When you buy a new stock, the best-case scenario is never having to sell it, allowing you to sit back and rake in that dividend income for as long as you live. Now, while the idea of holding a stock forever is fun to think about, reality usually has other plans for your portfolio.

When it comes to the stock market, small events can cause massive changes over time.

I'm usually an open book when it comes to my dividend portfolio—or at least I try to be. But I have to admit, I’ve been keeping a little secret from you over the past few weeks: I added a new dividend stock to my portfolio!

I’ve been keeping something big from all of you (not investing-related, more so life-related). It hasn’t been easy staying quiet, but I wanted to make sure everything was official before saying a word.

The more you spend, the more you have to earn just to maintain that standard, and before you know it, the stuff you own starts controlling you instead of the other way around. This leaves you in a position where you're more dependent on the income from your job when you should be working toward the opposite.

I tend to categorize dividend stocks into different groups, and have come up with four of them based on their general yield and dividend growth rates. In my portfolio, I try to strike a balance between these four groups.

The Ownership Dividend​ by Daniel Peris is one of the best books I've read in a while. This is why I think it's a must-read for all dividend investors.

One of the most common questions I get about Starbucks is why a company as successful as this one reports negative shareholders' equity. It’s a legitimate concern, especially when we’re used to thinking of equity as a key measure of a company’s financial well-being.

Sometimes the biggest mistakes you’ll make in your dividend portfolio aren’t from doing the wrong things, like investing in a low quality dividend stock, but from not doing the right things, like letting high quality, discounted dividend stocks pass you by.