Getting big raises

I know you love rais­es.

I came across an inter­est­ing arti­cle, The Incredible Growing Dividend. It’s writ­ten for those with a lit­tle more invest­ing back­ground than many read­ers here, but I feel it worth shar­ing.

I’ll start with a quote:

Although stock prices them­selves are quite volatile, the cash flows com­pa­nies col­lec­tive­ly pay out to investors don’t real­ly fluc­tu­ate as much as one would think.

We know about this from ear­li­er posts here. In par­tic­u­lar:

1. The val­ue of rais­es and the sin­gle most ignored met­ric by investors.
2. Keeping a per­spec­tive when invest­ing, com­pa­nies spend a lot of time with their stock prices in the shit­ter and it’s uncom­fort­able.

An inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic from a bear mar­ket we remem­ber expe­ri­enc­ing:

In the bear mar­ket from 2000-02, div­i­dends dropped by just 2% even though the mar­ket got cut in half.

Crazy right? The mar­ket is cut in half, you’d like­ly respond by sell­ing or stop­ping to invest, yet your pay­check would have been hard­ly affect­ed. In fact, a time like that rep­re­sents a great buy­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty and by mea­sur­ing the pay­check & raise you believe it in your gut.

Another one:

Dividends have nev­er fall­en over a five year peri­od

Never is a pret­ty good thing to align to, if you’re try­ing to invest for the long term.

I rec­om­mend read­ing The Incredible Growing Dividend. It’ll make you feel more cer­tain in your search for a safer way of invest­ing in the stock mar­ket while help­ing to reset your per­spec­tive from “port­fo­lio size” to “pay­check and raise”.