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GETTING STARTED

Building your wealth through dividend growth portfolio takes time and effort. The strategy is to have the compounding affect to work in your favor so the sooner you start the higher chance you can be financial free. However before you actually start investing, you might want to actually want to increase some financial intelligent and knowledge. Like what Warren Buffet quote "Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1". The key to a successful investing is knowledge. So the more you actually read and learn, the more likely you will become a better and knowledgeable investor. You don't want to make any fatal mistake so getting a better understanding and knowledge are as crucial as starting early. Please do no start until you know what you are getting yourself into. Never buy based on other people's recommendation or what you don't understand. Do you own diligence.

Rule No.1: Never Lose Money. Rule No.2: Never Forget rule No.1.

Books and Tutorial Videos On Finance
If you are a beginner in the investing world, I would highly recommend to read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", by Robert Kiyosaki. The book advocates financial independence and building wealth through investing, real estate investing, starting and owning businesses, as well as increasing one's financial intelligence to improve one's business and financial aptitude. It's really the basic to a better understanding how the wealthy create wealth, and how the wealthy differentiates between assets and liabilities. This is really vital since many people don't really understand to tell the differences. They think the house they live in or the car they drive are their assets when actually they are actually your liabilities that takes money out of your pocket. It's just pure common sense. An asset is something that put in money into your pocket, and a liabilities is something that take money out of your pocket.


Once you understand the basics, I think we can start learning about the basic fundamentals about stock investing. Robert Kiyosaki emphasizes that to become a successful investor, it's essential for us to increase our financial literacy. I find out that the simplest way to learn is to actually engage in watching tutorial videos. I actually learn much faster after watching a tutorial videos compared to reading a book myself. I encountered this awesome website Buffett's Books that explain how the greatest investor Warren Buffet chooses the company to invest in. I highly recommend to actually watch their free tutorial videos that teaches from the the basic that will later lead to a more complex understanding about security analysis. The tutorial videos are amazing, I literally understand the whole concept of value investing after watching those videos. The videos are not even one to two hour lectures. In fact each lecture are divided to like a 10 minutes to 30 minutes short video explanation, and trust me each video lecture you watch will make your investment philosophy differently.

www.buffettsbooks.com

For some reason, after watching video from Buffet Books, I actually have easier time reading other investment books. I guess it is because of those tutorial videos that increase my financial knowledge that lead me to have easier time of understanding for more complex reading. Investing might be complex in the beginning, but the more you read and learn, the easier it will get. Similar to playing a video game, the more you play it, the more expert you become at it. Some of the books that I like and recommend are listed below.

Rich Dad Poor Dad. By Robert Kiyosaki
















Learn to Earn: A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Investing and Business. By Peter Lynch and John Rothchild






Your Money Or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence. By Vicki Robin & Joe Dominguez

Most of the books I have read so far are actually not about dividend growth investing but more of a value investing, but understanding the fundamentals is really crucial to become a successful investor. It's pretty much useless if you invest your money on high yield dividend stocks but have a weak financial statement. Those dividends are not going to sustain in the future, or even worse the company might face loss in value or bankruptcy.

Opening up your Brokerages
If you feel like you are confidence enough after understanding how the financial world work. I guess it's time to open up your brokerage account. I personally use E-Trade Financial as my broker. The transaction cost is $9.99 per trade which is moderate, but still pretty expensive compared to other broker such as Scottrade which cost about $7 per trade. The reason why I personally like E-Trade Financial more is because they have this tool called Income Estimator which allow me to see my estimated divided income a year ahead. It's a useful tool if you are trying to figure out how much dividend you are going to make in a year.


Important Research Links 
Morningstar
Morningstar is a respected and reliable source of independent investment analysis for all levels of fund and stock investors, ranging from inexperienced beginners to sophisticated experts. Its website includes free information on individual funds and stocks such as 5 years financial datas. More complete data is available through subscription services and publications.


GuruFocus
Similar to Morningstar, Gurufocus is a subscription site for the stock market data including stock screeners, model portfolios, and trades made by financial gurus like Warren E. Buffett. It has many powerful tools for investors. I find Gurufocus a much more advance reasearch tools compared to Morningstar because of it's awesome screener and financial datas. The stock screener has so many criteria to screen from, which give me the ability to find the type of companies that fit my criteria. I used its screener to find many of my dividend growth stocks picks which consist of great valuation and historical growth rate. In addition, its financial datas is a hardcore status for any value investor out there. It has up to 15 years of historical financial datas giving investor a larger picture of the companies' financial performance. This is a great propitious for any dividend growth investor since one of the crucial information is knowing the historical dividend growth rate. So knowing its 15 years financial performance and information is valuable.

Simple GuruFocus Screen High-Dividend Small Caps

Finviz
If you want to use a stock screener like Gurufocus but don't want to pay for its service then I recommend using Finviz Stock Screener. It's similar to Gurufocus Stock Screener except it's not as advance. I was using Finviz when I was still in University, however I decide to use Gurufocus now instead.

Free & Simple to use

Investopedia
Investopedia is an internet site devoted in investing and financial education. I strongly recommend this site if you need some brushing in some of the basic financial terminology. The website provide many short one to three minutes videos on the basic terminology. The videos show step by step explanation of the terminology giving the average person like me a clear understanding. I think a person who watches all the videos and definitions on that website learn much more than going to four years University with a Finance major. Along with educational content, Investopedia offers interactive tools such as its popular stock market simulator, which allows individuals to set up a brokerage account with play money and trade publicly traded stocks and options on the NYSE, NASDAQ, and other stock exchanges.

Simple Short Lecture Videos

Other Beneficial Financial Tools 
Personal Capital
I find Personal Capital as a really advantageous financial tool when it comes to Portfolio Management and I highly recommend for someone who wants to stay on top with their finances. Personal Capital is best described as an "account aggregator". It is pretty much helping you to track and understand all your financial accounts. You can have various accounts, such as your mortgage, credit cards, bank accounts, investment accounts and whatsoever you have in one online interface. This involves authorizing each account that you have from within Personal Capital. Furthermore, it offers great online interface to track all of your spending and account balances. You can track your spending down to the penny; every credit card transaction, every checking account and every automated payment ect. They can all be viewed in your account dashboard. You can also get the details you need to analyze each purchase. You can categorize spending by date, merchant, and category. The greatest part about this service is that it's completely FREE to use except if you want to use their financial adviser services (if you think you really need one). On top of that, the platform service is available on your desktop computer and your mobile application. Yes, I repeat it's available for your mobile application. I'm truly satisfied being able to use their mobile application to keep up with my finances whenever I want to.

Available for Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile App

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