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.

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.

Some of the most frequently asked questions I get are about covered call ETFs, specifically ​JEPI​ and ​JEPQ​. They have become quite trendy among dividend and income investors, but this is why I’m avoiding them altogether.

Sometimes, we can be our own worst enemies. Our biases, whether we want them to or not, significantly influence how we manage our investments and make decisions in our portfolios. While we can’t always overcome these biases, we can at least be aware of them to hopefully make better investment choices.

Dividend investors buy stocks with the intent to hold them for a long period of time, however, sometimes selling a stock is a necessary move. Last week, I found myself in that exact position and ended up selling three different holdings at one time.

At the end of the day, the main goal of investing is to acquire and accumulate assets, especially for dividend investors who aim to build a consistent stream of passive dividend income. If you’re going to be a “net buyer” of stocks, believe it or not, the ideal scenario is to invest in a stock and then see its share price go down.

In the short run, the market operates as a "voting machine," where prices are influenced by news cycles, investor sentiment, and often erratic behavior. This can create volatility in share prices that don’t necessarily reflect the underlying fundamentals of a company. On the other hand, over the long term, the market functions as a "weighing machine." This means that eventually, a company's stock price will reflect its actual intrinsic value based on the underlying fundamentals.

Bruce Greenwald said, “Whenever you buy a stock, thinking it’s going to do well, somebody else is selling it, thinking it’s going to do badly, and one of you is always wrong.” This double entendre of investing is something we often overlook, and it underscores two crucial points.