Safe Dividend Investing

Knowing little about investing I entrusted my life savings to an investment advisor. Within three years the value of my retirement savings had shrunk by $300,000. He had assured me that mutual funds were safe and that when I retired  and liquidated 4% of my portfolio each year to live on that the income could be relied on until I was 90. It now appeared that it would be all gone before I was 65.  I now had the motivation  to find a better, safer way to invest. My hundreds of weekly podcasts relate to what I learned over the last 22 years  in creating for myself  a generous, reliable income and in growing my wealth. My annual income is in the six figures and my portfolios are in the seven figures. My portfolio has survived very well through the 2008 and 2020 market crashes. It has never stopped growing and keeping my income well ahead of inflation. Much of my success was a result of my experience as a commercial risk executive with Dun & Bradstreet, Creditel and Equifax. In the past I had built commercial risk scoring systems that had helped guide banks, insurance companies and trade suppliers from incurring losses. I now built stock scoring software to help guide my choice of stocks for my portfolio. This easy-to-use software is supplied free with my 10 investment books. In the the 300 weekly podcasts and the 10 investment books I pass on advice and recommend proven practices, such as:  (1) It is critical that you become a self-directed investor..... (2) If you can not easily measure the risk and potential in an investment, then do not invest in it. This excludes from your portfolio bundled investment devices, like mutual funds, ETFs and Index funds,.....  (3) Financially strong companies who have paid “good dividends” for decades will continue to stay profitably strong and continue to pay good dividends because it is both part of their "character" and in their executives selfish interest..... (4) Diversification is critical. Investing equally in the best 20 strong dividend stocks is the ideal.....A portfolio of 20 limits your risk in any one deviant stock to only 5% of your wealth..... (5)  No matter how strong you think a stock is, do not fall in love with it.  I have lived very well off my steady dividend income for 22 years, through two market crashes and one pandemic. I have watched my portfolio’s capital more than quadruple from where I started, despite taking out a generous dividend income every year to live on.  For my books and podcasts I have spent years scoring thousand of  high dividend paying stocks traded on the TSX, NYSE and the NASDAQ.  I proved that carefully chosen financially strong stocks paying high dividends can provide not only a generous dividend income but outstanding capital growth .Financial independence is realizable.