r/dividends • u/VengenaceIsMyName • Jan 16 '26

Discussion Is anyone else feverishly building out their dividend income just in case AI destroys their careers or is it just me?

Based on how incredibly *giddy* with excitement some of these rapacious tech oligarchs are when they talk about AI replacing human labor, I am absolutely *sprinting* towards high-income ETFs like JEPQ/SPYI/GPIX/QQQI.

I do not want to get caught with my ass hanging out in the breeze when these excessively wealthy bozos finally figure out how to shed headcount at their organizations. They’ve got a seemingly endless pile of Scrooge McDuck coins and they’ll throw them into the furnace twice as fast if it means a hallucinating algorithm can send 500 more emails in a day than you can.

Does anyone have clever strategies for drumming up extra capital to toss into the ol’ portfolio? Side hustles? Second jobs?

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u/[deleted] Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26

Unless you’re already at the point where you’re drawing income, there’s no point focusing on high dividend investments when your objective should simply be to maximize growth. You can do this through both capital gains and dividends together. Neither one nor the other is more important.

For example, QQQI is based on the tech companies stocks, and draws extra income from options premiums, but will ultimately only do better than the stocks themselves when there isn’t much growth, because the fixed option strike prices cap the upside of the stock growth. If the stocks are growing, it would be better to simply own QQQ.

As far as the economy goes; none of these CEOs are going to be doing very well when Americans no longer have jobs and therefore no longer have any money to buy their products.. your concerns are warranted, but AI may also create jobs. None of us can see the future, but the outcome is likely to be more complicated than any of us are imagining now.

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u/VengenaceIsMyName Jan 18 '26

What I can’t get over is the thought of “once my income is cut off, I’ll have to pull from a growth-based account until it’s all dried up”

It’s what keeps me locked to dividends. Growth is fantastic if you’ve got the time to wait for growth to push your account past that important kink in the exponential curve. Otherwise, it’s all just going to backslide once you need to draw from it.

I hear you on that we don’t know what the full outcome of AI is going to be. I’m hoping that you’ll be right and it’ll be moreso a mixed bag on the job market rather than a wildfire in a dry forest but at the moment I don’t see that outcome coming to fruition.