my target for each category. Fixed These are your needs. Certain essential items such as food, clothing, utilities and a roof over your head. I will go into more detail later on that roof piece. That is always a hot topic between my wife and I on our housing choices over the years. I even place things like diapers and basic necessities into this category...

After working, getting the kids to the dentist, working some more, cooking dinner, playing with the kids, bathing and getting them to bed, I had a few minutes this evening to add a page to my blog.  It is dividends I have been receiving since I purchased my first stocks way back in 2010.  Do not laugh to much at my initial years.  Some money reinvested into more stocks that pay dividends year over year is better than no money.  In some future post I will go over what stocks are generating these dividends.  I will say that in 2010 I new nothing about investing and just purchased some stocks I read about in an article.  Not such a good choice but I haven't sold them yet.  Maybe after taking a closer look at my portfolio with you I will be able to send some of those stocks packing.  It is late and I have to get up early to go work at a JOB.  Just saying that word makes me want to save more money.  I will go into more detail in the future....

What will I be talking about in my blog? Some of the stuff you may have seen on other sites. Things like what my finances look like and how much am I saving. My twist to that is a system I learned from a book I read many many years ago. I wish I would have written down the name and author so I could give him or her some credit. The only thing I remember is what I wrote down in a spreadsheet. This acts as a guideline for my spending and I will match up my world to it. I am still on the fence about disclosing my salary to the world. I will probably disclose my spending just to show people how much it costs me to raise a large family these days. My wife and I try to live frugally but sometimes our judgment isn't the best. Hopefully by sharing all of this with you will help me to be a wiser spending and saver. I will also by posting my dividends each month and how they chart over the past few years. They are not much to speak of (yet) but I like to show others how the ...

All Are Welcome Welcome readers to my story about saving and investing in quality dividend stocks.  This is my journey through life as I strive to save and invest so that I can retire before I am too old to enjoy an active life.  I am setting the goal at age 55 (fifteen years from now.)  Wow I can't believe I just wrote that down.  It feels good to get it out of my head and onto some paper (even if it is just electronic paper.)   Who Am I? I am the Dividend Family Guy.  Let’s break that down into how I came up with that name.  The first, Dividend, is my style of investing and why most of this writing is occurring in the first place.  The next part of my name comes from the love for my family.  I am a father of 5 kids and have been married to a wonderful wife for twelve years.  My family is one of my top priorities and providing for them is what I do.  Now I need to start saving and investing for them as well.  The last...