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After watching a lot of YouTube videos and reading posts on Google about making money online passively there are a couple of things I’ve learned that made me want to start on this journey of investing.
To become wealthy we need to be buying assets instead of liabilities. Assets are things that put money in our pocket while liabilities do the opposite.
The wealthy at the early phase of their lives don’t spend money on luxury items and focus on spending their money on things that make them more money. They buy assets. At this stage it seems like they are broke.
Broke people on the other hand spend their hard earned money on luxury items early on, saving nothing and maybe even putting themselves in debt just to make themselves look rich or giving in to their wants and let the stuff control their life and live paycheck to paycheck.
The earlier we start on spending our money on collecting assets the better. Time can compound our money and the earlier we start investing on assets the better.
Don’t be young, broke and catch up later. Start as early as possible and control your financial situation.
There are a lot of assets out there and we are all free to choose which assets we want to invest in.
I discovered investing in stocks in 2018 and I’m already in my 30s at that time. I have to admit I learned a little late as no one ever really taught me how to invest in stocks when I was younger and I just learned everything by searching information online.
Even if I think I’m late, I still wanted to put my extra money in the stock market and make my active income into a passive income stream.
Passive income for me is earning money even when I’m doing something else or sleeping. And I truly believe investing in the stock market can provide this for me.
Important to note that I have an active income and we need to have active income to be able to invest into the stock market and turn that active income into passive income.
Your active income is your greatest tool to build your passive income stream. Without active income you can’t invest in anything unless someone gives you money to invest.
So, I was investing in stocks. I was picking some of my favorite individual stocks and invest in them and I stopped because I was afraid of loosing money. I was trying to time to buy in low so that in the future I can sell high.
I was waiting for stocks to go down near their 52 week lows before buying in, but they never really went down that low back in 2018 to 2019 and my $500 initial investment did not grow that much.
Around November 2020 I learned about my first ETF investment.
Learn more on ETFs and my Passive Income journey from this post…
My very first ETF investment is Invesco S&P 500 High Dividend Low Volatility ETF it’s ticker symbol is SPHD and I bought this ETF using the Robinhood app.
If you’re interested in getting a Free Stock share consider opening a Robinhood brokerage account through the link below, connect your bank account and you will earn your first free stock share.
SPHD
SPHD at the time of writing this post is priced at $39.25 per share. Robinhood has a new feature that I like where I can choose to buy a fractional share of a stock or ETF. How that works is I could buy SPHD for let’s say $5/week for a corresponding amount of shares.
In short, I don’t need to have $39.25 to be able to buy a share of the SPHD ETF I can just buy a fraction of the price and the Robinhood app allows me to do that.
Also, I don’t need to pay any fees for commissions using the Robinhood app. So, when I do buy some stocks or ETFs I don’t have to pay Robinhood any fees. Some other brokerage accounts will charge you for commissions.
SPHD is currently composed of 52 total individual stocks from the S&P 500 that has high dividend yields and low volatility.
And by the way the S&P 500 is an index that contains the top 500 companies in the United States. It has the 500 biggest companies that are doing really well in the United States and you get to own a piece of those companies when you buy an ETF that tracks the S&P 500.
Note: Low volatility means that price per share does not change too much and tends to be in a consistent price range. Low volatility may also mean that it is less risky than volatile stocks or ETFs.
The top 10 stocks in this ETF are:
- Altria
- Kinder Morgan
- AT&T
- Iron Mountain
- Williams Cos.
- Gilead Sciences
- Vornado Realty Trust
- Dow
- Prudential Financial
- Philip Morris
So when you buy this ETF you get a portion of all the stocks listed above plus 42 more.
The current 30-day dividend yield is at 4.94.
I currently have 7.34 shares and multiplied by current stock price I have about $288.23 invested so far.
I earn monthly dividends for this ETF and I earned $1.03 last September 2022 which I automatically reinvested using Robinhood’s dividend reinvestment program (DRIP enabled).
So, I am earning $1.03 per month for my $288.23 invested.
SPYD
SPYD is the ticker symbol for SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF. This ETF tracks about 80 of the highest-yielding stocks from the S&P 500.
The top 10 stocks in this ETF:
- Cardinal Health
- Principal Financial
- Exxon Mobil
- NRG Energy
- Chevron
- Philips 66
- Valero
- Gilead Sciences
- Darden Restaurants
- Huntington Bank
It has a 30-day yield of 4.9 as dividend.
I currently own 7.11 shares with stock price at $35.85. I have about $253.80 invested in this ETF.
This ETF earns dividends quarterly which means you get dividends every 3 months or 4 times a year.
Last quarter of September 2022 I earned a $2.94 dividend from this particular ETF.
VYM
This is the 3rd ETF that I currently own and the largest volume of my 3 ETFs.
VYM is the ticker symbol for Vanguard High Dividend Yield ETF. And this ETF tracks the perfomance of a benchmark index that measures the investment return of common stocks of companies that are characterized by high dividend yield.
These ETF contains about 450 stocks which is a huge number and this ensures that your investment is well diversified and in turn reduces risk.
The top 10 holdings in this ETF:
- Johnson & Johnson
- Exxon Mobil
- JPMorgan Chase
- Procter & Gamble
- Chevron
- Home Depot
- Pfizer
- Eli Lily
- Coca-Cola
- PepsiCo
It has a 30-day dividend yield of 3.31.
I currently own 9.06 shares at $97.06 per share. Which means I have $879.96 of my money invested in this ETF.
This ETF shares dividends quarterly and last quarter on September 2022 I got paid a $6.90 dividend from VYM.
Conclusion: Three High Dividend ETFs Where I Invested Money
SPHD, SPYD and VYM are the 3 ETFs where I currently put my money into. I believe they are all well diversified and I get a decent amount of dividends from these ETFs.
My dividend income is still small but I am hoping to grow these investments in the future using what they call as the dividend snowball. Where I reinvest my earned dividends to make me more passive income.
And I will strive to invest every single month through dollar cost averaging.
And I use the Robinhood app to invest in these ETFs and all the data that I have written here are available in the app except for the schedule of when you recieve the dividends.
It would be nice if the Robinhood app can tell if the ETF or stock has a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual dividend.
But I do like that Robinhood has no commission fees to trade, I could buy a fractional share of a stock or ETF, able to reinvest my dividends automatically, able to set investments automatically, and they even give you a 1.5% interest on the cash balance that you did not invest yet.
If you’re interested to open a Robinhood account, click on the link below.
Not only that, you will get a free fractional share of a big company like Apple or Amazon when you open up a new Robinhood account, connect your bank account and earn a free stock.
Open a Robinhood Account Link…
Get that free stock, get that free money.
Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed and I’ll see you on my next post.
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