Last week, I received one of the greatest emails of my career.
I write a dividend growth newsletter called The Oxford Income Letter and also run a few VIP Trading Services, one of which is called Weekly Income Alert. The goal of WIA is to, as the name suggests, generate income every week (on Fridays).
A subscriber to WIA named Pam wrote to say:
Finding all of you has been a godsend for me!!! I was driving an Uber in retirement. Now I am not, thanks to Weekly Income Alert! So glad I took a chance. There are lots of advisors out there telling you what stocks to buy, but no one is offering a way for someone with limited resources to get additional cash without waiting 10 years. I love Weekly Income Alert.
The reason Pam’s message was so meaningful is that the title of my second book is You Don’t Have to Drive an Uber in Retirement.
The book outlines various ways to make and save money so you don’t need to take a job that you’re not excited about after you retire.
To be fair, I’ve met plenty of Uber drivers who began driving after they retired from their careers and love doing it. They get out of the house, meet interesting people, make money, and work when they want to without punching a clock.
But there are many folks who, after a lifetime of labor, would prefer not to have to work in order to pay the bills.
Fortunately, there are steps they can take to set themselves up to generate income before and in retirement.
The foundation should be dividend growth stocks.
Keep in mind that these will be long-term investments. You need to be able to handle short-term volatility and down markets. If a bear market is going to scare you into selling your stocks, don’t invest in the stock market.
Any money that you need within three years should be kept in cash or extremely conservative investments like CDs or Treasurys. It won’t generate much income, but it will be safe.
Dividend growth stocks will not only generate income, but also – if you’re in the right stocks – beat inflation, which is more important than ever today.
For example, if you’d bought shares of AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) when I recommended it 10 years ago in The Oxford Income Letter, you’d be up over 267%, which is great.
But more importantly, the dividend has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 11.7%. Even when inflation is at its worst – and even with today’s sky-high prices – an annual 11.7% hike increases your buying power.
That’s the key. Especially in retirement, we need to at least maintain our buying power – and hopefully increase it.
Investors who bought AbbVie at the time were earning a 4% yield – solid, but nothing extraordinary. However, because of the strong dividend growth, those same investors now earn 12.1% per year on their investment – in cash.
Even if AbbVie had only gone up an average of 8% per year, which is about the historical average for the S&P 500, its dividend growth would still have made it a fantastic investment.
Think about that. You don’t have to be the greatest stock picker. You can buy a stock whose performance is simply average, and if the dividend grows strongly, you give yourself a raise every year.
There are plenty of other things you can use to boost your income in retirement, such as the strategy we use in Weekly Income Alert and the methods mentioned in You Don’t Have to Drive an Uber in Retirement. But owning quality dividend stocks that boost their payouts by a meaningful amount every year should be the bedrock of your portfolio.
Good investing,
Marc
P.S. I call the strategy behind The Oxford Income Letter the “10-11-12 System.” It’s how I select the dividend growth stocks that I add to our two primary model portfolios.
To learn more about how it works (and become a member today at a deeply discounted rate), click here.
