My Transition To Dividend Growth Investing: A Look Back To Last Summer When It All Began

As the summer starts to heat up and many of the stocks that I am interested in buying seem fully valued, I thought I would take this opportunity to look back on the past year and reflect on my family's transition from index and mutual fund investing to dividend growth investing. It has been an educational year (well, almost a year now), and I wanted to share some of the story. First, some context. I just recently turned 33, am married, and have one child. We are investing for the long term. We made our first purchases starting in 2008 with Sequioa Fund (SEQUX) and Fidelity's Total Market Index Fund (FSTVX). Later, we added investments from Pax World -- (PAXWX), (PXWEX) and (PAXHX) -- to reflect our social ideals in our investments. Our investment strategy was very straight forward: dollar cost average by contributing a set amount each month unless... Read more