Dividends

When you think about it, money is a pretty funny thing.  For a couple thousand years humans used precious things to represent this idea of “money” — ivory, colorful shells, precious gems, livestock, silver, and most notably gold.  This worked well for humanity for a very long time… as long as the values were small.

The general inconvenience of physically carrying a whole bunch of “precious stuff” eventually gave way to paper certificates…

Every year right around the end of January, I try to plan out my dividend income and capital allocation goals for the year.  I started doing this in 2017, continued the process in 2018, and still find the process useful enough that I’m doing it again in 2019.

At the most basic level, my planning process amounts to putting excess cash to work from our Big Fat Cash Pile AND trying to put that cash into smart places that generate a growing stream of dividend income.  The devil is in the details of course…

I’m not going to sugar coat the obvious here… the Tako family net worth declined in 2018.  The year 2018 turned out to be a perfect showcase for stock market volatility.

Most of the year the stock market was in a happy place — The economy was growing, consumers were borrowing and spending more, and unemployment was also super low (all of which are important ingredients for a rising stock market).

It looked as if 2018 was going to be yet another year of positive stock market returns…