IFB07: Creating Portfolio Income with Ben Reynolds from Sure Dividend

Creating portfolio income is one of the main reasons we all invest. There are many ways to create that income. One of the best ways is utilizing dividends. These payouts from your investments are one of the leading ways to create portfolio income for your retirement or hopefully, before that.
Tonight we have the extreme pleasure to have a conversation with Ben Reynolds of Sure Dividend. Ben is one Andrew’s and I’s favorite writers and his work is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in dividend investing. The writing is very easy to read and he provides tremendous value with each analysis that he does. Ben focuses on companies that pay dividends and his real passion is helping investors create portfolio income through these dividend payers.

* Having a long-term horizon
* Discovering the important ratios of dividend investing
* the importance of dividend aristocrats
* A new take on dividend reinvestment
* ETFs or individual stocks 
* How to start dividend investing
* 8 rules for dividend investing

He has two newsletters that he writes that focuses on different aspects of the dividend investing world. Sure Dividend is for his subscribers that have a longer time horizon and the Sure Retirement that is for those who are looking for higher yields. We will discuss these in much more detail in our interview.
This was a treat for me as I was able to be the moderator and ask the questions. Then just sit back and listen to Ben and Andrew go back and forth.
Here is our interview with Ben.
Enjoy.
 
Dave: How did you get interested in dividend investing?
Ben: I have been interested in investing, since basically when I finished college. I have always been interested in finance from a very early age. I got interested in dividend investing in particular when I started researching market anomalies. You probably have heard of some of them. Like the value investing effect or low price to earnings stocks. Or the low-volatility effect where low-volatility stocks have outperformed high-volatility stocks.  
There are all these market anomalies and one of them is that dividend-paying stocks have outperformed non-dividend paying stocks over a very long period of time.
And that really stood out to me. And I thought it would be interesting to combine dividend investing with some of the other market anomalies that I was just discussing.
Dave: How did you come across that information?
Ben: One of the courses I took in college was on market anomalies. And it was a really interesting course and that’s what really got me interested in it.
 
Dave: Tell me a little bit about your background.
 
Ben: My degree in college was in finance and then after graduation, I worked a couple of different jobs. One of them was in logistics in a third-party warehouse.  I did sales there, it wasn’t quite with my degree but my passion was with investing and I was constantly reading about investing.
And from there I started writing a lot about investing and then started Sure Dividend from there. It has really been my outlet for learning about investing and hopefully telling people about it.
Andrew: So you escaped the academic route of efficient market hypothesis? So you were able to somehow avoid that trap?
Ben: Yes, that is when I really started to get interested in it. When seeing that wasn’t really accurate because to me investing is as interesting if you can’t or only do average. That doesn’t sound exciting. But when you discover that there are lots of inefficiencies and you have seen people that hav...