$10,000 Milestone Reached Again

Wow, what a busy few weeks it has been. I haven’t been posting. I haven’t been driving. The reason for both is the same. Work, work, and more work! I just had my hell week, but thankfully, that’s over. I’m still going to be busy through the end of April, but things will be easier for the next few weeks. In the meantime, my dividend portfolio continues to grow. The growth is due to dividend increases and my regular contributions. Well, I have some exciting news!!! For the first time in a long time, my dividend portfolio has crossed the important milestone of $10,000. Lets dive in to discuss.

How Did I Get To $10,000 Milestone?

If you take a close look at any one of my dividend income reports, the latest being February 2022, you’ll notice that I’ve been reporting my dividends since 2017. In fact, for a few years, my portfolio balance kept rising and rising. If you check out my dividend tracker, you’ll also notice that in 2019, I earned $1159.46 in dividends for that year! Just amazing.

But alas, “life is what happens when you make plans.” I decided to buy a beach condo, and had to liquidate most of my dividend portfolio to do it. I hated selling, but apparently, I wanted the beach condo more. There’s no use crying over spilt milk. Time will tell if this was the better decision. All I can say is so far so good. The condo which I’m using as a vacation rental is picking up. It’s my first year so I don’t have many reviews as of yet. I have to work on building up my clientele. But, based on my current bookings, I have enough income to pay for the expenses through July. And I still have lots of space available on my calendar during the busy season. Wish me luck.

The point being is that I had to start over with my portfolio, although I didn’t start from scratch. I had about $7000 or so in my portfolio after I liquidated my stocks. Still, it was a grind to climb my way back up to the $10000 milestone.

Where Do I Go From Here?

At the time of this writing, my portfolio balance is $10,106.48. The easy answer to the say is that the sky is the limit. But, that’s a bit vague. Goals should be SMART. That is, they should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. Over the long term, now that I’ve crossed 5-digits, I am working towards crossing the 6-digit threshold, namely, $100,000. However, it’s going to take a very long time for me to get there.

So, I will have mini-milestones along the way. Specifically, these mini-milestones will be at $5000, with a specific emphasis at the $10,000 mark each time. While I won’t necessarily make a post at the $5000 mark, I do intend on recognizing the small wins at the $10,000 level. So, for example, when my portfolio crosses $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 and so on, you can expect a similar post about reaching that milestone.

I do want to emphasize that this won’t happen overnight. There are a lot of competing goals I have, one of which is to establish a solid foundation going forward. That means paying off my credit card debt, and building up an adequate emergency fund before I significantly increase my contributions to my dividend portfolio. Slow and steady wins the race.

Conclusion

It feels good to achieve this small milestone. The journey to financial freedom through dividend growth investing is a long and slow one. But, it’s a journey that is absolutely worth making. My goal is to build my portfolio in such a way that I won’t need to tap into it again before retirement!

In fact, I really hopeful that after about a year, I can start using some the profits from the beach condo to help rebuild my dividend portfolio at a faster rate. Only time will tell. In the meantime, I will celebrate this small win, which helps to provide motivation to keep going.

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