September 4

Blogger Interview – Dividends Down Under

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This content was saved from the old investmenthunting.com website, in case anyone was still looking for it (with the help of archive.org)

Welcome to the 13th post of my blogger interview series. Today’s interview is with Jasmin and Tristan from Dividends Down Under. As their blog name gives away, these dividend bloggers are from Australia. I’ve never visited Australia, but it’s on my travel bucket list.This is one interview I wish I’d done in person.

Dividends Down Under is a fairly new blog, but these two hustlers have been busy building a loyal following and scouring the Internet, making friends with many successful bloggers. If their persistence continues, I foresee Dividends Down Under becoming a powerhouse blog in the dividend investing space. I’ll be begging them to let me do a guest post so I can steal some of their traffic ;-). Here’s a link to all of my Blogger Interviews.

Dividends Down Under Blogger Interview

Where do you live?
Eastern Australia (where we are lucky to be alive with all the deadly creatures, everyone has pet kangaroos and we thoroughly enjoy a shrimp on the barbie every day of the week).

What are your hobbies?
We’ve always been big gamers and spent many hours gaming together in the early years of our relationship (we don’t have as much time for that any more). We’re the typical introverted couple; we like to go on walks, play with our fur-baby cat, watch movies and have lots of deep, worldly, often financial conversations. It’s probably no surprise that we like blogging too.

Which countries or major cities have you lived in or traveled to?
As a couple we’ve been to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane (Australian cities), internationally we’ve traveled to England and Hawaii. We have long-term FIRE goals to travel to many countries together like New Zealand, Italy, France, the Caribbean and USA mainland (New York, San Francisco and road trips across different areas).

Which sports or teams are your favorites?
As a couple we enjoy tennis the most (so no teams there), we like Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic and Thanasi Kokkinakis (up and coming Aussie player).

Jasmin: I don’t really enjoy other sports.

Tristan: I like to keep up with sports news around the world, even if I don’t get a chance to watch much. I follow Soccer, Formula 1 and Cricket the most closely.

What’s the best vacation you’ve ever taken?
2 weeks in Honolulu together just relaxing, eating lots of food (we were big foodies when we were younger and have become more responsible adults about our food habits, but we’re still foodies at heart).

When you were a child, what profession did you want to be?
Jasmin: I really wanted to be a singer, did a lot of song writing and performing in my younger years, glad I didn’t pursue that long-term as the touring lifestyle wouldn’t have been my thing (I like home too much). I’ve also considered going into counseling/psychology.

Tristan: When I was 7, I wanted to own all the railways (thanks to the pc game railroad tycoon). Then I wanted to run a business empire – not sure what, but I guess owning stocks is kind of hitting this dream.

What is your career today?
Tristan: I’m rat racing the 9 to 5 in an office job. One day I’d love to become a financial advisor.

Jasmin: I am the CEO of house duties incorporated; I take care of all the things Tristan doesn’t have time for, keep clean clothes on his back, our house looking sparkling and do a lot of the behind the scenes work on our blog.

What is your primary motivation to reach financial independence and retire early?
To be able to enjoy a modest life together, without having to rely on someone else to provide us with our income. We want to be our own boss, with lots of different income streams and have financial security.

One of our biggest motivations for financial independence is our struggle with infertility and IVF. It has definitely been a struggle to know that if we were wealthy it would be a whole lot easier, the realization that sometimes you need lots of money to get what you want/need in life and we can only rely on ourselves for that.

At what age are you planning on retiring?
We don’t have a specific number, but in our 40s would be great (we’re in our mid 20s). Early retirement to us still means working towards financial goals but without working in a traditional job to pay the bills.

What’s the first thing you’ll do when you retire?
Go to eat at a fantastic restaurant (and throw our healthy eating out of the window for the day), then make a blog post to share with you all our milestone. Maybe a nice holiday too.

If money were no object, but you had to have a job what would you do for a living?
Jasmin: If our fertility were no object either – be a stay at home mum until our kids were school age and then maybe be an IVF counselor or work on our blog.

Tristan: I’d either be a professional tennis player (and travel the world with Jasmin & family) or help ordinary Aussies take control of their finances.

If you could go back in time, what investment advice would you give to your past self?
Start investing in 2008, don’t scrimp on life experiences because of the cost – keep investing in your life experiences but make sure you keep investing in your financial life too (especially the future).

If you could only use one metric to evaluate a stock, which one would you choose?
This is a hard pick as there are so many factors that we consider and we have outlined them in our shares criteria and process page. Probably the dividend payout ratio as it shows how safe the dividend is and how much the company is re-investing back into its business.

How do you stay the course when markets are down?
Remind ourselves that we’re in this for the long haul and you haven’t officially lost money unless you solidify by selling. Down markets are the best time to buy, not sell.

What’s your favorite aspect of blogging?
Connecting with our readers and other bloggers. It blows our mind that so many people are interested in what we have to say.

Why should people read your blog?
We are a couple on a modest income, at the start of our journey aiming towards financial independence. We particularly want to show other Australians that they aren’t alone on the financial path and share any tips we’ve come across along the way. Throw in some adversity with fertility and you’ve got our recipe of determination.

Which 5 blogs do you visit the most?
Investment Hunting
Dividend Diplomats
Income Surfer
Hey, It’s Just Money!
Financial Slacker

What’s your best source of traffic to your blog?
Google searches – we’re pleasantly surprised how many people find us through Google.

Our runner-up source seems to be Pinterest, it might overtake Google one day.

Why do you blog?
To document our journey, share our experience with other people. Since we’ve started blogging our record-keeping of savings/expenses, dividend income and lots of other things has become much more organised and has become very useful, a great resource for us in our personal lives and the blog keeps us more accountable to keep updating those figures regularly.

What’s the name and URL of your blog or blogs?
Dividends Down Under – https://dividendsdownunder.com/

Bonus Answer
We broke the rules and added another answer. Thank you for featuring us on your blog IH, we had a lot of fun answering these questions. IH Answer – Thanks for participating. I’m honored that so many bloggers have signed up to be interviewed, especially since I’m asking more personal questions than most blogger interviews do. Getting to more about all of us makes us a tighter community.

My Thoughts On Dividends Down Under

Dividends Down Under (Tristan and Jasmin) aren’t wasting time getting known in the blogging space. I’ve been impressed with how quickly they’ve built a following and become regular commenters on many blogs in this space. I tell anyone who asks that I’ve built my site traffic by consistently commenting on similar blogs. I think Tristan and Jasmine are doing it right; frequent and make meaningful comments on similar blogs.

On a personal note, what’s not to like about these two. A hard-working young couple with a primary goal or making money to start a family. I wish them the best with IVF and with their early retirement strategy.

Dividends Down Under can be found on the big 3 social networks. Links to all sites are listed below.

Twitter

Pinterest

Facebook


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