motley fool best dividend stocks — and other passive incomes i tried

best dividend stocks, by their own description, pay you for waiting. i waited. the third yoga mat, also, pays for waiting. brenda, the plant, pays in wilt. a hot take collection forms quietly on the page. the rendimiento real arrives in textures, not numbers.

writing this from the desk. carla is upstairs at a training thing on the third floor. i have, by my own optimistic clock, about forty minutes before anyone notices the tab count.

so. motley fool best dividend stocks. that’s the phrase. that’s the bait. allegedly, the path to a life where money arrives while you sleep, like a roommate who pays half the rent. i have read the page. i have, in a moment i’d rather not analyze, opened a fourth tab. tab 47. always tab 47. the boiler room script would be more honest about its returns.

motley fool best dividend stocks: a curated list of equities that, in theory, pay shareholders periodic cash distributions in exchange for parking their money. in practice, the list updates, the yields drift, and the patience required is roughly the patience of a yoga mat under a sofa, except the yoga mat charges no fees. that, in a paragraph, is the comparison.

PASSIVE. INCOME. IS. NOT. A. PERSONALITY.

motley fool best dividend stocks, the official angle

here is the official angle, as far as i can reconstruct it from this desk. the motley fool best dividend stocks approach: you pick companies that have paid dividends for a long time. you reinvest. you wait. compound interest does the heavy lifting. the language is gentle. patient. the same tone my ex used when telling me i had remembered something incorrectly.

i’m not saying the official angle is wrong. i am saying it is told in a voice that suggests you, specifically, are about to do well. they pick names. utilities. consumer staples. the occasional bank that hasn’t blown up recently. they put a chart with a green line going up and to the right, because charts that go down do not, historically, sell newsletters.

the implicit deal: give us your attention, and someday you will not have to give anyone your attention. and you can tell, from a few miles off, that everyone selling this idea also writes a column about why this time is different, three times a year, in serif font. which reminds me — the taxman sends letters in serif font. i know not because i opened any of them. i know because the envelope is enough. someone is being paid for my waiting. it isn’t me.

my own passive assets, ranked by disappointment

i mention this because, in fairness, i have my own passive assets. nobody ranks them. nobody publishes a quarterly review. so i’ll do it here, instead of the spreadsheet i was asked to update by 9:47am.

asset one. the third yoga mat. purchased with the earnest belief that the third would succeed where the second and the first had not. it lives under the sofa. it does not charge a management fee. it provides a small but reliable monthly disappointment. that’s a yield, of a kind. denominated in regret.

asset two. brenda, the plant. brenda has been technically dead for somewhere between eight and fourteen weeks. i water her on alternate fridays out of an obligation i cannot explain to anyone. brenda’s yield is wilt. wilt does not compound. and yet brenda persists, in a pot from a thrift store, with the dignity of an asset that has stopped pretending.

asset three. one airpod. i lost the other one at a place i refuse to describe. the survivor sits in a small dish on the desk like a single earring from a divorce nobody asked about. binaural is a luxury for couples. i listen in mono. half of every podcast. i pretend the other half was the boring half.

asset four. the gym sauna. i pay for a gym. i go for the sauna. i never go to the gym part of the gym. the membership yields a humid room three times a week. by some calculations, the best-performing asset. by others, a $54-a-month chair in a heated closet.

the third yoga mat, technically an asset

i want to spend a little more time on the yoga mat, because i think it does, against all my better judgment, qualify as a textbook passive asset. if you put it next to one of the motley fool best dividend stocks on a page, the yoga mat would not embarrass itself.

here’s the case. purchased once. zero ongoing fees. no margin call. no board of directors. cannot send me an envelope in serif font. it has, since 2023, sat in one place. it has not depreciated emotionally because i never bonded with it. in the right thrift-store light it fetches four dollars on resale. that’s a positive number. better than several investments i’ve made on the advice of that website i refuse to fully name, including its membership tier i once compared to my bulk place card.

the comparison table

which brings us to the part a comparative format is legally obligated to include. a table. an auditor would recognize the shape. an auditor would not, on balance, recognize the contents.

the column i find most honest is the last one. it’s what every prospectus refuses to publish — and what the three-letter domain i keep ending up on can’t print without losing subscribers.

what the table does not measure

the table is a small lie. tables are. it pretends the columns are the whole story. they aren’t. the columns the table refused to include, on the grounds that they would have made it sad:

• the dignity column. brenda has more of this than any of the dividend names. brenda has stopped pretending. that is its own form of return.
• the conversation column. the third yoga mat has come up at three separate dinners. the dividend stocks have come up at zero. on a per-dollar-of-storytelling basis, the yoga mat is outperforming.
• the where-it-lives column. the airpod lives in a small dish on the desk. the dividend stocks live in a tab. the tab gets closed. the dish does not.
• the toilet paper position column. unrelated to dividends, but i’d like the record to reflect that, in this household, the roll goes UNDER. people who put it over are the same people who tell you this time is different.

i’m collecting these. somewhere in a notes app i no longer trust is a thickening file of my own takes — about dividends, yoga mats, brenda, about why the one tie i own (i own one tie, total, since tom’s wedding) is technically an asset that appears once a wedding. it doesn’t pay dividends. but it accumulates, which is, frankly, the only thing any portfolio is really doing — accumulating, until somebody looks.

closing — wall of insults audit

it’s almost 11:14am. carla will be down soon. and the wall of insults is, as of last night, full enough that i did, briefly, audit it.

the wall of insults is the digital corkboard where i pin every paid insult from tier-two readers. last night i read every one. nineteen of them. five were repeats. two were, frankly, just sad. one of them — and this is the part that fits the post — said, in plain text: “you are the kind of man who would buy the worst dividend stocks and call it a strategy.”

that insult is, on a technicality, incorrect. i would not buy the worst dividend stocks. i would read the page about the motley fool best dividend stocks, open four tabs, intend to act, fail to act, and end up with a third yoga mat instead. that’s not a strategy. that’s a personality.

the dividend names will keep paying or stop paying, on their schedule. brenda keeps wilting on hers. the airpod will, eventually, vanish on its. the wall keeps growing, one paid line at a time. the only truly compounding asset i have ever held is other people’s opinions of me.

carla just walked back. she didn’t look at the screen. that’s a good sign. or a very neutral sign. one of the two.

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