If I Had $10,000 To Invest In 2026, I’d Build This Portfolio 📊

So, guys, if I had to start completely from scratch with $10,000 to invest, this is exactly how I'd build my portfolio today. Now, keep in mind, this portfolio is going to be a bit more dividend focused because that's kind of my jam. But still, I don't want to completely sacrifice growth just to chase a higher dividend yield, especially at the beginning. My goal here is to build a portfolio that has the potential to build serious wealth over time while still delivering a growing stream of passive income. And to be honest with you, it's really not that difficult to do as we'll see. By the end of this video, I'll show you exactly how I divvy up the money, ETFs I'd choose, the individual stocks I'd own, and what this portfolio might look like 20 years down the road. Now, guys, before we start putting this portfolio together, in case you're new to the channel, my name is Ryan Williams, and here we talk all about dividend investing and how you can use it to create passive income and reach financial freedom. So, if you love dividend investing and if you're on a mission to retire early, then hit that subscribe button. We are coming up on 100,000 subscribers fast, and I'd love to have you along as we both continue growing our portfolios and collecting that cash flow. Now, getting into the ETF side of in the pursuit of building a well-balanced portfolio, you'd have to have some sort of broad market foundational ETF to check that box. And in my mind, there are two suitable options for this. The first of which is just the S&P 500, which consists of the 500 largest companies here in the United States. And there are a lot of great options out there to get exposure to the S&P. You've got funds like SPYM, IVV, or VOO, which is the one I actually have in my real portfolio. As we can see over here on my dividend portfolio tracking spreadsheet, which you can start using for free to track your own portfolio, there's a link to download this in the description of the video. But here, we can see I have just over 19 shares of VOO, and in total, I have just over $13,000 invested in the fund. I dollar cost average into VOO every single week because, like I said earlier, it offers that broad market exposure, and I think that makes for a great foundational fund for any portfolio. Now, if you didn't want to go the route of the S&P 500, I think another good option would be something like VTI, which is the Vanguard Total US Stock Market Fund. This one is way more broadly diversified than the S&P and has close to 3,500 different holdings. To be honest, I think both of these are great one-and-done funds. Like if you wanted to just have one ETF in your portfolio, I think you'd be just fine only investing in the S&P 500 or only investing in VTI. And if we compare the performance of these two funds over the past decade, while it's close, VOO has historically delivered higher total returns than VTI, which just goes to show that more diversification doesn't necessarily lead to greater returns. Even so, if diversification was something that you were concerned about, I mean the S&P 500 still has 500 different companies, so lack of diversification's really not much of an issue there. With that said, our first holding here in the portfolio will just be the S&P 500s through VOO. And as far as the dividend stats go, the starting yield is definitely on the lower end at around 1%, but historically the dividend growth has been moderate, coming in at around 7%. That's pretty decent. With VOO though, or with the S&P 500, I'm not really buying it for the dividend. You know, that's not really the role that it's playing in our portfolio here. The S&P 500's job is to give us exposure to some of the best companies in America, and it more so serves as a growth engine for the portfolio. The dividend is really just a nice bonus. If we want to put more emphasis on dividend income, that's where this next category of ETFs comes in, and there are a ton of great dividend ETFs out there, like SCHD, VIG, VYM, DGRO, and FDVV. And we can compare all of their different stats here. Now, out of this group of funds, I personally only have SCHD in my portfolio. And taking a look at my position, I have around 580 shares, and in total I have almost $19,000 invested in the fund, making it my largest holding by quite a bit. I think SCHD's dividend stats are pretty hard to beat, and it's historically delivered a pretty solid total return over time. I mean, just so far here in 2026, the fund is up close to 20%, which is actually outpacing the S&P this year. So, SCHD is going to give us our second holding here in the portfolio. And to be honest, I think you could just stop here with these two funds if you wanted to. With these two, you've got some growth, you've got some income, you've got some dividend growth. It's simple, it's hands-off. I really think it gives you the best of both worlds. And I think these two funds here make for a great well-balanced portfolio. And for any brand new investor just getting into the market, if you wanted to go this route, I think that's a pretty solid setup at the start. Still though, I know a lot of people get into this and immediately want to start picking stocks even though they don't really know what to look for. And I say that as someone who started investing in only individual stocks and was definitely in this boat myself. I don't think it's necessarily a terrible idea to have some individual companies right out of the gate. I do think it keeps it fun. And you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a little bit of exposure to individual companies as a brand new investor. It's not ideal, but it's also not the end of the world. With that said though, when building out a list of potential individual stocks to buy, rule number one is that you have to actually understand the company and know how it makes money. Like you have to be able to explain all of that stuff to a nine-year-old, or else you probably shouldn't be investing in it. This is what Warren Buffett calls your circle of competence. It's basically your realm of understanding. And you should never ever invest outside of this circle. I say that from experience, too. Now, the good thing about investing in dividend stocks is that there are a lot of recognizable ones out there. Some of the great dividend payers out there are some of the world's most recognizable companies, like Coca-Cola. You've got Starbucks, Bank of America, McDonald's. The list goes on and on. With that said though, I still think ETFs should make up the majority of this portfolio. They're going to be the foundation because they give us that diversification and really just make things so much easier to manage. So, for this portfolio, I think we'll go with maybe like a 70/30 split between ETFs and individual stocks. And I think that's going to give us the best of both worlds. We've got that broad diversification, that hands-off approach from the ETFs, and we've got a little bit of personalization and a a bit of fun from those individual stocks. And for our portfolio, we'll just go with three different stocks. The first of which is going to be Visa, coming in with a pretty low yield, less than 1% as we can see here, but Visa has been a great dividend growth stock, and they have a 17-year dividend growth streak. Now, obviously, Visa is a very familiar and recognizable company. It's the largest payment network in the world, and the investment thesis is pretty straightforward. People are using cash less, they're using cards more, and as long as that trend continues, Visa should stand to benefit. Moving on, the second stock I'll pick is actually going to be VICI Properties. This one is a much higher yielding stock with a current yield just under 7%, an average dividend growth rate of about 6 and 1/2%. These are pretty solid dividend stats, and a 7-year dividend growth streak. VICI is a real estate investment trust that owns a lot of the big hotel buildings on the Las Vegas Strip, ones like Caesar's Palace, MGM Grand, New York, New York, Mandalay Bay, and The Venetian, just to name a few. Seeing as I live here in Las Vegas, VICI is smack-dab in the middle of my circle of competence. I feel very bullish on the city from a long-term perspective, and so I think this is a pretty fitting investment for my portfolio here. Anyway, stock number three is kind of an interesting pick. This one is Republic Services, RSG, and this is actually the only stock on this list that I don't actually own in my portfolio. RSG is coming in with about a 1% yield and a nice 8% dividend growth rate, and they've been growing this thing for the past 22 straight years. Now, in case you're not familiar with this company, Republic Services is a waste management company. They're actually my waste management company here in Vegas, so once again, I'm very familiar with this one. And one thing that will never, ever, ever change is the fact that people are always going to have trash. They're always going to have garbage, and that garbage will need to be dealt with, no matter what's going on in the world, or what's going on in the economy, trash is cash, guys. Now, with the addition of RSG, this is going to be our full portfolio, guys, and here's the breakdown. We've got 35% in VOO, we've got 35% in SCHD, that's giving us our 70% exposure to ETFs. Then we have 10% each in the three companies, RSG, Visa, and VICI Properties. And looking at the dividend stats with this portfolio, we'll have about a 2.4% dividend yield with an 8% dividend growth rate. That's looking pretty solid. And with $10,000 invested in this portfolio, at the start we should be bringing in close to $240 in dividends per year. Now, looking at a historical backtest to see how this portfolio would have performed over time, this one goes all the way back to January 2018. So, for the last 8 and 1/2 years or so, this portfolio would have generated a compound annual return of about 13.4% per year, which means if you would have invested $10,000 in this portfolio back in January 2018, today you'd have almost $30,000. You'd be sitting with $29,058, which is pretty solid. However, this does slightly underperform the S&P 500. If you would have invested that same $10,000 in the S&P, you'd be left with $32,043. And the compound annual growth rate here is about 1.2, 1.3% above our portfolio here. And with that said, if we scroll down looking at the performance of our portfolio over time, it's the one here with the blue line. We can see that for the most part it's actually tracking pretty closely to the S&P throughout most of this timeline. In fact, all the way up until April 30th of last year, it was outperforming the S&P. But this is where the S&P really started to pull away. We can see that from this point, the green line really shoots up above our portfolio here. The market has been on such a rampage this past year and some change, so that it's really not too surprising to see the S&P pull away from our portfolio. Scrolling down one more time looking at the breakdown of returns in this portfolio. For the most part, every single year when the market was going up, our portfolio underperformed the S&P. The only year where that wasn't the case when the market was going up was back in 2019 where we barely outperformed the S&P. However, during downturns like in 2018 and 2022 here, one thing that we'll notice is that our portfolio typically sees less of a drawdown than the rest of the market. In 2022 where the S&P was down 18%, our portfolio was only down 7%. So, overall, it seems like the general trend with this portfolio here is that when the market's doing good, when things are bullish, our portfolio tends to underperform the S&P. However, when things are bad, when there's downturns in the market, we typically see less of a drawdown. So, it's a bit more defensive. So, that was the past until today, but now guys, we're going to forecast what this portfolio might look like if we let it grow 20 years into the future. And here's the inputs. We're going to start with an initial investment of $10,000. Every single week we'll be investing $100 into this portfolio. We're going to start with our portfolio yield of 2.39% and although the compound annual growth rate in this portfolio over the past 8 years or so was like 13%, we're going to be a bit more conservative and say that the dividend increases are going to be about 7% and the share price appreciation will be about the same. And when you add this number with this one right here, that amounts to about a 9.4% total return. Now, looking at the results, if we invested $100 per week into this portfolio, after 20 years, we should be left with about $324,000, which is pretty nice. The annual dividend income comes out to about $7,800 per year, which is not too shabby if I do say so myself. With that said, guys, if you want to see how I've really been investing my money lately, then check out this next video right over here, where I'm breaking down my most bought stocks so far here in 2026. In total, I've invested almost $10,000 into these five stocks, so click right over here to check those out and I'll see you in the next one.