In year one, I earned €22.70. In year five, I earned €2,186.23. That’s not a typo. My dividend income more than doubled in a single year — from €1,077 in year four to over €2,186 in year five. And it happened because of three things I didn’t have before: a full year of salary, a pension benefit I didn’t know existed, and the confidence to invest seriously.
The Context — First Full Year With a Real Income
2025 was my first complete calendar year of full-time employment. I’d started at my internship company doing Angular web development in 2024, and by 2025 I was settled into the role, understood the codebase, and — most importantly — had a predictable monthly salary hitting my account twelve months straight.
I also got my first pay raise. A modest 1.5% — not life-changing, but symbolic. More meaningful was the Christmas bonus that came with it, which gave me a lump sum to deploy into the portfolio at year-end.
But the biggest financial discovery of 2025 wasn’t the raise. It was something I found buried in my employment benefits that most young workers either don’t know about or ignore completely.
The Pension Discovery — Tax-Free Investing I Almost Missed
Somewhere in my first year of employment, I discovered that my company offered a pension investment scheme. On top of my normal salary, the company contributed €142.50 per month into a pension investment account. The money was invested tax-free, and I wouldn’t be able to touch it until retirement.
Most of my colleagues either didn’t know about this or didn’t care. I almost missed it myself. But once I understood what it meant — free money from my employer, invested tax-free, compounding for decades — I made sure it was set up properly.
I chose to invest the pension contributions into the iShares Core MSCI World ETF (IWDA), a broad global index fund. This wasn’t a dividend play — IWDA is an accumulating fund that reinvests dividends internally rather than paying them out. But it didn’t need to be. The pension account served a different purpose: long-term wealth building with tax advantages that my regular brokerage account couldn’t match.
This was a mental shift. For the first time, I was running two investment strategies in parallel: the dividend portfolio for building passive income I could access anytime, and the pension for building wealth I’d access in retirement. Two different goals, two different accounts, two different approaches — both working simultaneously.
If you’re a young employee reading this: check your company’s pension scheme. Seriously. It’s probably the highest-returning investment you’ll ever make, because the employer contribution is essentially free capital and the tax advantages amplify every euro you put in.
The Portfolio Explosion — From Seeds to Serious Positions
In year four, I’d planted seeds — small 1-3 share positions across a dozen companies in December 2024. Year five was when I started watering them, while also planting entirely new ones.
The scale of investing in 2025 was unlike anything in my previous years. With a full-time salary, a Christmas bonus, and growing confidence in my strategy, I deployed more capital in 2025 than in all my previous years combined. Here’s what I built:
Healthcare — A New Sector for Me
One of the biggest additions was healthcare — a sector I’d never owned before.
UnitedHealth Group — 4 shares. The largest health insurer in the United States. Not a traditional high-yield stock, but a dividend grower with a business model that benefits from America’s aging population. This was a bet on long-term demographic trends rather than current yield.
Novo-Nordisk — 22 shares. The Danish pharmaceutical giant behind the GLP-1 weight loss and diabetes drugs that have taken the world by storm. I bought the US-listed ADR. Again, not a high-yield play — but a company with pricing power, growing revenue, and a dividend that I expect to grow meaningfully over time.
Merck & Co — 12 shares. Another US pharmaceutical company with a strong dividend history and a pipeline of drugs that should support cash flows for years to come.
Healthcare was a deliberate diversification away from my heavy financial sector and energy exposure. People get sick regardless of interest rates or oil prices — that’s a different kind of defensiveness than groceries or telecom, and it adds genuine resilience to the portfolio’s income supply chain.
European Expansion — Beyond the Netherlands
I also significantly expanded my European holdings beyond the Dutch core:
Engie — 56 shares. A French energy and utilities company with a substantial dividend yield. Utilities provide the kind of predictable, regulation-backed cash flows that make dividends reliable — similar in character to KPN’s telecom model but in the energy infrastructure space.
Stellantis — 118 shares. The automotive group behind Peugeot, Citroën, Fiat, and Jeep. A cyclical bet — car manufacturers don’t have the same defensive qualities as grocery companies. But the share price had dropped significantly, pushing the yield up. I was buying at what I believed was a depressed valuation, similar to how cyclical stocks like Aperam can offer value at the bottom of their cycle.
Vodafone — 956 shares. The British telecom giant, bought at just over €1 per share. A massive position by share count, picked up at what felt like a fire-sale price. Vodafone had been through years of restructuring and dividend cuts, so this was a calculated risk — not a KPN-style safe telecom play, but a turnaround bet with income potential.
Fugro — 133 shares. A Dutch geo-data and offshore services company. Not a typical dividend stock, but the company was generating strong cash flows from the energy transition and offshore wind boom.
US Income Plays — Building the Transatlantic Bridge
NNN REIT — 30 shares. A US net-lease REIT — the kind of real estate company that owns properties but passes all operating costs to tenants. Net-lease REITs have a different risk profile from retail REITs like Wereldhave — their tenants are responsible for maintenance, insurance, and taxes, making the income more predictable.
Arbor Realty Trust — 136 shares. A mortgage REIT that finances real estate loans. High yield, but mortgage REITs are among the riskier income investments — sensitive to interest rates and credit quality. This was a conscious high-yield allocation, sized appropriately as a satellite position rather than a core holding.
Kraft Heinz — 47 shares. The American food giant behind brands like Heinz ketchup, Philadelphia cream cheese, and Oscar Mayer. A consumer staples company with the same kind of defensive characteristics I value in Ahold Delhaize — people buy food regardless of the economy.
The Dividends — €2,186.23 and the Doubling Moment
Total dividend income for 2025: €2,186.23
More than double year four. This was the year the compounding curve visibly bent upward.
The income came from an increasingly diversified set of sources. The Dutch core — Shell, ING, NN Group, KPN, Ahold Delhaize — continued to grow their contributions through dividend increases and, in Shell’s case, additional shares from the DRIP (dividend reinvestment plan that automatically converts dividends into fractional shares). The US BDC positions kept delivering their frequent payments. And the new positions bought throughout 2025 started contributing their first dividends.
€2,186 divided by 12 is roughly €182 per month. That’s real money. It covers a significant chunk of monthly expenses — groceries for two weeks, or a car insurance payment, or most of a utility bill. The portfolio was no longer a hobby producing pocket change. It was becoming a genuine secondary income stream.
A 103% year-over-year increase. The cumulative total crossed €4,500. To put that in perspective: I’d now received back roughly the same amount in dividends as I invested in my entire first year — and the portfolio was still growing.
What Changed in Year Five
The Portfolio Became Truly International
In my early years, I was a Dutch dividend investor with a small US side bet. By the end of 2025, I held companies in the Netherlands, France, the UK, Denmark, Norway, Germany, and the United States. This wasn’t accidental — it was a deliberate response to one of the risks I’d identified in my earlier analysis: geographic concentration.
My Dutch core is strong — KPN, Ahold Delhaize, ING, NN Group, Shell — but all of these companies are tied to the Dutch and European economy. Adding Kraft Heinz, UnitedHealth, NNN REIT, and other US holdings means my income now flows from two different economic zones with different business cycles. If Europe has a bad year, the US positions provide a buffer, and vice versa.
I Started Thinking in Sectors, Not Just Stocks
Year five was when I stopped picking stocks purely on yield and started thinking about sector allocation. My portfolio now had deliberate exposure to: telecom (KPN, Vodafone), groceries/consumer staples (Ahold Delhaize, Kraft Heinz), banking (ING), insurance (NN Group), energy (Shell, Engie), healthcare (UnitedHealth, Merck, Novo-Nordisk), real estate (NNN REIT, Arbor Realty), and industrials (Fugro, Stellantis, DHL Group).
This kind of sector diversification matters because different sectors respond differently to economic conditions. When interest rates rise, insurers benefit while REITs struggle. When the economy slows, grocery companies and telecoms keep paying while cyclical industrials may cut. Having income from multiple sectors means the overall stream is more resilient than any individual position.
The Pension Changed My Time Horizon
Discovering the employer pension scheme with the €142.50 monthly contribution gave me something I didn’t have before: a forced long-term savings vehicle. The IWDA shares in my pension account can’t be touched until retirement. That constraint, which might sound limiting, was actually liberating — it meant I didn’t need my brokerage portfolio to do everything.
The pension handles long-term wealth accumulation through broad market exposure. The dividend portfolio handles building a growing income stream I can access anytime. This separation of purposes made both strategies cleaner and more intentional.
I Learned to Deploy Capital Decisively
In my early years, I’d agonize over every purchase. Should I buy now or wait? Is this the right price? What if it drops tomorrow? In year five, with a steady salary and a clear strategy, I started investing with more conviction. When I identified a company I wanted to own, I built the position in one or two decisive purchases rather than nibbling at it over months.
Fugro at €1,500 in a single purchase. Engie at over €1,000. Vodafone at over €1,000. These would have terrified me in year one. By year five, I understood that the cost of hesitation — waiting for the “perfect” price while missing dividend payments — is usually higher than the cost of being slightly early.
The Honest Assessment — What’s Working and What Needs Fixing
Not everything in the portfolio is perfect, and I want to be transparent about that.
What’s working: The Dutch core is rock solid. KPN, Ahold Delhaize, ING, NN Group, and Shell are doing exactly what I bought them to do — paying growing dividends from strong businesses. These five positions alone produce a meaningful base of income that I’m confident will be there year after year.
What needs watching: Some of the newer positions are higher-risk than my core. Stellantis is facing a brutal auto market downturn. Vodafone is a turnaround story that might not turn around. Arbor Realty Trust’s mortgage REIT model carries interest rate risk. These are positions I’m comfortable holding at their current size, but they need monitoring — and I won’t hesitate to trim them if the warning signs appear.
What I’m still learning: Managing a portfolio of 25+ positions is qualitatively different from managing 5-10. There’s more to track, more dividend dates to monitor, more annual reports to skim. I’m developing systems to handle this — but it’s a skill I’m still building.
The Emotional Reality of €2,186 in Passive Income
€182 per month. That’s what my portfolio produced on average in 2025. To put that in perspective relative to my €2,800 salary: my portfolio is now generating the equivalent of 6.5% of my take-home pay, without me doing any work.
That number might not sound transformative. But think about it this way: every year, as I add capital and as the companies raise their dividends, that percentage grows. If the trajectory of the last five years continues — and there’s no structural reason it shouldn’t — my dividend income will cross €500/month within a few years. Then €1,000/month. Then more.
At some point, the dividend income will cover a meaningful portion of my living expenses. And at that point, the relationship between me and my employer fundamentally changes. I’ll work because I choose to, not because I have to. That’s the end goal. And year five is the year it stopped feeling like a fantasy and started feeling like a math problem with a solvable answer.
Five Years of Dividends — The Full Picture
| Year | Dividend Income | YoY Growth | Cumulative | Key Milestone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 (Year 1) | €22.70 | — | €22.70 | First dividend ever |
| 2022 (Year 2) | €534 | +2,254% | ~€557 | 8 companies paying |
| 2023 (Year 3) | €719.67 | +35% | €1,272 | Graduated, US expansion |
| 2024 (Year 4) | €1,077.84 | +50% | €2,350 | Broke €1,000, first salary |
| 2025 (Year 5) | €2,186.23 | +103% | €4,536 | Income doubled, pension started |
From €22.70 to €2,186.23 in five years. From one company to over twenty-five. From nervous student to employed investor with a pension, a growing salary, and a dividend income stream that’s compounding faster than I projected.
The flywheel isn’t just spinning anymore. It’s accelerating.
Read how it all started: My First Year of Dividend Investing — €22.70 Received
Read the previous chapter: My Fourth Year of Dividend Investing — €1,077.84 Received
