The goal with investing is to continue growing and learning more as you become more experienced. Quite frankly, that should be the goal for EVERYTHING in life, not just investing!  The two of us have been investing for over a decade. Trust us when we say this.  We have grown a lot and learned from a TON of investing mistakes over the years.  We are active participants on Twitter (Profile here) and love being a part of the DivTwit community!  Hearing our investing advice is boring…right? Plus, we may not provide a wide enough spectrum of advice and investing lessons.  Rather than write an article with just our anecdotes, we decided to ask DivTwit!  This article contains Investing Lessons for our younger selves!

Reflecting and sharing your investing lessons is critical.  Not only does it help you grow, it also helps others that are at the beginning of their investing journeys avoid some of the same hard lessons you faced.  We all work so hard to make Every Dollar Count and save/invest everything we can to earn the most on our savings.

Read: How To Maximize Your Cash: 4 SIMPLE Steps

That is why we are so open and transparent on this website. We hope that all of you can learn from our investing journey to help yourself grow as an investor.  We share our stock portfolios, watch lists, how we screen for stocks, signing up for  a new Financial Freedom Product to help grow your income, and quite frankly, EVERYTHING to help us and you at all stages of your investing journey.  Transparency is key for us and reading your journeys on blogs and social media also helps us grow!  To us, sharing our journeys with you is what it is all about!

Read: Dividend Growth….10 Years in the Making

One of the earliest investing lessons I learned is to not chase dividend yield.  It is a simple lesson. Quite frankly, this is a lesson I mistake I should have avoided given the fact that the payout ratio and dividend growth history are two of the 3 metrics of our Stock Screener.  Still, sometimes investing lessons are best learned with pain.

Read: The 3 Metrics of Our Dividend Stock Screener we use for EVERY Investment Decision

Back in the mid 2010s, I invested in a new REIT, ARCP, that offered investors fast dividend growth and a rapidly growing dividend yield over 7%. The other investment I was considered was a Dividend Aristocrat named Realty Income. At the time, Realty income was yielding a much more modest 5%.  Soon after, I regretted the decision. ARCP was caught up in an accounting scandal that slashed the dividend. The REIT took on too much debt. Ultimately, the dividend and stock price fell. The company had to rebrand to VEREIT to shake the stench of the previous management company. Ironically, years later, VEREIT was acquired by Realty Income!

From this lesson, I learned the importance of focusing on quality dividend yield instead of chasing the highest yielding stock.  Have I lost out on some winning investments? Sure. However, I have also avoided costly dividend cuts.  Focusing on solid,but not the highest yield, and a strong history of dividend growth has helped me achieve a higher quality dividend income stream.

Now, when I see a new investor in my personal life, Twitter, or commenting our YouTube Channel  (Profile Here), the first investing lesson I tell them is to “Never Chase Dividend Yield.”

Investing Lessons for YouR Younger Self

Enough with our investing lessons. The question is….what are your favorite investing lessons you’d tell your younger self!  We posed the following question to Twitter at the beginning of 2023 and got some excellent results!

What is one piece of investment advice you'd tell 2018 you?

— Dividend Diplomats (@DvdndDiplomats) January 2, 2023

For the remainder of the article, we are going to share the best investing lessons from that Tweet.  We want this article to grow as well. So please reply to the article with some of your best investing lessons for your younger self. We will continue to add responses to grow the largest list possible.  After all, the more investing lessons the merrier…..right?!

The beauty of asking the question on Twitter is that the replies are limited to 160 characters.  Whether it was one word, two words, or a couple of sentences, the advice was very powerful and impactful. We will do our best to organize the responses by categories!

Remember, we asked people to provide investment advice and investment lessons for their younger selves!

Several of the responses focused on making sure you buy quality investments This was important to show first, because the purpose of our Stock Screener is to help us find undervalued QUALITY dividend stocks to purchase (Note: We included links to the tweets if you want to follow the people”

• Frank Mularcik: “Quality”
• Dividend Desi: “Focus on Quality Dividend Stocks”
• Frank Rizzo: “Invest in stocks with a long history of YOY growing distributions in the double digits and avoid looking at high current high yield as a major investment criteria (i.e. T, VOD, or VZ as examples).”

Other responses hit a key theme that we always state.  It is critical to start investing as soon as possible and to be consistent with your investing.

• Larry Dixon: “The most important dollar you put in the market is the first dollar- just do it.”
• Dividend Don: “Get the dividend snowball rolling”
• Dividend Rob: “Consistency”
• Dividend Dad: “Just Start”
• Dreiburg Personal Finance: “Start”
• High Impact Information: “Stay the course”
• Wealthy Mate: “The best moment to invest is NOW”
• Tomas_K: “Follow the magic of compounding”
• D C: “Start Now”
• TheYoungOne84: “Start now”
• Scott: “Don’t tinker, just leave them alone.”

Next, some responses took it a step further. They couple personal finance advice with a motivational call to start or continue investing.

• D’Orazio: “Fix your spending habits, invest the savings and watch how fast that will help your compounding.”
• Deathly Dividends: “Pay off high interest debt and have an emergency fund before you think about investing. Then put your first $10k in an S&P index fund.”

Now, if only we had a crystal ball, the following advice would be helpful. These responses made us laugh and helped us start thinking about something we don’t consider too frequently…is it okay to sell a dividend stock to lock in gains?

• TK Money: “Sell in Q4 2021”
• Stone Grin: “Don’t be afraid to trim at all time highs”
• 6Kings: “Short the world until March 20, 2020… then buy everything the next day.”  [Note: Remember, you can’t time the market!]

Summary

Hopefully you have gotten some value out of the investing lessons listed above. As you know, the investing lessons in this article are just the tip of the iceberg.  We appreciate the Twitter communities participation in this exercise and helping share the investing lessons they would tell their younger selves.  It is all about learning, growing, and sharing our knowledge with this wonderful community. Now, lets apply the lessons, keep sharing them, and reach financial freedom TOGETHER!

What is your favorite investing lesson listed above? What investing advice would you tell your younger self?

-The Dividend Diplomats