Member-only story
Revealing My $12K Dividend Stock And ETF Portfolio
How I generate tax-free dividends every month.
With all the stimulus checks and a boatload of extra free time that many people got, I noticed investing in the stock market became almost like a “trendy” activity that everyone wanted to try.
Investing as a general topic is something I have always been interested in.
My first exposure to stock investing was when I was sitting in a math class in Grade 4, and our teacher gave us a for-fun stock investing project because our class was miles ahead of all the other classes in our regular curriculum.
We were partnered up and told to pick a stock, track it for the next few weeks, and see where it went. Other than we only had $100 to spend and the stock had to be on the TSX, there were no strict guidelines.
My partner and I ended up picking WestJet for no particularly good reason. It went up, but we had no idea why.
My “real” exposure to investing came towards the end of middle school when my parents argued a lot. The arguments stemmed from our financial issues. My dad was laid off from his job, and his small gambling addiction coupled with my mom’s determination to fix our financial issues made us operate at a financial red line.
My dad had debts that he couldn’t pay off, and my mom took on more debt in the form of buying rental properties hoping that it would change our financial situation.
And so, in hopes that my brother and I don’t end up in the same situation as my parents, my mom had lots of conversations with us about investing and advised us to read some of the books that she read, such as Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.
That’s what I did, and I drilled down into the topic of making money even more so than my mom.
I opened a tax-free savings account (TFSA) the moment I turned 18 and maxed it out as soon as possible.
Almost a year has gone by since I opened the account, and I thought it would be fun to share what I invested in and why I did so.
