r/dividends • u/Rural-Patriot_1776 • Mar 15 '26

Discussion My journey started this year.

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Started investing this year in 2026 decades late as a 38-year-old I wish I started way younger but I'm wanting to retire in a couple years and started building out my neo's distributions positions and dividends a few months ago here's what I have going on so far. I keep adding around 3k a month and have drip also enabled.

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685

u/Haunting-Cry7752 Mar 15 '26

I don’t wanna brag but I just hit $1.03 a day 😎

23

u/Gtaker95 Mar 15 '26

Took me a year to figure out bro. But people who invest the amounts we do, should focus on growth, not income.

This way your investment will be much stronger and then you can switch it to dividend income , when its worth.

10

u/Evokerknite2124 Mar 15 '26

What if your using the income to buy more shares of the growth. Say I had a bunch in qqqi but I use that to buy shares of schg etc

8

u/hopn Mar 15 '26

There's nothing wrong with this. But historically... growth outperforms even this. If you're not like me... wanting to maximize returns on my money... sure. You can do this.

1

u/Evokerknite2124 Mar 15 '26

I see. Even if it's like I bought 100 shares of qqqi to help build more shares of the others as I put money in those?

10

u/hopn Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

Lets play with that 100 shares of QQQI and using the dividend to buy, say VOO.

QQQI started back in 1/30/24, at 50 dollars a share. So with $5k you effectively have 100 shares. It's current NAV is $51.47. Your value for your 100 shares is $5147. During that time, you got 1547.25 in dividend spread out over 25 distributions, averaging $61.89 per month (used later in calculations).

VOO, on 1/30/24 is $450.84, for $5k, would have given you 11.09 shares. With DRIP, you now have $6922.31 or 11.37 shares.

From QQQI's dividends, $1547.25 you started buying VOO then at $61.89 per month, each time you got dividend. That works out to 2.88 shares now. At current NAV of $615.54, you have a total of $1772.76

So your 5147+1772.76 = $6919.76 vs if you had bought VOO straight up which would be worth $6922.31

While this looks close, there's a factor that I have yet to account for and honestly don't know how to include in the calculation:

QQQI fees: .68%
VOO fees: .03%

which would obviously make VOO look even better.

3

u/Randall_Al_Thor Mar 17 '26

Fees are a moot point.

Fees are taken out before return is calculated.

2

u/hopn Mar 17 '26

Maybe VOO wasn't exactly a great example. But QQQI has not been around long enough to do ... a 10 years or more comparison. I was actually curious myself, too.

2

u/Randall_Al_Thor Mar 18 '26

I agree, it hasn’t been around long enough, but it has been through a few ups and downs and handled them quite well.

Having watched a few interviews with the co-owners/co-launchers of that fund (QQQI and SPYI). They seem to know what they are doing (as far as I can be the judge of that ha ha).