About Me

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for visiting my blog!  The goal of this blog is to document my journey towards retirement.  I have no idea how long it will take or when I will feel comfortable enough to retire, but stay tuned and find out!

I am 26 years old and will be getting married on August 16^th, 2014.  My fiancé and I both enjoy traveling and although I have not been to too many exotic locations, it is something that both of us have become passionate about.  I have currently been to every state on the east coast except Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.  I’ve been to Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arizona.  I’ve also been to the Bahamas, Hawaii and for our honeymoon we are going to Aruba.  I bought a house back in February 2012, so I am more focused at investing than paying down the mortgage since we have a good interest rate.

Now for a few financial tidbits since this is a retirement blog. :)

I started investing back in 2010 and despite it being a great time to start investing, my returns had been sub-par.  I blame it on stock picking and trading too much combined with the fact that I was new at investing.  I fell into the typical investing style that most young people do and thought that I could beat the market.  I never lost any money, but whenever I made a bunch, either I held the stock for too long and it tanked, or I bought another stock and it tanked.  I began dividend investing back in January 2012 with my first few purchases being PM, T, PEP and INTC.  Those have given me decent returns so far, but so has everything else it seems like.  I’m not going to lie, I still have a “play around” account that I trade in frequently, and starting in July 2013, I have really turned a corner.  The first 3 years that account was only up 10%.  The past 10 months (as of this writing) I'm up 50%, call it a learning curve.  Stocks that have helped achieve that return are FNMA, AAP and AAPL.  In total, I have 3 investing accounts, my dividend investing account which this blog will primarily be about, my “play around” account, and then a 401K consisting of mutual funds.

Thank you for reading my blog and I look forward to talking with every one of you through the years.  Hopefully by writing out my journey, I will stay inspired and get out of the 8-5 before most of my peers.  I also look to inspire others to start saving and investing so they too can escape the daily grind.

Thanks,

Scott