How to Invest $1 Million to Live off Dividends Forever! (Build a Portfolio)

I recently asked investors over on Twitter how much capital they thought they would need to live off dividends forever. And the answers range from anywhere as low as 1 million all the way up to 10 million. And while a $1 million portfolio certainly won't support every lifestyle, with the right strategy in place, you'd be surprised just how much dividend income you can actually produce. So in this video, we're going to build a real life example of a million-doll portfolio that is designed to generate over $50,000 a year. Why 50,000? Well, while your cost of living can certainly vary depending on where you live by a wide margin, the average cost of living for a family of four, excluding rent in the US is about $4,258 or roughly $50,000 a year. Now, while this does exclude rent, keep in mind the average social security check currently sits at about $2,000 a month. So naturally, a portfolio that can reliably generate $50,000 a year in all market environments and grow those dividends at a rate above inflation could actually be a very effective portfolio. Now, a lot of investors might look at that goal and think, why not just put the entire portfolio into high yielding option income ETFs? These are ETFs that can yield anywhere from 9, 10, 11 to even 14% and above. But again, we need to make sure that these payments are sustainable in all market environments. These funds pay their distributions out of their net asset value. So in a true market downturn, the distributions these funds pay would certainly decline. We also need to consider the fact that we have to account for inflation, diversification, the quality of the businesses we own, and the threat of dividend cuts. We need our income to increase every year, even if stock prices are struggling. So, can we build a $1 million portfolio that allows us to live off dividends forever? And remember, even if our cost of living is $50,000 in year 1, if inflation sits at just 3%, by year two it's already $51,500. And by year 10, it's already above $65,000. So, it's imperative we buy stocks that are truly increasing their earnings power over time. So, let's go ahead and start building out our portfolio that will allow us to live off $1 million forever. And the very first position in the portfolio will be a very foundational one, one that's very popular in the income community, and that's SCD. We'll allocate about 25% of the portfolio to it, meaning $250,000. And if we look at SCHD historically speaking, what we'll see is from a dividend yield perspective, that starting yield on average over the last 5 years has hovered around that 3.5% range. And at some points, it was as high as around 4.2%. 2%, but 3.5% has historically been the rough average. So, we'll apply a 3.5% yield to that allocation, meaning this position would generate in year 1 roughly around $8,750. Now, the yield is great. That's true. But it's also important again that our portfolio continues to generate more in dividend income every single year. And of course, this is where SCD has historically thrived. Why? Because take a look at those dividend growth rates. We can see every single year SCHD is growing those dividend payments. The 10-year dividend kagger is close to 11%. The 5-year is roughly 7.23%. So, we'll go with the lower of the two numbers because while I do think it's certainly possible they grow dividends at a faster rate than that, the goal is not to be overly optimistic. So yes, SHD, great starting dividend yield, great levels of dividend growth, and of course, you get an added level of diversification since this is indeed an ETF. We can see there's roughly around 100 holdings in the ETF, and we'll get exposure to companies like Texas Instruments Qualcomm Proctor and Gamble, Coca-Cola, staple companies that you're probably familiar with. And even from a sector perspective, it's very well diversified. And while this is all true, there's something else that's very important about SCHD. We know the market is trading at some of its most expensive valuation levels in history. However, SCHD alleviates a lot of valuation risk. What do I mean by this? Well, take a close look at this chart. What this is telling us is the US equity risk premium is the lowest in over two decades. Now, all this is doing is it's taking the S&P 500 current earnings yield minus the 10-year Treasury yield. Now, for reference, the 10-year US Treasury is sitting at about 5.21% according to treasurybonds.com. So, all this is doing is basically telling us how much extra return investors are being paid to own stocks instead of risk-free government bonds. And historically, stocks have offered about a 3.5% premium over treasuries. Right now, that premium is negative. investors are taking on more risk for potentially less reward, especially relative to risk-free 10-year treasuries. Believe it or not, SEHD to some degree actually alleviates this risk. Why is that the case? Well, it's due to the reconstitution through SED's methodology that's implemented every single year. Now, so basically, SCHD has a stock universe. They select their stocks from the Dow Jones US broad stock market index, not including REITs. And there are some initial screens such as looking for liquidity, minimum market cap, and a history of paying dividend payments. And while there's some quality screens as well, here's what we have to pay close attention to. The top stocks passing initial screens are ranked by indicated annual dividend yield. And only the top 50% are eligible for selection. And again, like always, thanks to SCHD Stan for this image. But think about what naturally happens as a result of picking the highest yielding stocks for this ETF. When a company's share price rises faster than its dividend, its yield declines. And because underlying index screens for above median yields and includes yields in its composite ranking, a stock can become less competitive for inclusion as its price gets further ahead of its payout. In other words, if a stock price climbs at a much higher rate than its overall dividend yield, most of the time that means the stock's PE multiple is declining. And so because they implement this reconstitution every single year, naturally SCHD holds a lot of stocks that have much lower PE multiples relative to the S&P 500. And so in a year like the past year where SCHD has seen over 25% share price appreciation, we'll likely see a lot of stocks added and removed from the fund when they have their annual reconstitution in March. So you can see SCD from a yield perspective, a dividend growth perspective, but also from an alleviating valuation risk perspective, it's a very attractive foundational position in a dividend portfolio. Whether you're looking for immediate yield, dividend growth, or a combination of both. Now, our second position is going to complement very well. Why is that the case? Well, it's because we're adding a tech ETF to the portfolio, a tech income ETF, and that ETF is GPIQ. We'll be allocating about 15% of the portfolio or $150,000. And the trailing 12-month yield for this ETF is roughly $9.96%, meaning it would generate almost $15,000 in year 1 for our portfolio. So, all of a sudden, we've already allocated 40% of the portfolio. Now, we have to ask, why would we add a GPIQ? Because like I said at the beginning of this video, a lot of these option income ETFs aren't quite as good as a lot of people would lead you to believe. In fact, you have to be very careful when selecting option income ETFs. Well, there's a couple of unique ways that GPIQ is structured that allows it to have much more sustainable distributions relative to its peers. So, let's talk about it for a moment. Now, we can see in the last year, GPIQ was up about 10.65% 65% while also providing right at a double-digit 10% yield. How have they been able to do this? Well, let's take it a step further. First off, there's no doubt the underlying index QQQ has done very well over the last year. It's up by about 24.1%. But we can see some of GPIQ's peers such as QQQI from NEOS, total return of 18.3%. Jeep Q from JP Morgan, total return of 19.45%. It's clear that GPIQ has been able to capture a significant portion of the upside, much more than its peers. Naturally, we have to ask why is that the case? Why have they done such a good job with this? And this is where it's very important we understand the fund structure. Over on dividendology.com, I provide a database of covered call and option income ETFs. And you can actually download this spreadsheet for free at the link in the description. But let's go ahead and take a close look at GPIQ. We can see it listed right here. If we go ahead and zoom in, there's one specific metric that allows it to take more part in the upside. If we scroll all the way over, it's right here. We're looking at portfolio options coverage. For GPIQ, it's around 25 to 75%. What does this actually mean? Well, anytime you have a covered call or option income ETF writing options on 100% of the underlying index, naturally what happens is that caps more of the upside. So, for example, Jeep Q and QQQI typically write options on 100% of the underlying portfolio. And while this does allow them to produce more income typically in the short term, over the long term, they don't get to take as much part in the upside versus an ETF like GPIQ. But here's what's perhaps just as important to understand. When we look at these option income ETFs, we have to remember that the distributions are paid out of their net asset value. So if the net asset value is declining, what does that mean? Well, it means your distributions are going to decline. But if your net asset value is actually growing, then at the same time it means your distributions will grow. So for example, take a look at the distribution history for GPIQ. You can see back in 2023 in December, their payment was about 38 cents that month. But if we look at the most recent distribution, it was 51. So over the last two to three years, this fund has actually seen distribution growth, something that is incredibly rare for option income ETFs. And the reason they've been able to pull this off is because their portfolio options coverage is sitting at 25 to 75% allowing them to take more part in the upside, which ultimately makes them have more sustainable distributions. And on top of that, we can see it also allows them to recover from market pullbacks like when we had the tariff scare in 2025 or when the war broke out in 2026. GPIQ has been able to recover both times and even grow distributions over time. Not to mention, it also has the lowest expense ratio out of the other ETFs mentioned. So, with that being said, we can actually expect over the long term for GPIQ as markets grow to have slight distribution growth. While the distribution growth over the last few years has certainly been faster than just 1%, keep in mind if we saw a serious pullback in the tech market, GPIQ's distributions to some degree would get reduced as well. It's very important we keep that in mind. But on top of that, we can also see it pairs very nicely with SHD, who has very little exposure to tech and basically no exposure to those mega cap tech names. So now with these two combined, we have about $400,000 allocated, a yield of close to 6%, almost $23,700 of income, and a weighted 5-year dividend growth rate of almost 5%. So a starting yield of nearly 6% and weighted 5year dividend growth of around 5% is a pretty solid combination, but there's more we can do to this portfolio to enhance it in terms of starting yield, in terms of diversification, and even sustainable distributions and dividend growth. And so the next position that we'll add is again going to be a more foundational position, an ETF that's going to add another added layer of diversification, and that is IDVO from Amplify ETFs. We're going to weight this about 15%, meaning we're allocating $150,000. And over the trailing 12 months, it's had a starting yield of roughly 6%, meaning it would generate around $8,955 of income. And the five-year dividend growth rate we're projecting is around 3%. Now, this is a very unique fund because remember how for GPIQ, part of the reason that they're able to grow distributions and see growth in net asset value over time is because of that lower portfolio options coverage. Well, IDVO is also quite unique in that sense because if we jump over to the funds page, they list why invest in IDVO. Well, the reason is because there's two potential income streams. IDVO seeks to provide income from international dividend paying stocks. So that's the first one, international paying dividend stocks. So now we have exposure to international markets which we didn't previously have in our portfolio. An added layer of diversification. And not only that, these are stocks that actually pay out dividends. So we're not just generating income from options being written on the underlying holdings. These are positions that do truly pay out dividends. And it's a very well- diversified ETF once again. And then on top of this, they increase their distributions by opportunistically writing covered calls on those stocks. And opportunistically is the key statement here. For example, look back at the covered call ETF database. If we look at IDVO from Amplify again, let's zoom in and take a closer look at this ETF. If we scroll all the way over, we can see portfolio options coverage right here. Only around 50%. So, they're only writing options on 50% of the portfolio. So naturally, what happens is this is a fund that's going to be able to take much more part in the upside. So now we can get distribution growth in two different ways. Number one, the underlying holdings are growing their dividends over time, which the fund then distributes to their shareholders. But number two, because they're writing options on the portfolio, only 50% the net asset value continues to increase, meaning it can increase distributions over time. And take a look at what this has actually looked like over the last few years. Back in September of 2022, distributions was about 12 cents monthly. As of the most recent distribution, it was 21. So very strong distribution growth in a very short period of time. So the reality is that distribution growth of 3% on a 5-year dividend cagger basis could be on the lower end. It could absolutely be higher. But again, the goal is not to be overly optimistic. But now we have a very strong foundation for our portfolio. Three positions which complement each other very well, all diversified from each other, making up 55% of our entire portfolio with a yield of about 5.94% generating almost $33,000 in income and a weighted 5-year dividend growth rate of about 4.4% outpacing inflation. But how can we continue to enhance this portfolio? So, what's next? Well, one of the more unique areas in the market that gets very little traditional analyst coverage is the preferred share space. I love researching preferred stocks. It's very interesting. You can find some incredibly unique opportunities. However, it is a lot of work involved in finding those preferred share opportunities. For example, in the high yield portfolio we're building over on dividendology.com, we added a 10% yielder that's also up double digits in the share price in our portfolio. Those are the type of opportunities in the preferred share space. So, how can we play this in a more hands-off way? Well, one thing we can do is add PFFA to our portfolio. Now, we're only allocating around 6% of this ETF to our portfolio, but that means $60,000. And the yield right now is 10.64%. Now, if we look at this ETF, this is the first one in today's video where we've actually seen a decent share price decline over the last year. It's down by roughly 10%. Why is this the case? Well, what's been happening in the markets over the last few months? What we've seen is a rapid expansion in the yield curve. What do I mean by this? Well, take a look at the yield curve on treasurybonds.com. What we can see here is the 10-year Treasury yield. Right now, it's sitting at about 5.21%. 1 year ago, it was 4.03%. Naturally, what this means is the risk-free rate has expanded dramatically over the last year. And that's going to pull back on a lot of higher yielding assets such as real estate investment trusts, such as preferred shares, such as corporate bonds. And that's exactly what's happened to PFFA. And so over the long term, we certainly don't want our dividend portfolio to see perpetual share price decline. But perhaps what's even more important is that our distributions and dividends are sustainable and outpacing inflation. And what we can see from PFA is that's exactly what's happened. Even since 2021, distributions have continued to climb higher. Every single month they're making distributions and every year those distributions are slowly climbing higher. So, it's a pretty impressive accomplishment for an ETF that's yielding about 10.6%. It's grown more in popularity over the last few years as assets under management are now sitting at 2.33 billion. Now, one of the things we have to point out is this is an actively managed fund. Why is that so important? Well, you have to understand something about preferred stocks. there's a major risk and that risk is call risk. Most preferred shares can be called back by their issuer and so passively managed preferred stock ETFs have a hard time mitigating this risk and so with active management they can control exposure to fixed and floating rate securities. They can actively seek to mitigate call risk while also diversifying across sectors to help maximize the yield to call. And so if we look at how PFA has performed versus its passively managed peer PFF in the last 3 years has a total return of 21.6% while PFFA a total return of 38.14%. So this actively managed strategy has way outperformed its passively managed peer. And so while I'm a fan of a lot of passive funds under the right circumstances, preferred stocks are an asset class where active management makes a lot more sense. And that's exactly what we're taking advantage of with this addition to the portfolio. Now, we're not going to expect very much dividend growth moving forward, but we will see some slowly over time, but it will likely be at a rate below inflation. However, that starting dividend yield is a very nice boost to the overall portfolio, and it puts our starting yield at about 6.4% and our weighted 5-year dividend growth rate at still above 4.1. So now that we have our foundational positions built out, we can start adding some individual names to sectors we really don't have a lot of exposure to where we can produce predictable income. For example, maybe some real estate exposure, maybe some energy exposure, as well as some other potential opportunities. And so if we start with real estate, there's really one name that's very popular for a good reason, and that's going to be realy income. we can allocate around 7% of the portfolio when right now the yield for realy income is about 5.95% so just under 6% and historically they've grown dividends roughly at that 3.5% range so this will put the portfolio's yield at about 6.35% and a weighted 5-year dividend growth rate of above 4%. Now if we look at the share price over the last year it's not impressive. In fact, people have a lot of complaints with the share price over the last 5 years because it's down by 20%. But we need to understand a couple of fundamental things. Now, again, like I mentioned earlier, the reason for the share price decline is not due to the company's fundamentals. In fact, the company has continued to grow adjusted funds from operations per share, which is the northstar metric for REITs. However, we can see again the Treasury yield curve has expanded dramatically, not over just the last year, but over the last 5 years, which is going to weigh down REIT prices. That's the ultimate issue with the REIT market right now. But here's what's really great about this. During this time period, like I mentioned, realy income has continued to grow adjusted funds from operation per share every single year. They're projected to continue to do it at a healthy rate moving forward. And keep in mind that's the metric that dividends are paid out of. So if this is growing, then dividends can continue to grow at the exact same time. And along with this, if adjusted funds from operations per share is growing and the share price is simultaneously declining, what does that mean? Well, it means we can get in at a much more attractive valuation. And Realy Income is currently trading at one of its lowest valuations in the last 5 years. And so naturally, part of the reason that they're trading at such a high yield, such an attractive yield, is because of this reason right here. They've continued to grow dividends while the share price has been stagnant. And what's so interesting about this is historically realy income since inception, at least since becoming publicly traded, has way outperformed the S&P 500. And while that's certainly impressive, what's even more impressive is they did it with less than half of the volatility than that of the market. And really, that's exactly the type of performance we're looking from for the individual positions that we add to this type of portfolio. Yes, we want strong total returns, but more importantly, we need predictable, sustainable, growing dividends and ideally low levels of volatility. Now, what's great about highquality REITs is they have very predictable cash flows, which naturally gets translated directly into growing dividend payments. Their total portfolio occupancy rate is close to 99% and they have a very strong investment grade credit rating. These are the exact type of qualities we're looking for when adding individual names to our portfolio. Now to add to this real estate allocation, we can add n inn. We can weight it about the same as realy income, 7% and this one has a starting yield right now of 6.11% producing $4,277 in dividend income. and it's seen dividend growth of slightly above 3% over the last few years. Now, what's interesting is for just how long they've actually paid and grown dividends. They have 37 consecutive annual dividend increases. And so, when we look at the share price, like most rates, yes, they've pulled back particularly in the last few months and are down in the last year again because of those rising treasury yields, but the underlying fundamentals continue to be very strong. In fact, this is a REIT where the dividend payments might be even more sustainable than realy income. Why do I say that? Well, it's because they're paying out less in dividends relative to their adjusted funds from operations, which again, by the way, the most important metric for a rate and it's continuing to grow. In fact, right now they're only using 67% of their AFO to actually pay out dividends. So, it's a very well- covered dividend, very predictable, and has grown for 37 years in a row. So the reality is this REIT pullback that we've seen in the market over the last few years is a great opportunity for income oriented investors who have a long-term time horizon as a starting yields are now higher and you can buy more shares with your capital. So now we have some real estate exposure. Where else is there opportunity? Well, one of the first places I would actually look is an energy stock, MLX. Now here's the irony of this. I've talked a lot before about how I'm not a huge fan of energy stocks because future cash flows are so reliant on what commodity prices look like, but MLX is quite different. Now, it's certainly important the underlying holdings in our portfolio aren't reliant on commodity prices, especially like oil because oil is incredibly volatile. It's incredibly volatile. So, what makes NLX different? Well, MLX actually earns fees for moving, processing, and storing energy. So its cash flow is much less directly dependent on commodity prices than in oil producers. This makes income streams much more predictable. And so when we're talking about an MLP like MLX, the key metric we want to pay close attention to is distributable cash flow per share because that's what their dividends or their distributions are paid out of. And again, you can see this is very stable, which would not be possible if they were relying on commodity prices. You can also see it's very easily and well covering those distributions and growth is projected to be pretty solid moving into the future. And what's really wild is we can see management is actually guiding towards a 12.5% distribution raise through the year 2027. So they grew distributions by about 12.5% in 2026. They plan to do that again in 2027. So that is incredible levels of distribution growth for a stock that's already yielding about 7.58%. And complete transparency, like always, this is a stock that I added to my portfolio at the beginning of this year. At the time, it was yielding around 8.5%. And it's seen very nice share price appreciation so far in 2026, combined with a nice starting dividend yield and exceptional dividend growth. This was an incredibly rare opportunity, and they're still growing distributions at a healthy rate despite the fact the yield is still 7.6%. Now, we're not quite done adding energy stocks yet. In fact, we're going to add a stock similar to MPLX, but slightly more conservative in terms of its payout ratios and balance sheet, and that's EPD. We can see we're waiting this about 7%. The yield right now is around 6.24%, and the income it would produce as a result is around 4,368. And the dividend growth hasn't been as good as MPLX, but it's been quite strong. It's been outpacing inflation. And again, this is another energy stock that basically earns fee income. It's not nearly as reliant on commodity prices. And like I said, this is much more of a conservative income play than MPLX. Not that NPLX is aggressive by any means, but you can see the credit rating on EPD is incredibly strong. It's one of the strongest with its peers. 97% of their debt is fixed rate, so rising interest rates isn't nearly as much of a threat, and they have some of the healthiest leverage ratios among their peers. Not to mention that their distributions are incredibly well covered. In fact, we can see in 2025 they paid out about $2.18 in dividends, while distributable cash flow per share was $366. So, they could increase these distributions dramatically if they decided that was the best capital allocation decision. So, it's a more conservative play, a slightly lower yield, and slightly less dividend growth, but you can see why it's certainly a sleep well at night stock. So now we have eight positions in our portfolio, four ETFs, all well diversified from each other. We have two real estate additions, two energy additions. How can we continue to enhance this portfolio with the 11% we have left to offer? Well, what we can do is add one of the most popular monthly dividend payers of all time in the financial sector, and that's going to be Main Street Capital, stock ticker main. We'll allocate around 6% of our portfolio to it, meaning $60,000. And the yield right now is about $816%. That's important to remember and we'll come back to that in a moment and I'll show you why. But also we can see that means around $4,900 in income with historical dividend growth of close to 5%. And if we look at Main Street Capital over the last 10 years, it looks decent. It's up about 59%. But you have to keep in mind most of the growth is coming from distributions. So if we do exactly that, you can see total returns over the last decade are over 239%. Incredibly impressive for a high yield monthly dividend payer. So what type of stock are we actually looking at? Well, Main Street Capital is a business development company. So basically what they do is they lend out money and they lend it out to companies that have difficulty getting traditional financing. And there's pros and cons to this type of business model. So let's break it down. Now what we have here is a Dividendology BDC database. It's something I provide over on dividendology.com, but it's got key metrics that most softwares don't allow you to see for BDC's, but are critical to understand how they're structured and how they could potentially perform moving forward. So, let's find Main Street Capital. We'll go ahead and zoom in and scroll down, and we can see Main Street Capitals listed right here. Now, here's what you'll notice in this database. There's a base dividend listed and a total dividend listed. Well, this is the case because anytime these BDC's are making extra income, they distribute it to their shareholders. It's called a supplemental dividend. So, for example, if we look at their investor presentation, what we can see is 2008. Since 2008, we can see the monthly dividends they paid out as well as the supplemental dividends they've paid out. So, the monthly dividends every single year have continued to climb higher. That's incredibly attractive. However, supplemental dividends can vary to a much wider degree. For example, you can see when we entered a very low interest rate environment during 2020 up till around 2022, they weren't paying out any supplemental dividends. It's possible a lot of their underlying companies in their loan portfolio were defaulting as well. But as we entered a higher interest rate environment, they started generating significantly more supplemental dividends. Why is that the case? Why do they generate more supplemental dividends in higher interest rate environments? Well, it's because a lot of the loans that these companies give out are variable rate loans. Meaning, as interest rates go higher, the income the BDC collects also goes higher. So, as long as the underlying companies aren't defaulting on the loans, higher interest rates, ironically enough, can be a net benefit to BDC's. We can also see Main Street Capital has some of the strongest base dividend coverage among their peers at about 133%. So, here's what's important to remember as it relates to this around 8.16% yield that we pointed out at the beginning. What we need to understand is that's including the supplemental dividend. So, the true yield you could receive moving forward. The base yield is certainly significantly lower. It's closer to that 5 to 5.5% range. That's hypothetically what you could more or less consider as guaranteed. Meanwhile, the supplemental dividend is not guaranteed. So, it's imperative we keep that in mind anytime we analyze a BDC. And so finally, we now have one more position we can add to our portfolio. We have some energy exposure, some real estate exposure, as well as well diversified ETFs and a financial BDC company, one of the healthiest in their sector. What else can we add? And to keep it quite simple, what we can do is we can add stock ticker M O U Al Ultra Group, a company with perhaps the strongest pricing power in all of the S&P 500. Right now, their starting yield is sitting at about 6.2% producing $3,100 in income. And they typically grow with a dividend at around 4%. Now, if we look at Altria over the last year, they've done pretty well. They're up by about 10% and in the last 5 years up almost 50%, but keep in mind that's share price, not total returns. Most of their growth has come from dividends. So, let's assess the sustainability of those dividends. We'll plug in MO. Now ultimately what we need to see is whether or not free cash flow is covering those dividend payments because they have a nice starting dividend yield, a history of growing dividends and we can see free cash flow is growing those dividend payments. In fact, management has stated their target payout ratio is roughly 80%. Now some people do have concerns over declining volumes and that is something to keep an eye on. But here's the real investment thesis. Jump over to the profitability sheet from ticker data link in the description, but plug in Altria stock ticker MO and take a look at the gross profit ratio. This is the thesis in a nutshell. In 2015, it was about 58.95%. By 2025, 72.21%. The company has incredible pricing power, which is typically a sign of a company that has a wide moat. They can protect their competitive advantage. So, now we have a simple 10 position portfolio. We have four ETFs and six individual names. What this led to is a portfolio with a yield of 6.5%. Producing $65,141 in income and a weighted 5-year dividend growth rate of 4.46%. But how does this actually play out? Well, let's start to run the numbers and find out. Now, the Fed's target inflation rate is 2%. Before you get upset with me, don't worry. We'll run some other scenarios. Assume that inflation is roughly 2%. And all of a sudden, you can see why dividend growth is so important. Because while at first, our income does produce more than our cost of living, our cost of living eventually passes our income. This is why dividend growth is so important. But if the average dividend growth rate of our portfolio is about 4.46%, what's the ultimate end result? Well, let's zoom in and take a closer look. We can see in year 1, we're producing $65,141 versus our cost of living of 50,000. That's about a $15,000 difference. So, we're producing far more income than our cost of living, and this gives us a lot of flexibility. For example, if we want to further strengthen our portfolio, we can simply reinvest about $15,000 back into the portfolio. But in this example, we'll just assume that we're spending it all. Now, we can see as we move forward, the difference continues to expand. Why? Because our dividend growth rate is above the rate of inflation. So by year 10, yes, our cost of living is almost $60,000, but by then we're producing $96,000 a year in income. If we zoom forward, year 20, cost of living is almost 73,000. By then we're producing almost $150,000, meaning the spread is $76,000. And by year 30, this would produce 231,000 with a spread of 142,000. Again, this is not reinvesting dividends. But what if inflation continues to be higher, especially as it has been over the last few years? Maybe it's even as high as around 4%. How dramatically does this change the analysis? Well, again, our year 1 spread is going to be the exact same. But because our dividend growth rate is still above the rate of inflation, we can see the spread, the difference between these two every single year still continues to widen. By year 30, it's almost at $75,000 worth of spread. And again, I have to reiterate, if you reinvest this capital, that spread will grow at a faster rate. But what about a disaster scenario where inflation is even faster than our average dividend growth of 4.46%, which again, to be honest, I think it would be higher than that. But let's say inflation gets all the way up to 5.5%. How long can our portfolio actually survive? And this is a really interesting case study cuz again, the difference in year 1 will be the exact same. But look at this. In year two, the difference actually continued to widen. Why is that the case if our inflation rate is above the dividend growth rate? Well, it's because the dividend growth rate is compounding on a larger number versus inflation. So, for a while, we can see our difference continues to expand. But as our cost of living catches up, the difference starts to decrease over time. And so, we can see starting right here in year 28, this is where our portfolio would fail. assuming we're spending all of this capital here where we have a spread versus our cost of living. But the reality is if you use this capital and reinvest it back into your portfolio, you would never have this issue even if you reinvested a small portion. So even in a scenario where inflation is significantly higher than it has been historically speaking, it's very hard for the market to make this portfolio tumble. So, we were able to build out a simple 10 position portfolio with three foundational positions, SCHD, GPIQ, and IDVO and sprinkle in some added yield, dividend growth, and diversification along with it. But perhaps most importantly, these are positions with very predictable dividends and will grow dividends at a rate above inflation over time. And so, while there's no doubt we could continue to add option income ETFs to push this yield higher, this is certainly a portfolio where you can sleep much better at night with these type of positions. Like always, if you want access to more research such as this and some of the best dividend growth and high yield opportunities out there, be sure to check out dividendology.com at the link in the description and sign up for the newsletter. You'll typically get around two newsletters from me a week. But go ahead and let me know your thoughts in the comments down below. And like always, please don't forget to like and subscribe to the