Taking it out of order...
Originally Posted by
ERD50
I'm fascinated by some people's thought processes.
While the statements above may be true, they are stated in a vacuum. There's no comparison to readily available alternatives. It strikes me as nothing more than confirmation bias. Who is served by that?
-ERD50
... I'm happy to present an opinion and people can take what they want from it, or not. I think people are served by diversity of thought and challenges to convention rather than by rigid doctrinaire thinking. There is rarely if ever one absolute right path and personal circumstances have to be the main guide.
I 100% agree with you on that. I'll just add that it is helpful when people present the thought process behind their opinion. It's usually pretty hard to get anything useful from the opinion alone.
Hear you, can't agree. Not a vacuum at all. The clear bias on this forum and elsewhere is with other approaches that seem to be well understood and taken as gospel. ...
I'm not sure what "clear bias" you are talking about, so I guess it's not clear? And to explain, yes, to me your comment was in vacuum. You said:
Me too. Several 100's of thousands of dollars worth, per year, in fact. For doing absolutely nothing.
Without putting that in %, or providing the portfolio amount so we can put it in %, it's pretty meaningless, and it can be done without restricting yourself to dividend payers. In practical terms, OK, a portfolio made up of higher than average dividend rate stocks would kick off more income (w/o selling anything) than a broad-based index of stocks. But that only means one might decide to sell off some of the stock fund from time to time (like once per year) to make up the difference. That also provides a good time to re-balance an AA if desired.
In practical terms, making a sale once a year isn't a meaningful amount of effort, so to me, your "doing absolutely nothing" comment strikes me as more "dogma" and "bias" - just what you accuse the forum of in general?
There's nothing "wrong" with you deciding you want to focus on dividend payers, and I'm certainly not going to try to convince you otherwise. But I am usually tempted to respond when someone makes a post that seems to indicate "their way" has clear advantages, when the data doesn't back it up. That's not "doctrine" at all, that's letting the numbers speak.
-ERD50