re: Dividend stocks and DRIPs as a long term investment vehicle

Thanks,I'll have to talk to my CPA about that, from the link I see my company can contribute $51,000/year and I can add $5,500 for a total of $56,500 correct? And the penalty for early withdrawal at say 45 in 10 years would be?

Your income tax rate + 10%

Admittingly it does fly in the face of your planned strategy of just living off of dividends.

The proposal works best if it let it be till 59, living off of other assets till then.

But it's something to consider. You are paying a lot in taxes you don't have to, and those paid taxes represent a compounding opportunity cost.

I don't understand the dislike for ETFs. I love Vanguard and it makes it extremely easy to pick what I want, have some diversity, and grow it over time.

I work 10-14 hour days and I when I come home, the only thing I'm doing is hanging out with the wife and resting. I feel like many people are in that same situation and the whole "30 minutes of study" a day is just plain unrealistic.

Is there anything wrong with having 6 ETFs and just spreading my money between them?

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Think about this. What if tax code changes and dividends are taxed as regular income as they have been in the past?

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They won't raise taxes on dividends, only cigarettes. And that somehow will translate into BigFella profiting and then subsequently paying too much in taxes.

bc they raise the prices of cigarettes drastically.....if you're hooked, what are you gonna do?

If they triple the price of coke, you'll move on and not care. Being addicted to something is tough to explain, ask a crack addict I can't explain it to you.Have you seen a smoker try to stop? The shake, they sweat, they can't sleep, its a force beyond explanation.

and the company doesn't pay more in taxes, the consumers do.

Commercial

ACgeaux, are you really trying to be a smart arse right now? If I remember correctly you apologized to me in that one thread about the rant you went off on. How's that LVS stock doing? down nearly 20% in the last month arent we? PM got whacked too down only half as much funny how that 3.7 beta thing works in down markets.

Well,I suppose it allows me to do my own research and understand a balance sheet when I read it, I understand margins and when a company is experiencing top line organic growth, I can tell when a company is in good shape and when it's not. Like how I said in another thread ATT is overvalued and its payout ratio is unsustainable....Suffice?

Are you still upset about your thesis and how I blew up your "LVS is a super buy and hold lifetime, addictive blue-chip" rant?

Not really bc now they learned their lesson from Altria. When the US won the tobacco master settlement and forced altria to pay a fortune annually, altria spun off kraft, spun off mondelez, spun off philip morris and basically gave the US government a big F U by saying you guys weren't going to come after us for more money once the original master settlement is up so now the big cash cow part of altria, the foreign growth is gone from America's litigation grasp.

If another country brings up a lawsuit, I imagine they'll do the same thing and spin off that company within that particular country. The real growth is coming in the developing parts of the world:Africa,Indonesia,Vietnam. China is a place where they own .3% of the market bc of China Tobacco and 25% of that gigantic population smokes, they're getting in slowly but surely. I really see nothing to derail them, they're doing everything that made americans smoke at a rate of near 50% in the late 1960s, they're going after the youth in all these countries now and nothing is going to stop them. Do you realize the powers that govern these nations with all the population growth and how corrupt their leadership is?

along the way they've bought back no less than $4B a year of their own shares in their 5 years of existence which in the long run will allow for less shares and bigger dividend boosts, this year they will buyback $6B

Share price is irrelevant buddy, look at the market caps, visa is much bigger. Visa bc

1.the bulk of my credit cards I process at work
2.deal with samsung to bring NFC to phones
3.50% off Credit Card market and w/no credit risk
4.This is gonna sound funny but read a piece in barron's that adult websites pay $750/yr to process visa card's and now mastercard initiated a $500/yr fee and many adult websites are dropping mastercard and sticking with Visa
5.Adult industry again - no Amex, and they charge 14.5% to process adult industry sites via CCbill and Epoch
6.inflation hedge as prices go up both will do well
7.growth in prepaid cards
8.growth in internet purchasing
9.Read their balance sheet, their operating margins are the highest i've ever seen.

There's many more reasons but Visa is bigger than mastercard is the main one, along with the bigger dividend growth. NFC is supposed to be a big deal in the coming years and Visa's deal with the biggest phone maker on earth samsung should be a big boon if it really takes off