How long until you don’t have to work?

Usually the answer to this question is stated as “until your investment income exceeds your expenses”. That form of the answer makes me a little uncomfortable. It doesn’t really highlight the most lucrative place to make changes if not needing to work is your goal. I much prefer the answer “until your expenses are less than your investment income” because it highlights the fact that it’s your expenses that are keeping you from being financially independent. If you had zero expenses, then you wouldn’t need any income at all to maintain your standard of living and you’d already be financially independent.

Not needing to work to maintain your current standard of living is what I mean by the phrase financially independent.

Lately, I’ve been talking about happiness and how money is not really the answer. True, money can alleviate some unhappiness, but that really only happens up to the point where you have food and safety. Beyond that point money only provides increases in our standards of living, which we quickly get used to and soon return to our set point of happiness (although now dependent on and expecting the new standard of living). So as I suggested in the last article on maintaining control of your life, one very effective method to maintain control and happiness is to reduce your expenses.

But words only go so far and without numbers, they are only opinions. So lets get into some examples and see what we can find out.

Running the numbers

First let’s look at how long it would take a minimum wage earner (MWE) to become financially independent. In the article on who should be saving and investing, I laid out some expenses and income numbers for the MWE. Recapping the pertinent numbers, the MWE has $10,300 in gross annual income, $5,784 in annual expenses, and $9,012.50 in after tax income. So each year, after paying expenses, the MWE has the remaining $3,228.50 left as savings [1]. That’s a savings rate of 31.3%.

If we assume that the MWE can match the market, and generate 6% returns, and that inflation is 2%, then we can plot out a spreadsheet to show how long until the MWE makes it to financial independence. It turns out the MWE has to work 36 years to meet his current level of living standards. So if the MWE starts working at 18 right out of high school and never increases in skill to make any more money than the minimum wage at the time of that original article ($5.15), the MWE can stop working at 54 [2].

If you play with the numbers some more, it turns out that the amount of time it takes to get to where you can maintain a given living standard without working is a function of the savings rate. Someone who makes $100k per year and saves 50% of their income is going to be able to cover their expenses with their investments in the same amount of time as someone with $50k that saves 50% of their income. The $100k earner will be able to spend $50k (of today’s dollars), and the $50k earner will be able to spend $25k (of today’s dollars), but both will be used to living on that and will not need to have a job to cover their expenses.

Incidentally, the number of years to cover your expenses at a 50% savings rate is 20. So start working at 22 right out of college, save 50% of your income every year, and you’ll be able to stop working at 42 and maintain the same relative standard of living the entire time.

To calculate the savings rate, I’m taking the amount deposited into savings for the year divided by the gross income for the year. Gross income is the amount you get paid over the entire year before any taxes are taken out.

I’m assuming that anything that didn’t go into savings was spent on some kind of consumption and is in some way supporting your standard of living. So this is a conservative estimate, meaning that you might get there faster. For example, in retirement, you might have lower taxes on your income since currently investment income is taxed at a lower rate than earned income, and you wouldn’t be paying employment taxes like FICA on that income.

Here’s a rundown of the savings rates and the years to be financially independent:

So what is cable really costing you?

Now that we have that continuous graph, we can find our own savings rate and get a conservative estimate of how many years it will take us at that rate to be financially independent. We can also look at what changes in our spending can do to shorten the time to when we are financially independent.

So let’s say you look at your cable bill and figure out that you pay $100/month for cable. That’s $1200/year. Let’s also say that your income is $50k/year, and you’re currently saving 10% of your income, or $5k/year. Remember at 10% you have to work and save 61 years to match your relative standard of living.

So if you stopped paying for cable and started saving that $1200/year, you’d now be saving ($5000 + $1200) $6.2k/year total. So your savings rate is now 12.4%. The number of years to match your spending at 12.4% from the graph is 56. So if you’re only saving 10% now, and you can drop cable and save that money instead, it’s going to save you 5 years of working.

It’s important to note that only the person saving only 10% per year is going to see a 5-year benefit from dropping cable. And the reason is because that person is already saving so little. Even small changes in savings will make large differences to this person. But if you’re making $50k and saving 50%, or $25k/year, then an extra $1200/year is only going to shave 2 years of working, 18 years instead of 20 years. Maybe you’re willing to work a couple more years to watch The Daily Show? Maybe you’re not. But the point is you can now figure out how many years a monthly expense is really costing you and determine if it’s really worth those extra years of work.

Does it make sense to work harder?

So you can see that someone who’s a diligent saver gains less from cutting expenses than someone who is less diligent of a saver. But let’s take a look at what the diligent saver might get from working harder and adding some extra income. If you’re the 50% guy, and you add an extra $10k of income (without adding any new expenditures), your new savings rate would be 58.3%. So instead of the 20 years, you’ll be able to quit working after 16 years, or 4 years earlier. Assuming you started at 22, that’d be financial independence by 38. Again, maybe that’s worth the extra work, and maybe it’s not. That’s a decision for you to make, but consider taking a dry run at it to make sure it’s worth the extra work.

Forward looking statements

Now there are lots of caveats here and we can only make guesses about the future, so all of this is subject to those limitations.

For example, the above assumes that when you do quit working that you will have the same level of expenses as when you were working. That may not be the case for you. Maybe you expect your kids to be living on their own at that point. Maybe you will have paid off your mortgage and only owe taxes and insurance each year. Maybe you don’t have to maintain a work wardrobe and can wear Bermuda shorts, sandals, and Hawaiian shirts all the time. Maybe you don’t buy lunches out any more. But consider that you’ll also have extra expenses, like needing to maintain your own health insurance.

Or you may plan to move to somewhere much less expensive than your working environment. If that’s the case, again I encourage you to do a dry run now. You don’t want to save less now assuming you’ll be happy living some where cheaper, and then find out you were wrong, but don’t have the money to live where you wanted to.

A few times in this article I referred to maintaining your “relative” standard of living. What I mean by this is your standard of living relative to the rest of society. The benefits and opportunities that a middle class family has now were not even available to the richest families even 50 years ago. And it can be inferred that as time passes more advances will be made.

But if the benefits and opportunities currently available are good enough and you don’t feel a need to increase with the times, you might be able to be financially independent even faster. You would be trying to maintain an “absolute” standard of living, rather than a “relative” one. So you could probably ignore the affects of inflation on the amount that you needed to spend to maintain your standard of living, but still benefit from the affects of inflation on your income [2].

Consider though that you will be like the older person now that doesn’t have or want a microwave, a computer, a cell phone, cable, Internet access, or any of the other advances that have been made in the last 50 years. It’s certainly possible to live without these things, but you need to know yourself and whether or not you can handle seeing other people having these things and you not being able to afford them. If medical science comes up with a procedure to reverse the aging process are you going to be happy continuing to age while everyone else stops aging?

Also when playing with the numbers, don’t get fancy with the earnings percentage. 6% is about the most that you should expect to make long-term. You don’t want to be stretching to make more gains on your money when investment income is the only income you have. That will just lead to taking risks that are less likely to pan out and more like to end up with you poorer, and possibly having to go back to work.

And lastly, the calculations above assume that you have zero savings to start with. If you have more than zero, then you’ll want to add that in to your own spreadsheet to see where you stand.

Summing up

So if you’re considering adding a new monthly expense, like a mortgage payment, car payment, or some other loan or service payment, take a few minutes to figure out how many more years of work you’ll have to endure to fund that new expense. Is it really worth it?

[1] The MWE would have about 10% more savings if they were saving the money in an IRA, but I’m going to ignore that option to keep it simple.

[2] In the calculations above I’m assuming you’ll get regular cost of living (inflation) increases in your income and will continue to save the same percentage of that new pay level.

Are you smarter than a raccoon?

A book I read in the third grade had an interesting description of a raccoon trap [1]. It consisted of a hole just large enough for a raccoon to pass an empty paw through, and something shiny at the bottom of the hole. When the raccoon sticks its paw in and grabs the shiny object, its paw is now too large to fit back out through the hole. But the raccoon doesn’t want to let the shiny object go, and so the raccoon is stuck, trapped by its own desires.

If you’re feeling sorry for the little critter at this point, consider that you might be in a frighteningly similar situation. In the last article on happiness, I suggested looking at creating a happiness plan and trying it out for a year to see if it’s actually something you want to do. The idea being that you’re spending all this time and effort trying to attain the dream of early retirement or a bigger house or more stuff, but you don’t really know if any of that will actually make you happier.

If you balked at the idea of taking a year off or thought it ridiculous, take a step back and think about why you had that reaction. Is it because you fear leaving your current job would mean a painful reduction in your standard of living? If that’s the case, consider that this fear is an indicator that your current level of happiness might already be in danger.

Jealously guard control

Maintaining control over our own lives is one of the ways we can protect our happiness. When we feel out of control we suffer helplessness. Helplessness is one of the least bearable feelings and causes physical and mental distress. And if we feel helpless for long enough, we simply give up and stop trying. We become depressed, and stop even looking for ways to make it better. So if we want to maintain and increase our happiness level, we must maintain control over our lives.

Reduce your “standard of living risk” and be happier

Two of the most important places to maintain control are in our standard of living and our job. Interestingly the two are closely related, and gaining control over one, will provide greater control over the other.

“Standard of living risk” is the likelihood that we won’t be able to maintain control over our standard of living. Since our standard of living is funded by our income, and higher incomes are harder to get, more expensive living standards have a higher standard of living risk. That is, we are more likely to suffer an involuntary lowering of our standard of living if our standard of living is expensive.

So in order to avoid suffering an involuntary lowering of our standard of living we can voluntarily reduce our standard of living risk by choosing to have a less expensive standard of living. Even if we can currently afford a more expensive standard of living we would choose to maintain a more modest one.

So instead of buying a huge new house in a new neighborhood with a massive mortgage payment, we would choose one in a less swanky neighborhood, or we skip the house altogether and go for an apartment. And instead of buying a new car, and maintaining a car payment, we buy an older car for cash. And we make do with one TV and no cable. And the kids share a bedroom. And so on.

The idea here is lower our standard of living to the point where we know we can keep it constant at that level, and in that manner to keep control over our life.

It may seem counterintuitive to try to be happier by lowering our living standards, but consider that studies show that we feel a loss more than twice as keenly as we feel a gain. So in order to preserve our happiness, we should be more mindful of preventing losses than seeking gains.

Also consider that we adapt to a new level of living standards and return to our set point happiness, but it does take a little time before that happens. So if our living standards are constantly being taken up and then brought back down, we don’t have a chance to get used to them and our happiness level is always less than it could be if our living standards were constant.

And finally, with a lower living standard there is less financial worry. If we don’t have bills to pay, or we can easily afford to pay them all, then we won’t have worry. And avoiding worry will increase most people’s happiness all on it’s own.

So as odd as it may sound, we would actually be happier at a lower standard of living if that standard of living was constant.

Hold the line with slack

So how do we provide a constant standard of living? We make sure that we can maintain an income that easily supports that standard of living. And just as importantly provides some extra room for when things go wrong like car repair costs, and other financial surprises.

We want to match our standard of living to an income that we are relatively sure we can maintain. This would be the lowest income we are certain we could get if we went out in a poor to middling economy and took the first job offered. This income doesn’t include raises, bonuses, performance pay, overtime, time and a half, unusually high salaries due to a boom in our industry, or unusually high salaries because we are extremely valuable to our current employer. We want to remove all those variable income components and only consider the part that we can really count on. That’s what we will match our standard of living to.

I imagine that is quite a bit less than most of us are used to living on. But if we base our standard of living on that amount, we can be relatively assured that it will be constant and that our happiness level will not be affected by a reduction in living standards.

A side benefit is that all those raises, bonuses, and other income goes right into savings. This builds a nice cushion to handle any big financial emergencies. And another benefit is that the lower our expenses, the easier it is for us to be financially independent. So not only are we increasing our savings faster, we’re also reducing the total amount we need to save to support ourselves indefinitely. That’s like burning the candle at both ends. We’ll be there in no time.

Control at work

So now that we have our living standards under our control and we can fund that standard of living with a job we can pretty much go out and get tomorrow, how important is our current job? Right, not at all. It’s no longer a trap for us. We can leave whenever we want to.

Before, when our living standards were dependent on our exact current job, our employer had complete control over us and we were at their mercy. They could ask us to work longer. They could ask us to work harder. They could reduce our benefits or take away our perks. They could even ask us to violate our morals. And until now, if we didn’t take it quietly and do what they asked, we were afraid that they would take our job and hurt our standard of living.

But now, we have the control and are on equal or higher footing than our employer. Now the situation has flipped and they need our knowledge of their business, our skills, and our time, but we don’t need them. Any job will do for us now. So we no longer fear losing our current job because it can be replaced without a problem. We don’t have to suffer any insults or indignities and can walk out at any point that we desire without any pangs of worry.

In fact, we now have the confidence and control to take risks that our coworkers won’t be willing to take. We can boldly ask for a raise or other perks. We can speak our minds and say what needs to be said. It might even make us better employees, as we won’t be scared into being “yes men”.

We can even ask for a year off with benefits to go pursue our happiness plan. And we can confidently threaten to quit if we don’t get what we ask for, which again, counter intuitively might mean we’ll get an even higher salary than we would have if we just stayed quiet and kept our heads down. The squeaky wheel really does get the grease.

Voluntarily let go of the shiny object

Free yourself from the high living standards trap. Voluntarily choose to lower your living standards to where you can maintain them at a constant level. And take back control over your life and your happiness.

[1] The book was “Where the Red Fern Grows” and the real trap was a little more gruesome, but the point gets across well enough without that part.

What does happiness have to do with investing?

Happiness is the ultimate goal of almost any action we take. We want to invest to make more money. We want more money to buy more things or to be free from work. And we want to buy more things or be free from work because we think this will make us happier. So at it’s most basic level we invest because we think investing has the potential to make us happier.

But can we really be certain that more money will make us happier? In a post on behavioral finance, I talked about how we are poor at predicting what will make us happy. So it seems important to question the implicit assumption that more money will make us happier.

Will more money really make you happier?

There’s some evidence to say that more money will not make us happier, or at least not substantially. Some studies have shown that about 50 percent of your happiness can be attributed to your genetics. So regardless of your wealth, half of your happiness level is already determined.

We also have a tendency to quickly adapt to changes in our environment. So even if you gained more money, you would quickly get used to this new level of wealth, and probably decide that you needed just a little more to be at the level of happiness that you wanted. Think about the last time you got a raise, or bought a dream house. The euphoric feeling wears off much faster than we think it will. We are definitely happier in the short-run, but not for very long, and it will take an even larger amount of money to make us happier next time. Given these symptoms, the pursuit of more and more money kind of has the profile of an addiction.

Even after noting this though I still think not having to work every day of the week would be a huge gain in happiness. But one of the surer ways to tell if a particular thing will make you happier is to ask someone who is already doing that thing. And surprisingly, according to this article by someone who did retire early, whether or not you are happier depends a great deal on what you plan to do with the newly found freedom. (Take a look at the comments at the end of that article for some more examples of people with the same problem.)

But what if you have a plan that you think will keep you happy?

If you already have a plan for what you would do if you didn’t have to work, consider dipping into your retirement savings, and taking a year off and implementing that plan now. If you are right, then you get to spend a year doing something you really enjoy and now have some motivation to get there faster by cutting your current and future expenses. If you are wrong, you probably won’t even take the entire year. You’ll probably know within 30 days if your plan is something you won’t enjoy doing for the long-term.

I’m sure your financial advisor will howl in pain if you tell him this plan, so let me address the objections he’ll throw at you.

One tactic he might take is to point to a graph of two people who start saving at different times and how the earlier saver made more in the end, even after stopping saving at a certain point.

The graph is true, but if money doesn’t matter as much for happiness, then why would that graph matter? Well it matters to the financial advisor because his income is a percentage of your savings, so the lower your savings, the less money he makes. So in this case, his interests might not be completely aligned with your own.

Another objection might be that you need to raise as much money as possible (and pay the higher fees that it brings), so that you’ll be able to afford surprise medical expenses.

You should have catastrophic medical insurance to guard against this kind of thing. And even further if there was a large expense, you should be able to take the sum out of your principal and only lower the income that you make off of that principal each month by a small amount.

Another objection might be that you’ll need as much money as possible to outrun inflation. I would suggest you consider Buffett’s advice about buying stocks in companies that have strong brand names, or what he calls goodwill.

The strong brand name allows the company to sell their product for more than their competitors can, so the company can make higher profits using less capital. And when inflation pushes prices up, the company now makes an even higher profit than before and the value of the company increases even more relative to other companies because they gain the benefit of selling at higher prices, but not as much of the hindrance of having to purchase supplies at inflated prices.

Gaining perspective

Finally, consider that by taking a year off now, you are exchanging a year of youth for a year of age. If after taking the year off, you make no other changes and go right back to saving as usual, you will only have to tack one more year to the end of your retirement schedule to be at the same place as before. Is there really a valid difference in retiring at 65 versus 66?

But if it turns out after trying out your plan that it does make you happier, you’ll now be in a position to compare the benefit of a current expense against pushing your plan further out. You’ll be able to make an informed decision on whether or not cable is really worth what you are paying for it in terms of how many more years out it pushes your plan. The same goes for a large house, or new car, or any of the many things that we spend money on now in an often-failed attempt to increase our happiness.

Or you might be able to figure out a way to implement part of your plan now. Perhaps you work fewer days a week, or only part of the year. Or if someone else might like to do what you want to do, you teach lessons and get paid to do what you like, in more ways than one since helping is a way to gain happiness as well.

Once you start thinking about the things that really make up what it is you want to do and what parts of it really make you happy, you might find that it’s not so expensive as you thought and that you can do it much earlier than you originally thought.

Where can you learn more about dividend investing?

I recently left a company that was having some personnel problems. Shortly after my leaving I heard that they made everyone who remained sign a document stating that they would not solicit any of their current coworkers to go work somewhere else. This includes passing on an email about a job opportunity that a current coworker might find more fulfilling.

I worked there for quite a while and still would like to see them do well, but this makes me a little concerned about that company’s future. Consider which company you would work harder for and would feel more loyalty toward:

A) A company that tries to hide opportunities from you and threatens legal action if you tell a work friend about an opportunity the friend might find really fulfilling, or

B) A company that is so confident that they are providing a superior work environment that they are not afraid of you looking around to see what else is out there.

Something else to consider is that a company that artificially restricts the competition for their workers is sort of sticking its head in the sand. Attrition is an important indicator of problems within a company. By artificially restricting that indicator it’s kind of like ignoring the pain in your side that might be cancer. The longer you wait to deal with it, the worse things are probably getting.

It may seem a little backwards given that the tendency is to try to stop people from leaving, but companies might consider encouraging people to leave on a regular basis with “leaving bonuses” to find out how good of a workplace they are providing.

If a particular person takes the offer, then you probably didn’t want them hanging around dragging down your productivity with a bad attitude anyway. If many people take the offer, then you know you’ve got some work to do in making the workplace better.

But if people aren’t taking the offer, then you know you’re providing a better working environment than anyone else around. Which means you probably have happy productive workers, and consequently happy satisfied customers.

There’s actually at least one company that’s currently doing this, the shoe-seller Zappos.

So what does this have to do with dividend investing?

I often find that when an idea occurs to me, it seems to be a congealing of many things that I’m thinking about at the time. The independent topics and questions all click together and shine light on an idea that I hadn’t seen before.

First, in this case I was considering that a lack of open competition leads a company like my former employer to stop improving and get sick, fat, and slow. So I started thinking about how I could make sure that I was openly competing so that my business, Dividendium, would keep growing and stay healthy, lean, and quick.

Second, I’ve been reading about startups (Paul Graham and Founders at Work), since that’s kind of what Dividendium is. One of the things I’ve read is that if you want to open a shoe store, don’t do it in a town that has no shoe stores. You’re better off choosing one with lots of shoe stores. Why? The cost of educating the consumer has been spread across all of the shoe stores. So your consumer already knows what they want, and in some cases they can even tell you what you should be selling and what you shouldn’t. So I was also thinking about how I can better educate my website users and whom else I can get to help with that.

Third, I’ve been reading about happiness research. There’re lots of interesting implications for investing and finance there, which I’ll get to in another post, but the one that tugged at my thoughts here is that we get lasting happiness from friendships and from helping other people. I’ve noticed this good feeling myself when I get feedback that an article was helpful or some specific advice turned out to be just what a person needed. And it makes me want to work on the site even more. So I was now “selfishly” thinking about how I could be even more helpful to other people, so I can get that good feeling and the extra boost in drive to work on the website.

Fourth, I’ve been looking at how to improve Dividendium as a business. For a website this means increasing traffic to the site. But I wasn’t sure how much more I could grow the traffic. It seems to me that the best indicator for how high traffic can go is what kind of traffic your competitors are getting. So I looked them up. Wow, Dividendium is by far the underdog.

Looking at that from a “glass is half-full” perspective that means it has lots of room to grow. And from my own experience people who consume investing information will generally read as much as they can get. So all those users at the other sites are likely going to be interested in Dividendium as well. They just don’t know about it yet. So now I was thinking about how I could get those other people to know about Dividendium so they can try it out too.

So my goals are to encourage competition, educate users, help more people, and reach the same or higher levels of traffic as my competition.

It seems the best way to accomplish the first and second goals of encouraging competition and educating users is to openly acknowledge the competition and tell you what I see helpful that you can find there. Then if you see something on those sites that you would like to see done slightly differently, like perhaps at a lower price, such as free, let me know at contact us. And I’ll get to work implementing them on Dividendium and hopefully making it a better resource.

And if you agree that it’s a better resource then you can help me out with the third and fourth goals of helping more people and increasing traffic by letting more people know about the site. Evidently one of the bigger factors in search engine rankings and traffic generation is having your site linked on other sites. So for example, if you like this article, use the share links at the bottom to post it to Digg or whatever news aggregation sites you prefer. Or if you like the whole site, suggest it to other people by posting the address (www.dividendium.com) in forums or in the comments sections of blogs or articles that you read. The more external links the site gets, the more traffic it will get and thus the more people it’ll help.

So Who’s the Competition?

The obvious first one is Ex-Dividend.com. They’re actually the reason I created Dividendium in the first place. I didn’t want to pay for their service and figured I could do it just as well or better. I’ve never used their service, but as of this writing it looks like they charge $29.90 for basically the ability to see ex dividend dates, which you can see right here on Dividendium’s ex dividend calendar. If there are other benefits that readers know of, please post them. I also see in their free data that they provide a list of dividends increased and dividends reduced. Since increasing dividends generally points to a healthy company and decreasing dividends generally leads to a lower stock price, these might be good services to watch.

The next one would be Dividend Detective. Harry Domash is a long-time columnist and author and so there’s lots of info on this site including explanations of some of the more specific types of dividend paying companies, like REITs, MLPs, Canadian Royalty Trusts, and Closed End Funds. The site also has a “Big Dividend Stock List”, which is just an alphabetical list of stocks paying between 2.4% and 20%. There is also a “premium feature” that’s a list of the 50 highest yielding stocks on that list, but you can find that here for free on Dividendium’s highest paying dividend stocks. Just move through the list until you get to the 20% area and count off the top 50. Then, there is a premium service of $15 per month that appears to be access to 3 sample portfolios of minimizing risk, fastest growing stocks, and highest yield where they have done their own research and analysis and picked out what they think are good stocks. I don’t know anything about the results of these portfolios, so I can’t comment on the worth of the service.

Another dividend related site is Dividend Investor. The site is nice looking, but just about everything on it is hindered in some way unless you are a paying customer. The cost is $24.99 per month. The offerings I see that they have that aren’t here at Dividendium (yet…) are the stocks that pay monthly dividends, the stocks that have 5, 10, 20 year increasing dividends, and a specific screener that looks for preset criteria. If you think the monthly dividends list sounds interesting, let me know at contact us as I know I can implement that and post it for free if people will find it useful. The remaining two from that list can be done at Kiplinger. They have a sample screen called “Dividend growers” up in the right hand corner, or you can enter your own screening criteria. The “consecutive yrs dividend growth (max 20 yrs)” criterion is the one that is probably most important about that screen. It doesn’t look like it can search on the payout ratio, but it seems like after you narrow the list down you can check the payout ratios on Yahoo fairly easily.

The last one that I’ve been looking at is The Dividend Guy Blog. He’s been writing very consistently for a long while and has lots of excellent information, although it looks like there’s a little bit of confusion between “advertisements” and “sites of interest” on the right side bar, so watch out if you’re clicking around there. The archives are on the bottom of the page. His focus seems to be long-term value investing. In terms of fundamental investing information and sheer content mass, he’s definitely got Dividendium beat. It seems one way you get lots of interest from search engines (and thus traffic) is to post very frequently like every day or multiple times a day. But as I’ve pointed out before, that isn’t always good for the readers. And in this case it also tends to hide some of the better articles, so I find I have to wade through the fluff to get to the meat in some cases. (But maybe you feel that way about my writing. If so, let me know in the comments or at contact us.)

If you know of other sites that you find useful for investing (of any kind, dividend or otherwise, pay or free), please feel free to post them in the comments of this article or any other article if you find them later, even if it’s a site that you run.

And as I said previously let me know if you see a feature that you’d like to see here at Dividendium for free or done a little differently than the site that currently does it. And if you find Dividendium useful, it would really help me out if you could let some people know about it by posting the link at various places on the web. And if you really do find it useful, then you’ll be helping them out as well by telling them about a good tool, and it turns out that can make you feel pretty good, too.

Thanks,
Aleks