Safe Dividend Investing
In 2000, I lost $300,000 in mutual funds that an investment advisor had put my lifesavings into.... I lost it because I had entrusted it to an industry that does not educate investors nor encourage them to look closely at what that industry is doing with their money..... I set out to find a better, safer way to invest..... My podcasts relate to what I learned in creating a generous, reliable income and in growing my wealth.... A few of the more important lessons I learned and explore are:.... (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 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 stock to 5% of your wealth..... 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 18 years, through two market crashes and one pandemic. I have watched my portfolio’s capital more than triple from where I started, despite taking out a generous dividend income every year to live on... In charts, for my second investment book,(Safer Better Dividend Investing), I spent months scoring all 628 dividend stocks paying dividends of 6% or greater traded on the TSX, NYSE and the NASDAQ. I discovered dozens of stocks that can provide not only a generous dividend income but outstanding capital growth.....Financial independence is realizable for careful, patient, dividend investors.
Safe Dividend Investing
Podcast 258 - WORKING CLASS VERSUS WEALTHY CLASS ATTITUDES TO MONEY
Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 258, on January 17th of 2026.
My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". Until February 10th, it is available at a discounted price.
Being a miners son and having worked my way through university as a mine laborer I found it interesting this week to read an author's views about the attitudes towards money of the wage earning working class to that of high-net-worth attitude of the wealthy class. Having also been well compensated senior executive in large corporations and now living off my investments I felt qualified to add my views on the differences. Is the billionaire with his investment portfolios really happier because of his investments or do they weigh him down?
A similar question was raised by another author who suggests your objective should be to strive to spend all you have accumulated and to die with a net worth of zero. I find there is something sad to imagine seeing joy in the eyes of the soon to be departed because he has achieved his ambition of reducing his wealth to zero. You may find my views on such an ambition interesting.
My books are not get-rich-quick books. They are about taking a little time to carefully seek out financially strong companies with long histories of paying ever rising high dividends accompanied by rising share prices. Diversification, persistence and patience win out in investing. The objective is achieving financial independence for the rest of your life.
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
January 17, 2026
PODCAST 258
SAFE DIVIDEND INVESTING
Greetings to investors all around the world. Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 258, on January 17th of 2026. My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of seven investment books. My latest book “Achieving Financial Independence Safely – 200 NYSE exchange Stocks Analyzed and Scored” became available for delivery from Amazon on January 3, 2026. If interested, you can find more information about it, along with my other books, by doing a search in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books”.
Every day I pour through a flood of business literature. In one of these a writer caught my attention when he stated that money to the wage earning working-class is very tangible, unlike the high-net-worth wealthy class with their investment portfolios. I have been on both sides of this observation on how money is viewed.
The working class earn it, they see it, they spend it, and then it is all gone. Deferred gratification and future reward are rarely a consideration. The possibility of money growing in the background and eventually providing them with economic freedom is not something they are motivated to consider. They want to see their earned money and be able to touch it. Their life is focused on the necessary cash flow to pay their rent, buy groceries and put gas in their car. They do not expect anything to be left over from their paycheck.
I understand this short-term thinking. I was miner's son. I worked as a mine laborer for four months every year for four years, to save enough to pay each my university tuition, my food, my books, and my rent.
The work was deafening, dirty, smelly, uncomfortable, and boringly mindless. Each day I punched a time clock, put in my eight hours, and got paid for it. Many of those I grew up with followed their fathers into the mines. They quickly bought cars, drank too much and partied as young men do.
Why was I different? I had no grand ambitions. However, I did listen when my father told me that while the mine would last his lifetime all mines deplete their ore bodies and eventually close. He said I would get an education and leave mining behind.
When I graduated, I had $100 left in my bank account and no job. Education had opened my mind to the possibility that I had choices in life. It made me eager to take the chance of leaving the familiar environment I had grown up in and to travel to the foreign environment of a big city with millions of people.
Within a few days of arriving in the big city, I took the first job offered me. I would be able to wear a white shirt, a tie and a suit. I would sit at a desk in a clean, quiet environment. That was important to me.
Interestingly, it paid me less than I had made as a miner. Quickly I was taught how to think, to analyze, to sell, to compete, to manage others and to avoid high risks. I was given a thorough business education and introduced to a world which I had little prior knowledge of.
At the beginning, every day my creativity and productivity were compared with forty others doing the same job. We had quotas. I found that I enjoyed the challenges and I liked the praise I got for doing a better job than the others. The more money I made for the corporations that employed me the more money they paid me.
Soon my income covered my modest needs and wants. This eventually led to the reality of excess cash that exceeded my expenditures. Having been taught about risk, I learned to carefully invest this money in the shares of financially strong companies with long histories of ever-increasing share prices and ever-increasing high dividend payouts. These dividends were invested in more shares which generated even more dividends.
Eventually I was able to live very well off my dividend income. It gave me the freedom to do whatever I wished to do. It turns out all I really wanted to do was to write books and record my weekly podcasts. It became obvious that constantly chasing after more money would only cut into my writing time.
Am I envious of billionaires? No. I doubt if billionaires have the total freedom and enjoy the stress-free life that I do. Their measuring their worth against the worth of others seems to be an empty ambition once your needs are realized. Often the wealthy seem to be on an ever-speeding treadmill of their own making that they cannot find a way off. I wonder if they are happier, and more satisfied with their lives than a working-class wage earner who puts in his 8 hours each day and then goes home to relax without worries as to whether the stock market was up or down or whether their wealth had grown or shrunk that day?
Is there a conspiracy or natural law that forces the working class to live paycheck-to -paycheck and work in jobs that pay them for their time and not their creative and productive abilities? Control of their financial future seems to be something they rarely consider. Making sacrifices now to eventually realize financial freedom later seems to hold little attraction.
Is it cultural brainwashing that forces them into accepting some unwritten rule they are not supposed to rise above what they are been made to believe is their station in life? Do they really believe that wealthy business owners are smarter and more deserving of achieving financial independence than they are? Are they in a self-imposed prison that limits their horizons?
Are the elderly who continue to live thrifty lives instead of spending their accumulated wealth to wallow in all the pleasures life offers in their declining years in a similar self-imposed prison. I suspect that a writer I came across who promotes the objective of dieing with zero wealth is neither elderly nor wealthy.
Who knows precisely when they will die? I do not know anyone who does. However, I do know that an elderly person without a good reliable income can find life to be very miserable. Perhaps they might wish to die sooner rather than later.
I have been retired for 21 years and live off the dividends from my portfolios. Every year my portfolios increase in value as does my dividend income. This dividend growth exceeds the rate of inflation. The total dollar value of my portfolio is almost irrelevant. What is important is the dividend income that is derived from it.
I spend almost all this dividend income each year and want for nothing. I travel and live a comfortable life. I have no money worries. How I spend this income is of no concern to anyone but me. What those who share in my estate will do with that money is not my concern. By then they should be self-sufficient. Life has many twists and turns and depending upon an inheritance is a gamble.
My current financial state now is not what it was when I first retired. When I retired, knowing little about investing, I turned over all my life savings to a professional investment advisor. Within 3 years he had lost almost 50% of it. This was disturbing because he had told me that the way I would survive when I retired was to sell off 4% of the "safe" mutual funds that he had chosen for me each year. If I followed this 4% rule, he told me, the money would last until I was 90.
While achieving the ripe old age 90 seemed totally impossible 21 years ago, it does not seem that impossible now. What happens after 90? Apparently if you have lived in good health for your first 65 years the odds now are that you will live to be beyond 90.
Has your investment advisor given you this same 4% rule to live by when you retire. Of course, the investment advisor expects to receive their usual annual one of two percent of the value of your portfolio each year until your funeral.
The hundreds of thousands of dollars that I lost due to this mutual fund investment was educational. It not only motivated me to learn how to be a successful self-directed investor but to teach others how to reach financial independence as self-directed investors. I have taught, perhaps thousands, that while investing well need not be complicated nor frightening, it does require patience and persistence. If you carefully invest in financially strong, historically well managed companies that currently pay out a consistent dividend yield percent return of more than 5%. To do so means you can expect a dividend income between 6% and 8% of your portfolio and for the share value of the stocks in your portfolio to grow by 10% or more most years.
Once a strong, constantly growing diversified portfolio of 20 stocks is established you can go for years without being required to buy or sell a stock. You do keep an eye on it but if a stock’s dividend remains at 5% or more and its IDM score, at the same time, exceeds 50 you leave it alone.
The propaganda from investment advisors that you must deplete your wealth as you age is nonsense. However, while living within your generous dividend income there is always the insurance that you can easily sell a few shares to generate cash in an emergency.