Passive income investing: 2 pieces of advice from Warren Buffett
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Looking at Warren Buffett’s thoughts on longevity and risk helps Jonathan Smith to formulate a better passive income investing strategy.
Jonathan Smith is an experienced private investor from London.
The content of this article was relevant at the time of its publishing (April 2021). Circumstances change continuously and caution should therefore be exercised when relying upon any content contained within this article.
Generating income via dividends from stocks is one of the most appealing ways for me to build wealth. There are plenty of ideas out there to look at for passive income investing. And in this regard, I often listen to Warren Buffett’s pearls of wisdom. I tie his ideas in to dividend stocks and income investing, to help me hopefully pick the best ones to reach my goals.
Playing the long game
As someone who has been investing successfully longer than I’ve been alive, Warren Buffett is clearly someone to listen to. As it turns out, longevity is one of the things that makes passive income investing work. Buffett once said that “someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
What he meant by this is that good things can take time to happen, but the end result is well worth the time. It’s the same with getting dividends from stocks. For example, I might be aiming to make £1,000 a month in passive income. With a small pot to begin with, this isn’t going to happen overnight.
I’ll have to regularly invest small amounts so that over several years, my investment pot will be large enough to give me a yield to equate to £1,000 a month. But once I’ve got there, it’ll be worth the wait.
Looking for sustainable passive income
Warren Buffett once commented that “risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing”. This can be applied to many situations in investing, especially when targeting passive income.
The tendency for a new investor might be to simply buy shares in companies that have the highest dividend yields. If it was me, I might reason that I’d get the highest income that way.
In reality, companies with the highest dividend yields often carry the highest level of risk of a dividend cut. This is because the yield could look high just because the share price is falling. After all, a lower share price makes the dividend per share a larger proportion overall. If I didn’t know this or hadn’t done my research on the share price, I could make a bad call here.
To deal with this, I just need to make sure I’m not focused solely on the monetary dividend values for passive income investing. It also needs to be about the company. What are the prospects? How has the business coped with the pandemic? In this way, the dividends I get paid will be more sustainable, even if it means taking a slightly lower dividend yield.
Overall, by looking at the thoughts of Warren Buffett, I can give myself a better shot at making my passive income investing strategy a success.
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