Basically we enjoy having a beer in the garage and chatting about personal finance and interesting topics throughout the blog-o-sphere. One day we decided to record ourselves, and the FIgarage Podcast was born!! It’s raw and un-edited PG content. We introduce a couple micro-brews, mmm we like that part, and tackle topics on Financial Independence.
In the Garage you’ll find The Mechanic, The Accountant and The Economist. Three friends with different backgrounds that bring insightful knowledge and philosophy to finance and the journey to Financial Independence. We all came around to our FI journey’s with different influences and likewise have different ideas of what FI is and how to get there.
The Financial Independence Garage blog and podcast is where you’ll learn how to repair and tune up your personal finance investment vehicles. We’re going to learn about saving, investing and how to optimize those accounts. We’re also going to focus on the lifestyle side of personal finance. Including analyzing our spending habits, building successful strategies to increase our savings rate, and most importantly living a happy and fulfilling life.
Hello,
I found your podcasts a couple of months ago and have been catching up listening to some of the “beer and banter”. I am enjoying the wide variety of topics.
I started “investing” in stocks about 8 years ago after finally doing something about my bank investments rarely returning anything more than my principal. It is hard to get ahead investing like that.
About the time I was doing my research and investing in blue-chip, dividend, hold long-term, stocks; some of the bloggers that I was reading were switching over to ETF’s. I understand the “can’t beat the market” and inherent diversification in the ETF’s; however, it seems to me that a fair bit of money is being left on the table through the annual increases in stock dividends. I have not been able to find the “math” or explanations for this.
I purchased a few ETF’s just to compare them to my dividend stocks and I have not seen any increase in dividend payments so far. It has been a relatively short time, but when I look at some ETF history, the growth on the dividends is very slow to non-existent. I would say less than “cost of living increases” and less than “the increase in the value of the dollar”. Whereas I can see a significant increase in my stock dividends each year. Most are in the neighborhood of 3-8 %.
I am not sure if you would be able to comment on this or work through the numbers on one of your podcasts?
Thanks
Hi Mark, Glad you found the show and have been enjoying our info-tainment. You make a good point about dividend raises and money being left on the table. Personally I think a hybrid Blue chip dividend stock portfolio paired with an index ETF(s) is the way to go. Keep all your Canadian exposure in individual stocks where you will benefit from the dividend increase (hopefully) and the favourable taxation. Bob over at Tawcan has a good spreadsheet that he built for tracking dividends. The amazing thing that people don’t realize is that your yield is not just today’s yield. It is based on your ACB. I think the Accountant did a work up on the numbers in one of our episodes, just an example of if you had bought BNS 20 years ago, and then benefited from dividend raises and appreciation. You ended up with a huge yield on your cost. We try and straddle the fence a little on the show and explore different investment philosophies, we all know ‘personal finance is personal’. LOL Cheers, MM
Here’s the link to the spreadsheet. Down near the bottom of the LONG post is an actual link to the google sheet. https://www.tawcan.com/step-step-guide-make-google-spreadsheet-dividend-portfolio-template/#more-3723
Hey guys, found your podcast last week and have been binge listening ever since. Love the content and will be asking questions and suggestions in the future. Just curious, do you guys donate, tithe, or share a portion of your wealth in a giving scenario monthly, yearly, etc?
Hey JR, Glad you found the podcast and are enjoying our journey to FI. That’s a good question, and one we should bring up on the show. I can’t speak for the other guys, but my wife and I give about $1500-$2000 per year. We don’t have it set up monthly, just annual amounts to several charities. Before the pandemic I was volunteering quite a bit for Hero work in Victoria. It’s similar to Houses for Humanity, except they do big renovations for other charities. My wife has been a volunteer on the Board of our curling club for 5 years now. We also recently donated our BC covid benefit from the BC Gov. I think one of the great things about reaching FI is being able to give time. Since you asked, what do you do for charity?
Cheers,
Money Mech
Hey Money Mech, my wife and I donate, or tithe, 10% to our church. On top of that, me and a few friends and family set up a few scholarships to local high school students that we give out annually.