Two years.

Twenty-four months.

A hundred and four weeks. Exactly 730 days. That’s how long it’s been since this important thing …my personal finance and travel blog launched

Reflecting back on 2 years of blogging

Today marks the two years anniversary of Dividend Cake. In two years, a lot of life events occurred.

I’ve given already 9 financial education classes to the kids, wrote about travel locations, collected dividend and options income for myself, my mom and my kids and started my journey towards FIRE. And I also got married in South-America and Mrs DividendCake finally arrived in Belgium in 2018. Those are some big moves! Blog-wise, I’ve written more than 191 posts (75 posts in 2017) and tens of thousands of words. Today, I’m looking back at everything that’s happened on this blog in the past year, and what I’ve accomplished so far.

Teaching Financial Literacy

Financial literacy is a worldwide problem. Financial literacy of adults is low (33%). The numbers in Europe are not much better (52%). There is a huge difference between the Nordics (Denmark 71%) and East/South of Europe (Italy 30% – Romania 22%). Many factors influence financial literacy : age, gender, salary, profession, education, education parents and family composition. In the Dutch speaking part of Belgium 12% of the teenagers does not succeed in the basic test of financial literacy ! Since the start of my blog, there has been almost no change to this situation. The Belgian government has been debating financial literacy standards for several years now but nothing has been implemented so far…poor Belgium.

In Belgium Prof. Dr. Kristof De Witte of university KU Leuven does research about financial literacy in Belgium. In his 2017 presentation he highlighted that 84% of (future) teachers in Belgium do not have enough financial knowledge and literacy.  That is quite alarming, isn’t it? In his 2018 presentation, he highlighted that financial literacy amongst teenagers is LOWER than other age groups. 20% of the young people don’t know how to manage money.

By showing and writing about our financial journey, we can show parents, teenagers and anyone how to grow money using the stock market. In 2019 we will expand this to the FOREX market. Our main objective is to teach the kids financial literacy and how to grow money in different ways. In 2019 we will execute 8 financial education classes. Stay tuned this year to the blog to find out which topics we will cover…

Choosing exciting Travel Locations

2017 was an exciting year for our travel. An unforgettable experience was our visit to Puy du Fou and we ended the year with one week in Curaçao where we did a 30 minute dolphin swim encounter. In 2018 we visited for the first time Tuscany in Italy, did see the PISA tower and visited Florence. Also our city trip to London was a blast.

Find here some Travel the World Reports during the past two years :

World Travel Report : Curaçao (2017)

Must-See in Europe : Puy du Fou – an incredible experience (2017)

Our Summer Vacation in Tuscany, Italy

2019 will be an exciting year for our travel. We plan to do our honeymoon and book a family vacation

Enjoy the world and relax by seeing and exploring new countries, cultures, cities, …talking with the local people. Tomorrow may be your last day, right? Who knows? Recently I heard shocking news. An ex-colleague was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died two months later. Plan for tomorrow but live and enjoy TODAY !

Work SMART and make your money WORK FOR YOU !

Invest in experiences instead of buying things. It is scientific proven that it will make your life so much happier !

What are the great things that have happened as a result of this blog?

I’ve met a lot of wonderful, like-minded bloggers with a passion similar to mine. This resulted in a face to face meeting in the Netherlands and connecting with FIRE people around the globe. At the same time, I’ve developed relationships with other investors who want to grow their money using the stock market. I joined different Facebook groups where investors share ideas about companies, the stock indexes in general and ways to grow your money.

Being part of a community has made me much more knowledgeable; I no longer feel like I’m being alone when I want to talk about money and investing my money in the stock market. According to me, there are three kinds of people in this world. There are needers, wanters and deservers. Needers are people that whine and complain and talk about how much they need your help. Wanters are the second type of people. People who say ” I want this so bad!” but never do anything…. Some people call them dreamers, others call them lazy. The third type of people are deservers. They are self motivated and keep things going forward. They are focussed on their goals and that’s the kind of people I love to spend my time with. This is something I learned from Alex Morton. He says “It’s physically impossible for you to help everyone. Look for people who really deserve your time, energy, & effort. Look for people who have a burning desire for success and who are not afraid to lay it all on the line. ” Interesting thinking, isn’t it? Which type of person do you belong to?

Writing about money and growing your money in Belgium is something weird as most Belgians are very secret about their finances. Belgian people are very reserved by nature when talking about money. At a recent party some people simply walked away as they were thinking very black and white. You couldn’t simply challenge their thinking…. Also Belgian politicians have very little financial skills when you see how investor taxes grow each year for retail investors. Retail investors seem to be the NEW CASH COW for taxes for the government ! Well with this blog we will give A VOICE to the retail investor and PROTEST LOUD against any form of unfair investor taxes. The stock market transaction tax of 0,70 % of the invested amount (buy & sell) is the most unfair tax existing on this planet ! Recent news revealed that the Belgian government has a deficit of more than 7 BILLION. Is that the way to manage our tax money?

Look at below graph. I think we need LESS government and LESS TAXES and LESS EXPENSES ! Don’t you agree ?

Last but not least we can say that forcing myself to write posts about my financial goals and travel has had a great effect on my execution of my objectives. It forces me in a way to take action.

I know not every post is a winner and my English is not perfect each time, but chasing perfection can be more harmful than helpful. Better to put my thoughts out there and receive feedback. BIG thank YOU to all my commenters out there who push to me to write better content!

Final Words

Overall, this has been great 2 years blogging. There have been challenges on this journey, but the satisfaction of actually working towards my long-term goals and seeing my results has kept me going. We doubled in number of visitors and doubled above 50K followers last year. We crossed 2000 Twitter followers and 400 Facebook followers. Our goal for 2019 remains to grow our brand Dividend Cake and the following community. We have defined a few new projects for our blog in 2019.  I’m working on ways to add more value to this personal finance space and be a reference website for people who want to grow their money, parents who want to teach their kids financial literacy or travellers looking for a location where they haven’t been yet.

Looking forward, there’s still so much I want to accomplish and I have plenty of ideas for the future. 

Thanks for supporting me by reading the blog! Every pageview is still exciting to me. As long as people keep reading, I’ll keep writing. As always we end with a quote.