14th February 2017
Today is a special day. It’s Valentine day and we are celebrating our relationship with our beloved one. Additionally, after one year of hard work, we are launching our Personal Finance and Travel blog on all social media.
Read about why we are starting a blog and the journey from the initial idea to the final launch of the blog today.
Why are we starting a blog?
During the past years we have become very frustrated and also angry on the behavior of some commercial banks. Some people say banks are criminals or thieves….and there are definitely bankers out there that fool people all the time and abuse the lack of financial knowledge of people for their own interests. They 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 profit and bonuses.
We had numerous examples like that in the past year. We visited last year once a bank as we were closing down my mom’s account. We gave the assignment to the bank to propose an investment portfolio for 25k euro that would generate cash on our bank account each yea
r 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. The end conclusion was that we wanted to transfer our frustrations into a positive vibe with strategies on how to grow your money. We learned also 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.
The second reason is sharing knowledge. Financial education really lacks at schools and most parents just provide the basics. 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. Many people don’t know how to grow their money and the majority of people just rely on the bank’s advice. 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! Just look at a recent research of PWC of young people and their financial literacy. Let us know what you think in the comments.
In addition we enjoy life by travelling the world with or without the kids. We hope to inspire you by showing you the stories and places where we travel to. Travelling to a city, another country or a sightseeing spot in Belgium is always a relaxing and/or learning experience.
Last but not least we want to collect small donations for the portfolio of my foster child Anisha in Nepal. With PayPal blog followers can donate a small donation which I will invest completely in her portfolio. The goal is to collect money for the future of her family so she can support financially her family in the future.
The Journey
The conceptual idea started somewhere early January 2016. Then we invented the name of our blog. Dividend Cake is a contamination of dividend and cake. We want to grow our passive income by dividend investing and we see our dividend income as a delicious cake for our future. We want to add more pieces (high dividend stocks and ETF’s) to our cake so it keeps on growing. One day our cake will be big enough so that we can eat a little piece of it for the rest of our life. Then we are financially free.
Once we invented the name, we contracted a professional logo designer girl from Pakistan through the website www.fiverr.com. This website offers assignments from free lancers from all over the world. After a few iterations, we finetuned the final result and the dividend cake logo was chosen.
Once the logo was designed, we moved to the next task, a professional Powerpoint presentation. Here we contracted a guy from Ukraine, who made a professional business powerpoint presentation. This business presentation was amazing professional and great value for documenting our Financial strategy. We spend two months documenting our financial strategy and documentation. You can download this strategy to learn yourself and share it with friends.
Once the financial strategy was completed just before the summer of 2016, we focused on our blog specifications. Here we posted the project on www.fiverr.com again and got more than 400+ price quotes. We assigned the project to a young lady from the United States. Since September 2016 until February we worked jointly on the final professional design of the blog. During the journey we learned so many things that it still feels as a continuous learning experience…
Going forward
We are very excited that we have been able to launch this blog. Of course we have many ideas for improving the functionality and most important providing and sharing with you the important financial and travel content. You can translate the website in your own language if you want. There are 10 languages available from Google Translate. Select your own language in the upper right corner of the blog. We hope the translated content is correct, but please don’t hold us accountable for any errors.
Please keep on following us in the future and connect with us through social media. Thanks everyone for your comments and support. Share the URL of this blog with family and friends.
Next Saturday 18th of February we post our first January 2017 Dividend Income Report Out of our Own Personal Portfolio. The Dividend Income Reports from my mom and for my kids are already available on the blog.
Good luck with your financial and travel plans. Thanks for reading and following us!
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