Home The Retirement Income Series
Built: Dividend Investing for Retirement Income
A Conservative Income Strategy for Retirees — Including How to Build It in Your IRA and Roth IRA
For thirty years your money had one job: get bigger. Now it has to pay you, every month, for the rest of your life.
The income was lost long before the dividend was cut. This is a book about the years before.
That is a harder question, and it isn't the one your portfolio was built to answer. Dividend investing is a sound answer to it; it has worked for decades, and a retiree can run it personally for twenty years. So the useful question is not whether it works, but why it holds for some people and quietly comes apart for others, using the same companies, the same payments, and the same reasoning about what to buy.
Income almost never breaks where people look for the break. By the time a dividend is cut, the company has usually known for a year or more, and the decision that made the cut possible is older still: made before a single holding was chosen, at the moment of purchase, or afterward in how the pieces were fitted together. So this is a diagnostic, not a shopping list. Its twenty chapters each name one way retirement income fails, sorted into the five stages every income portfolio passes through.
What sets it apart is what it refuses to do. There are no tickers and no portfolio to copy, no yield other books were concealing, and no steady eight percent. You get the screen itself, every test, every threshold, and the reasoning behind them, so your judgment still works on a company this book has never heard of.
Nothing here asks you to be disciplined at the moment it matters, because almost nobody is. Every fix is structural: decided in advance and written where a worse version of you can't quietly revise it.
The five stages
Every income portfolio passes through these stages in order. Put the five questions to any portfolio in sequence, and the first one answered no is where the work starts.
Context
Was this the right job for this money?
Selection
Can the businesses afford to pay?
Vehicles
Do you know what you actually bought?
Construction
Is this a portfolio, or a pile?
Keeping
Will you still hold it in year twelve?
Inside the book
- Working out what your capital can actually produce, and what to do when the honest answer is not enough
- Reading a high yield for what it usually is: a falling price wearing a percentage sign
- Testing whether a company can afford its dividend in the year paying it turns inconvenient
- Telling a dividend from a distribution, and spotting the fund handing back your own capital and calling it income
- Building a payment calendar you can live on, with a buffer so a bad quarter never forces a sale
- Deciding now what you'll do the morning a dividend is cut
- Auditing your own portfolio once a year: five questions, about an hour
Twenty chapters in five stages, plus a one-page income policy statement, an annual audit worksheet, a reference sheet of every threshold, and a routine that takes twenty minutes a quarter and one afternoon a year.
Look inside
A few pages from the paperback. Select a page to see it full size.
- The contents
- The opening of Chapter 1
- Figure 2.1: three pay you more today; only one can keep paying
- Figure 14.1: six quarters of shortfall, and nothing sold
Who it's for
Retirees who want dependable monthly income from businesses they actually understand, whether the rollover has just landed or a portfolio built some other way has disappointed.
