motley fool dividend stocks — and the cousin nobody mentions

dividend stocks, generic, are stocks that send you a small allowance. tom, by all accounts, has a pension that does the same. mom, on the line, mentions the cousin who has dividend stocks. and i sit here pretending i understand the difference, which is the central crisis of this post and possibly of my financial life.

the topic, then, is motley fool dividend stocks. it is tuesday, 4:18pm. i am at a workstation that, strictly speaking, was assigned for other tasks. the spreadsheet sits open in tab 11 of 47, not progressing. i have the rest of the morning.

motley fool dividend stocks: companies the motley fool service identifies as paying regular quarterly dividends — small cash you receive for owning a share. the appeal: passive income. the catch: yields are small, share prices wobble, and your cousin, somewhere, is doing better than you.

the sunday call, where mom mentions the cousin

my mother calls on sundays. the system: between 11am and noon, she asks how i am, i say fine, she says “you sound tired”, i say i’m not, she says “okay” in the voice that means she does not believe me, and then she tells me a piece of family news i did not request.

this past sunday, the news was the cousin. you do not need to know the cousin’s name. the cousin lives two states over, has a partner, a small dog, and — this is the part — a portfolio. mom said, in the tone she uses for grenades, “you know your cousin has dividend stocks now. she gets a check every quarter. just for owning the things.”

i said: “that’s nice.” i said it the way you say it when the microwave (seventh) hums slightly when it isn’t on, and the third yoga mat is, possibly, breathing under the couch.

mom said: “you should look into it.” mothers know. it is their power. it cannot be argued with. so on monday, at the desk, i looked into it. the entry point was the long fool tradition i’ve been writing about. they have a service. the service has a list.

tom has a pension. i mention this every six weeks.

tom is a man i went to university with who now owns a house, a wife, two children, a volvo, and a pension. tom understands his pension. tom has a folder for it. tom has, in his phone, a contact for the person who manages it. i, by contrast, have a contact called “DO NOT PICK UP”, and that contact has called eleven times this month.

tom’s pension is the comparison object. because the real question, when mom says “the cousin has dividend stocks”, in the secret mom dialect, is: “the rest of the family is generating income while you are reading definitions on the internet at your desk.”

so: are motley fool dividend stocks the equivalent of a tom-style pension? the answer is the kind of answer i can only deliver in a table, because tables are how serious men disagree.

the table: motley fool dividend stocks vs tom’s pension

here is what i drew up between 9:14 and 10:14 this morning, in a notebook, with a chewed pen. directionally accurate, precisely useless — the two levels at which i operate.

that last row, frankly, is why i am writing this. “you can’t eat principles.” dad said it whenever someone refused a job on philosophical grounds. dad believed in payroll, in things showing up on the 1st and the 15th. dad would have liked tom.

what the fool service actually sells, when you cut the romance

what the motley fool dividend stocks service is, in plain language, is a recommendation list. you pay a subscription, they hand you names. they make a case for each name. you sit at a desk on a tuesday and decide.

i have written before about the podcast arm of the operation — where two men talk for forty minutes about a stock and you finish no smarter but more confident, which is the actual product. the dividend stocks list is the same product in a different package: confidence, sold at a yearly rate.

the corner bar conversation that clarified this

some months ago, in the corner bar i used to go to more often, i had a conversation with a man who fills, in my life, the same role mike does. he had retired with a pension and a small portfolio of dividend payers. he was sipping a beer the way only a man with two income streams can.

he said, and i’m paraphrasing because i had also been sipping: “kid, the pension is the floor. the dividends are the carpet. you want both.”

i didn’t have a floor. i had, at best, a yoga mat under a couch. i wrote the sentence on a coaster, which i lost but remember verbatim, which is suspicious of me, but here we are.

the bar man was right. tom’s pension is a floor. motley fool dividend stocks are a carpet. a carpet is nice. a carpet adds warmth. a carpet does not stop you from falling through the building. you cannot live in a carpet.

i am, financially, still in the carpet-shopping phase pretending i already have the floor. mom knows. the cousin knows. tom has not thought about me in fourteen months — a separate sadness for a separate post.

verdict, if you arrived here for one

so. should you, on a tuesday morning, with a job you tolerate and a yoga mat possibly growing under your couch, subscribe to the motley fool dividend stocks list?

here is what i would say, understanding that my financial planning consists primarily of not opening envelopes with red borders.

• no pension equivalent, no 401k, no employer-matched anything — fix that first. that is the floor. carpets without floors are an unfinished project.
• you do have a floor — sure. read the list. read the cases. read it the way you’d read a movie review: useful, opinionated, not a substitute for the movie. for the cinematic version of the same impulse — gambling money on a recommendation a stranger made loudly — see boiler room (2000), which is not the motley fool but is, structurally, a cousin.
• no floor, and the list looks like a shortcut to one — please. i love you. i am you. don’t skip the floor. the cousin has a floor too. mom, secretly, knows. she just doesn’t lead with it on the call.

for context on the older tradition of calling a financial advisor a “fool”, i wrote a comparison of the membership tier vs my bulk place membership that is, surprisingly, useful, and one on the subscription as a modern oath that is less useful but funnier. and if at any point you’ve thought “this man does not know what he is talking about”, read about the dunning-kruger effect and decide which side of the curve i’m on.

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