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This is a guest post from Matthew Kepnes of Nomadic Matt. Most people are under the illusion that travel is expensive. They see ads for expensive hotels, cruises, and European holidays and assume that travel has to be like that and that the only other way to travel is to be a backpacker, sleep in hostels, and cook pasta each day. That may be great for most people under 25 but for people with families, it is unrealistic. So people go on living this lie and spending hundreds per day on their one …

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Depending on the country you live in, an individual's need to save for retirement can vary widely. For example, in Norway (where I currently reside) they have a very socialist economy and any resident will retire with a pretty substantial income for their entire lives. In Canada, my home country, we have the Canadian Pension Plan. This pension plan is not huge - in 2007 the average monthly benefit was $481.46. This has huge implications on how I run my family finances.[ad#tdg-embedded] If …

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(This post was written by DGI on his blog, Dividend Growth Investor. He has been kind enough to allow me to post this article here.)[ad#tdg-embedded] One of the components of every stock analysis I have done at my blog has always been to show the effects of dividend reinvestment over a ten year period of time. The results are truly amazing as the dividend income with reinvestment almost always outpaces the dividend income without reinvestment. The main pro of re-investing your dividends …

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I recently read a great book by down to earth investor, Larry E. Swedroe. In his book, The Only Guide to Alternative Investments You'll Ever Need: The Good, the Flawed, the Bad, and the Ugly, Swedroe outlines a number of different types of investments with the main objective being to explain how one can diversify risk. As we all know, are a number of types of investments out there that dividend investors can use to round out their asset allocation, but only a few of them are actually worth …

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Like so many investors who actively invest in dividend stocks that have a very long track record, I got really burned in the this most recent market downturn. I was lured into the perceived safety of long term dividend growth stocks - especially when it came to financial and banking stocks. For example, at my peak I held shares in the following banks and financial stocks: Citigroup, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Canada, IGM Financial, and U.S. Bancorp. This got me into trouble and …

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As a DIY investor, I personally do not have an financial advisor helping me with my personal investments. I do have a lawyer that I use when need be, as well as an accountant helping me file my family's tax returns. That being said, I am not at all against people having financial advisors if they do not have the time or energy to manage their own investment accounts. Personally I have chosen to take things into my own hands to save costs and because I love the investment …

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