Bob Lai

1 week ago | tawcan.com | Bob Lai

I’m amazed that this blog has been around for more than ten years, especially knowing that many blogs either fade away or disappear completely after six months. For me, getting questions from readers and connecting with some of them in person has been a great attraction. Questions are always interesting to get as they reveal curiosity as well as often lead to many different kinds of important analysis.

2 weeks ago | tawcan.com | Bob Lai

Because we are still in the accumulation phase of our financial independence journey, we make many stock transactions every year, mostly purchasing more stocks from new capital and occasionally selling shares. In our December 2024 dividend income report, I summarized all the stock transactions we did throughout the year to give readers an idea of what we did. A few years ago I did a review of every dividend stock transaction we made between 2020 and 2022.

3 weeks ago | tawcan.com | Bob Lai

Long time readers will know that we are at a point where our annual dividend income can pay for our core expenses. However, core expenses do not include expenses like eating out, entertainment, vacation, charitable donations, gifts, and other non-necessity expenses. Although we aren’t at the point of living off dividends completely yet, we should be able to cover all our annual expenses if we rely on our dividend income and supplement the difference with part-time income.

1 month ago | tawcan.com | Bob Lai

Welcome to another dividend income update. Since the creation of this blog back in 2014, I have been posting monthly dividend income reports to keep ourselves accountable, and also to demonstrate that it is possible to build up a sizable dividend portfolio over time. For those of you who are new, we became serious with dividend growth investing in 2011 and started shifting money toward dividend paying stocks. Over time, we added index ETFs like XAW and QQQM to diversify our portfolio.

1 month ago | tawcan.com | Bob Lai

Two weeks ago, I went on my first business trip of 2025 in order to attend two trade shows – Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona and Embedded World in Nuremberg. Since MWC was Monday to Thursday and Embedded World was the following Tuesday to Thursday, I spent the weekend in Munich to avoid flying back and forth between Europe and North America and emitting unnecessary CO2. The 13-day trip was quite interesting with different surprises, as you can see from the random thoughts below.