Dividends

There exists an urban legend about Einstein.  You’ve probably heard it before.  Supposedly Einstein once said that “compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.”  It sounds pretty cool, and smart — like something Einstein might actually say.  Whether Einstein actually said these words or not is subject to debate.

We’ll probably never know the truth about that Einstein quote, but the important part is the truth within it — Compound interest, or more generically “compounding” is an extremely powerful financial force when it works for you…

April 2020 was a weird month.  A really weird month.  Inevitably it will go down in the history books as one of the strangest on record.  Not because it was a particularly good month (far from it), but because everything was just so gosh dang weird.

The stock market (for example) acted very weird in April.  It did the opposite of what you might expect during a pandemic and recession…

Oh what a difference two weeks makes in the realm of personal finance!  As I write this, the DOW is down over 2,000 points from its all-time highs.  The stock market is in panic mode as stocks drop day after day. 

The day’s newspaper headlines look like they came straight from a horror movie…

“Pandemic fears send stocks crashing”

“Dow Plunges for a second day on virus fears”

“Coronavirus fear sickens stock market”…

“Houston — We have liftoff!”

While 2018 was a rather ho-hum year when it came to stock market returns, 2019 was an entirely different story.  2019 was like being tied by the ankles to a rocket ship, and then getting launched into the atmosphere at 18,000 mph.  It was a wild ride…