Launch of our New Homepage

On the 14th of February of the year 2017, we launched our blog. I did chose Valentine’s day as my official launch day as it would be a day that I always remember.  

 

Today we are launching our new restyled homepage. Many people ask me why the name DividendCake. Dividend Cake is a contamination of “Dividend” + “Cake”. You can bake and eat it once. Our goal is to create is a cashflow cake of dividends. At first the cake will be small but over time the cake will grow bigger and bigger so it can start to pay the bills and support the family expenses. One day this dividendcake will be big enough to support our family expenses. That’s the meaning and logical explanation of our blog name. Read our Financial Strategy if you want to learn more.

In below blog post you can read how our blog evolved, why we needed a new homepage and a small glimpse of what we plan to do going forward.

Start of our Blog and how our story is growing

There are 3 main reasons why we started our blog. I discuss each of them in more detail.

1.Commercial behavior of banks 

During the past years we have become very frustrated and also angry on the commercial behavior of some commercial banks. Some people say banks are criminals or thieves….and there is some truth to this. Bankers use a lot of financial lingo and the majority of people lack the financial knowledge to judge the investment advice given. Bankers do not advise in the best interests of the people how to grow their money, but only in their own commercial interests. After all, they don’t care about YOU, but about their commercial targets each month. When you enter a bank, don’t you notice the posters about the “Fund of the month” to invest your money in ?

We had numerous examples like that 2017. We visited once a bank when we were closing down my mom’s account. We gave the assignment to one of the biggest bank in Belgium to propose an investment portfolio for 25k euro that would generate cash on my mom’s bank account each year higher than a savings account and they had to limit the bank fees.

Out of interest, we wanted to see how the bank director would invest my mom’s cash. So we asked investment advice. The bank director proposed us a mutual funds’ portfolio with all products managed by the bank. The management fees ranged from 2 to 6%. This is basically paying money to the bank with no guaranteed returns. But before the discussion on the investment advice, we had to complete the MIFID test. It is an obligatory test to test the financial knowledge of the investor. The bank director was challenging 4 of my answers as she wasn’t sure about my answers. She picked her own choices but at the end they were all wrong. We waived her investment advice away as she didn’t answer our basic investment question. She completely ignored our basic question and proposed a portfolio from her own commercial objectives. At the end she simply admitted she was obliged to offer their own bank products, even when they were high cost and low return. Incredible…

We have many examples of such behavior but we won’t bore you with those examples. Since the start of our blog, followers of our blog have shared stories with me. The end conclusion is that we wanted to transfer our frustrations into a positive vibe with a blog describing our strategies how to grow your money. We learned from other people in the USA and Canada. If you don’t put your money at work, don’t blame others that you won’t be financially independent one day.

2. Financial Literacy

The second reason for having the blog is to help people with missing financial literacy. Financial education really lacks at schools. The Flemish government has delayed ONE MORE YEAR to put the educational standards in place for teenagers. Now they are talking 1 September 2019. Will financial education be part of this program?

When we talk to family or friends, most of them don’t manage their finances and don’t care about the return or cash flow on their money. They are happy when the mortgage of the house and all bills have been paid. Many people don’t know how to grow their money and the majority of people just rely on the bank’s advice.  During the past year of our blog we have done some research on this topic. In Belgium the university KU Leuven is responsible for research and development of an educational program under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Geert van Campenhout and Prof. Dr. Kristof De Witte.

In a presentation last year Prof. Dr. De Witter describes financial literacy education as one of the 8 European core competences each individual should have. Financial literacy is a combination of 3 competences : Knowledge, Financial Skills and Attitude. Knowledge is something you have been taught in school, by your parents or other means such as the internet. Knowledge is understanding how inflation works, what cash flow is and understanding many other financial concepts… Financial skills is your execution ability of your financials.Does your family have a budget ? 47% of Belgians say they do. Do you set financial objectives for your family ? 62% of Belgians says they do have. Attitude is your attitude towards money. Are you a big spender and look what is left at the end of the month or do you prefer to pay yourself first ?

The financial literacy percentile within Belgium is around 55% compared to other countries in the world. The world average is 33%. There’s a lot of work to do to teach people financial literacy.

So by sharing our strategy and insights, we can show our financial journey for 4 different portfolio’s that we manage today. We believe there is great value on each one of the portfolios on how we do this.  Make sure you understand our Financial strategy. We hope it starts you thinking whether you should manage your own money better!

3. Travel Experiences

Travelling is what opens a person’s mind. I have travelled to more than 20 countries for business and leisure. As a single parent with two kids, I did put money aside to travel with the kids. Our travel to Malta was one of the highlights in 2016. Search the blogpost if you want to read about our travel experience in Malta.One of our goals that we pursue in life, is to travel the world. Exploring the culture of a country (food, places, people, music,…) is the best relaxation. Each year we put money aside to pick a location in the world and explore. We execute this in three different ways :

1. A day trip to a special location in Belgium, my home country. Be a tourist in your own country !
2. A city trip within Europe
3. A vacation location within the world where we explore the region of a country.

Why we needed a new Home Page

From divorced single parent with two kids to married husband with 3 kids our family situation has changed. Two years ago I started to learn Spanish and Ukrainian language. During the first year I asked my Spanish teacher where can I practice my speaking skills ? The best way to learn a language is to speak it each day in a country where they speak Spanish. That is how I learned to speak fluently German. When I was 18 years old, I spend 1 month in Austria working at a big farm. The only option was to speak German.  So my Spanish teacher told me that the country where they speak nice Spanish is Colombia.

So this led me to the idea to travel to Colombia and practice my Spanish. And she was right..they do speak clean Spanish. Never in the world I would have imagined to meet there my future wife. In August 2017, I got married to Mrs DividendCake. She shares the same family and financial objectives. Many couples get divorced because they have different financial goals in life. One partner prefers to spend money on big things and another partner wants to be frugal. How can a marriage work when two partners are pulling different directions ?

So our blog home page has changed to reflect better our new family situation and deliver the key messages. We also changed the slider and the key messages inside. From now onwards the blog will be about the financial and travel journey of our family. A family of 5 people. You can find at the homepage Our Final Targets. The loading speed of our homepage has drastically been improved on computers and mobile devices.

We will share with you our financial journey and all travel experiences of our family.

Going forward

During the past one and half year our blog has enabled us to network with bloggers already in FIRE mode or striving towards it, with investors with the same investing objectives, with people having the same life goals and with families struggling with financial skills. Last week a blog follower from the Netherlands asked me if he could give me a phone call. Sure, I said and we discussed our financials, our life goals and common journey towards financial independence.

Our blog has in this 1,5 year grown to 40.000 followers per month. From 500 to 40k people visiting our blog is simply amazing. We have more than 1500 followers on Twitter and have grown to 300 followers on our Facebook page. We never expected this success. The reason for the success is probably a combination of the reasons why I started the blog. People lose confidence in the banks as an advisor or they simply lack the financial literacy to take their own finances in their hands. That was exactly the same position I was in several years ago. There is always a start for everything. It is simply a matter of priorities and how you want to spend your time. I am a strong believer that you can make 1 million from 500$.

Recently I noticed the following heat map of internet penetration in the different countries in the world. As you can see it is mainly Western Europe, North America, the Australian cities, the Chinese cities at the coast and main cities in Latin America. There is still a long way to go for access of Internet to the world population. And I believe access to Internet can give you access to education, connection with other people around the globe with same goals as you, social media, a way to earn money on freelance work websites,..the possibilities are endless. Internet has changed the way people shop, travel and learn.

People travelling the world can now easily share experiences, inform themselves first and then make the best budget decision for their travel. Our family has still many travel plans. Our 2019 objective is our honeymoon travel. Where should we go ? The only condition that Mrs DividendCake has given me is that it should be an isle. Any ideas..let us know.

In the coming months we focus on achieving our financial goals. We still have 4 financial education classes planned for our kids. Teaching our kids how to manage their money and how to grow money is a key competence important for their future. We don’t wait for politicians nor schools to have their act together ! We will also rework the pages About Us and Portfolios in the coming months to describe better the strategy applied for each portfolio. We hope you like our new Homepage and we will continue to deliver the content that helps you to improve your financial strategy or gives you an idea for a travel experience.

Don’t hesitate to leave your comments and feedback. Let us know what you think.

Good luck with your personal finance strategy! Thanks for following us on Twitter and Facebook and reading this blog post. As always we end with a quote.