Podcast 252 - AN EXTRACT - 1ST CHAPTER OF ACHIEVING FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE

Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 252, on December 6th of 2025.  My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of six investment books.

 I am still trying to finish my latest 340-page book book before Christmas. It is called “Achieving Financial Independence From 180 High Dividend NYSE stocks - Analyzed and Scored”. It has taken me far longer than I had expected. 

 It will be of great assistance to anyone who wants to build a safe portfolio of financially strong, high dividend, income stocks. My plan is to have a preliminary release of the book at a greatly reduced price. If you wish to be informed of this preliminary release, please email me at imacd@informus.ca.

My objective with my podcasts and investment books is to motivate you to pursue financial independence as a self-directed dividend investor. Please, visit my website www.informus.ca if you wish to learn more about me and my writing.

Ian Duncan MacDonald
Author and Commercial Risk Consultant,
President of Informus Inc
2 Vista Humber Drive
Toronto, Ontario
Canada, M9P 3R7
Toronto Telephone - 416-245-4994
New York Telephone - 929-800-2397
imacd@informus.ca

Transcript

PODCAST 252

SAFE DIVIDEND INVESTING

Greetings to investors all around the world. Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 252, on December 6th of 2025.  My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of six investment books. It is taking me much longer to finish my new Investment book, “Achieving Financial Independence 180 High Dividend NYSE exchange Stocks – Analyzed and Scored”, then I had expected.  

 My plan, after hopefully finishing the book in the next two weeks is to have a preliminary release of the book on Amazon at a reduced price of $15 US for ten days and then increase the price to $30 US. If you wish to be informed of this preliminary release, please email me at imacd@informus.ca. It will probably be the last investment book I will write. It contains all the enhancements I wanted to make over my last six investment books. 

In 2026, I will return to writing novels. I find it interesting to see how the predictions I made more than 10 years ago in my political/action novels “DUEL” and “USING DROUGHT USA” have come true with confrontations between China and the USA in the Caribbean plus the US threatening to annex Canada. 

To give you a preliminary taste of the investment book I will soon release. The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of the book:

“Some feel “rich” when they look at their monthly stock investment statement showing a balance of several million dollars? This is even though it is just numbers flashed on a computer screen. It is an illusion. 

You can’t eat or drink those numbers. Only by selling your stocks and sacrificing part of your wealth will real money appear. This transaction, of course, is contingent upon someone wanting to pay the price you wish to receive for your shares. What happens if no one is interested in buying your shares? Are you still rich? 

 A speculative investor buys a stock only because they think it is going to greatly increase in value so they can sell it at a higher price. Once the speculative stock is sold, they must then find another stock they think is going to greatly increase in value. They keep repeating this buy and sell pattern.

With a big speculative win, many speculators think they are rich and feel they can live at a much higher level and risk even more in speculative investments. The odds are that at some point when chasing another high-flying speculative stock, they will have gambled and lost.  Much of their investment money will be gone. 

 Why do these speculative losses happen? Because of a thing called competition. A company’s success and rapidly rising share price attracts competitors. They will take away market share by offering a better product at a lower price. Monopolies are short-lived.

Compare always having to sell stocks to generate cash to live on, to automatically receiving a $10,000 dividend cash payment transferred into your bank account every month. Dividend cash that will immediately pay for your groceries, taxes and other expenses. These monthly dividend payments can continue every month for the rest of your life.  You do not need to sell part of your portfolio to realize cash to live on.

Dividend income is your reward for owning a portfolio of financially strong high dividend paying stocks. Every year you can expect to see the financially strong stocks in your portfolio increase in value. These share price increases often cause the managers of these companies to increase dividend payouts to their shareholders. They want to maintain a reputation of maintaining a high dividend yield. The increases keep your income well ahead of inflation. 

Share prices and dividend payouts are not directly connected. In the recession and market crash years, when all share prices decline, you will often see companies continue to increase their dividend payouts. Just because share prices fall does not mean a company is unable to profitably sell their product or service their established clientele.

Dividends are paid out of the company’s profits. Profits occur when your company revenue is higher than your company expenses. Experienced managers who have lived through many market crashes know how to generate sales, cut expenses and reach their profit objective. They know they can only influence the speculators who control share prices in an open stock market. 

On each of the 180 company stock data pages in my new book, you will find a record of a ‘company’s share prices and dividend payouts going back yearly for twenty-five years. The years the stock market crashed are highlighted. It is not difficult to find in these 180 pages of financially strong stocks those whose dividend payouts increased steadily every year through good and bad times. 

On the page for Eastman Chemical Company, you can see under its heading “SHARE PRICES AND DIVIDEND PAYOUTS” that thedividend payouts increased year-after-year by a few cents. In 1999 it paid a quarterly dividend payout of $0.22 per share. By 2024 it was paying a quarterly dividend payout of $0.88.  While its share price fluctuated between highs of $112.56 in 2021 to a low of $17.21 in 2003, the dividend payouts steadily increased.

You will also see that Eastman has obtained a strong IDM stock score of 65 out of a possible 100. Few companies achieve a score greater than 70. I personally avoid stocks scoring under 50. Most stocks score under 50. The lowest score I have ever encountered was a 3.

Looking at Eastman’s  sub scores in the “IDM STOCK SCORING CALCULTION”, you can see high 9  and 10 scores, out of a possible 10 score,  for data items like “Current price of stock; Stock price 4 years ago; Book Value of Stock;  Number of Shares Traded, and Price-to-Earnings Ratio” A following chapter explains why these scoring elements were chosen and how the scoring system works.

After seeing consistent, strong behavior like the Eastman example, it is not difficult to understand why a portfolio of financially strong high dividend stocks can create lifelong financial independence for dividend investors. Once you set up such a strong high dividend portfolio you no longer must stress daily over stock price fluctuations. 

Since financial independence removes the need for employment. You now gain the hours you used to spend every day commuting back and forth to work. No longer do you need to worry about what you would do if your job was terminated. No longer do you need to freeze in a cold climate. You can choose to spend your winters in a rented condo on a warm Caribbean island. No longer do you need to try to get by on six hours sleep. With financial independence you will sleep better at night, be healthier and happier.

Unfortunately, financial independence does not happen overnight. Unless a large sum of unexpected money is suddenly handed to you, it is going to take several years to achieve financial freedom. That is the reality of safe investing.

When I graduated from college, I had $100 left from the money I had saved working four months each summer for four years as a laborer in a mine. What I earned each summer was destined to pay for my tuition, books and living expenses. Now that I had achieved my education objective I desperately needed to find a job. 

I took the first job I was offered.  It was with a large international commercial risk information company. It initially paid me less than I had been earning in my summer jobs. At that time, achieving financial independence was not something I would even have thought possible.

Prior to this employment my only investment experience was putting almost all I earned into a bank savings account money to pay for my education. I knew little about the stock market, how businesses operated and how they made profits. I now wish someone at that time had taken me under their wing, then, and showed me how to safely acquire wealth, I would have achieved financial independence decades sooner. 

In the following chapters I will show you that time, patience and persistence are an investor’s best friend.  You do not have to be a genius, an investment advisor, a chartered accountant or have a Master of Business Administration to achieve financial independence. When it comes to being a successful investor, a lifetime of disciplined behavior beats brilliance every time. 

Wealth doesn’t reward excitement. It rewards endurance. You don’t need to be extraordinary. You just need to be consistently reasonable. 

Just as I controlled my urge to spend that money I was saving for my education, you must acquire the same discipline in saving and accumulating money that you will use to achieve your goal of financial independence. Too often I see people buying things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like with money they don’t really have. What often motivates this self-defeating behavior is insecurity, envy, greed and a lack of a realizable goal like achieving financial independence.

Every dollar you don’t spend has the potential to compound in an investment account. This compounding occurs when the dividends you earn can be reinvested back into the strong stocks in a wealth-building portfolio to generate even more dividend income and capital gains in your portfolio. Every unnecessary purchase delays your achievement of financial independence. Wealth equals what you have minus what you need. The smaller the second number, the richer you will become.

In easy-to-understand language you will learn in this book how to find safe, generous, strong stocks for your investment consideration.  However, to save you time I have searched, selected and scored 180 stocks worth your consideration from which you could consider selecting the 20 for your investment portfolio. Using selectors available on the internet it was possible to select these 180 stocks from the 2,126 stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange and the 3,285 traded on the NASDAQ. Out of 53,795 public companies traded on 78 major world stock exchanges all you need to achieve financial independence is to invest in 20 financially strong stocks paying reliable high dividends.

All book buyers gain free access to the IDM stock scoring software. The scoring can be done manually but the software makes it easier and faster. It helps you determine which stock would be a better acquisition than another. Just before buying any stock, you should always re-score a stock just to confirm there have been no recent changes in its strength

Why 20 stocks? All stocks never move in the same direction at the same time. You want enough diversity in your portfolio that a few stocks that temporarily decreased their share prices are offset by many more stocks that have increased their share prices. Diversity in your portfolio is also a strength. 

Suppose you had invested in only two stocks, and one had an unexpected disaster. This loss of 50% of your wealth would be a major catastrophe. No single stock is as safe as when it is bundled with 20 other strong carefully chosen stocks. An unlikely disaster with one stock would only impact 5% of your wealth which is easily offset with capital gains and dividend income by the other 19 stocks. 

I have been asked if I were just beginning to invest and had no money how I would go about getting started. The first thing is you need a plan and an objective. Even though you do not yet have the money to invest you can still identify the 20 stocks that you think would show the best gain in share price over time and the best dividend income. This gives you a real plan and an objective.

The next step would be to save the first $5,000 to buy shares in what you have identified as that safest and strongest of the 20 stocks. It may or may not be the highest scoring stock or even be paying the highest dividend. Sometimes a lower scoring stock paying a much higher dividend would be the best choice. Investing $5,000 that you have saved at great sacrifice commits you to building that strong portfolio which will give you financial independence.

The next step would be to save another $5,000 to buy the second-best stock. Saving this second $5,000 would be easier because you now have some dividend income from the first stock purchase to help you. This is your first step in taking advantage of the compounding aspect of dividend investing. 

You would keep on saving and buying $5000 worth of stocks until all 20 of the stocks you had targeted had been purchased. With the dividend income now coming in from all 20 stocks you begin to purchase more shares of the 20 stocks in your portfolio.

Within five years of the steady growth of your 20 stocks, you will have doubled the value of your portfolio. Your portfolio will keep on multiplying even faster as each year goes by.

  Of course, in addition to the dividend income and the capital gain in the portfolio, you can also be investing a percentage of your salary as an employee into your 20 stocks. Seeing your money compounding will give you a great incentive to grow the portfolio quickly.

At some point your dividend income will reach a level that you can choose to quit your job and live well off that dividend income instead of investing it back into the portfolio. It will continue to grow with the normal increase in share prices each year. 

You can never lose sight of the fact that it is the discipline of living within your growing dividend income that has made your dream financial independence possible. 

END