€22.70. That’s what my entire first year of dividend investing produced. Not enough for a decent dinner. Barely enough to fill half a tank of fuel. By any reasonable measure, a financially insignificant amount.
But it changed the way I think about money — permanently. This post is a transparent look at my first year: what I earned, what it felt like, and what I learned. If you’re considering starting your own dividend journey, this is what the very beginning actually looks like — no filters, no exaggeration, just the real numbers.
Why I Started
Two things pushed me to invest. The first was my dad. He’d been investing for years, and I could see what it did for him — not just financially, but in how he thought about the future. He didn’t carry the same anxiety about money that most people around him did. That stuck with me.
The second was my savings account. I was watching my money sit there earning virtually nothing while inflation quietly ate away at its value. Every year, my savings bought slightly less than the year before. I realized that “saving” without investing wasn’t actually saving — it was losing money slowly.
I didn’t want to trade stocks or time the market. I wanted something that would pay me for holding it. That led me to dividend investing.
Building the Portfolio — Starting With What I Knew
I started in March 2021 with a single purchase: KPN, the Dutch telecom company. I chose it because I understood the business — everyone in the Netherlands uses KPN’s network — and it paid a solid dividend from predictable subscription revenue. As a telecom provider selling an essential service through subscriptions, KPN’s cash flows are about as stable as it gets in the corporate world.
Over the following months, I expanded into more Dutch companies I was familiar with: ING Group, Ahold Delhaize, Randstad, and PostNL. The total amount I invested that first year was around €6,800, spread across these positions. I wasn’t trying to build the perfect portfolio — I was trying to get started and learn by doing.
Looking back, some of these picks were stronger than others. Ahold Delhaize turned out to be exactly the kind of defensive, recession-resistant holding that anchors a dividend portfolio — a grocery company selling products people buy every week regardless of the economy. ING Group, on the other hand, was a higher-risk play as a bank with regulatory exposure and a history of dividend interruptions. But the point of year one wasn’t perfection. It was getting skin in the game.
The Dividends — All €22.70 of Them
Here’s what actually landed in my account that first year:
April 2021 — KPN interim dividend: €14.96
This was the moment that made it all feel real. Less than a month after my first purchase, KPN deposited €14.96 into my brokerage account. I didn’t sell anything. I didn’t do anything at all. A company simply paid me because I owned a small piece of it.
I know how €14.96 sounds. People spend more on a mediocre lunch. But receiving that notification did something to my brain that reading a hundred articles about compound interest never did. The system worked. Money generated money — without me trading, timing, or stressing. It just arrived.
August 2021 — KPN final dividend: €7.74
Four months later, the second payment came through. Another small amount, another confirmation that the process was real and repeating. KPN pays dividends twice per year — an interim dividend and a final dividend — which meant I could expect this rhythm to continue.
Total dividend income for 2021: €22.70
That’s it. Twenty-two euros and seventy cents. My entire first year of dividend investing, summed up in a number that wouldn’t cover a pizza and a beer in Amsterdam.
And yet — those €22.70 were the seed of something that would grow far beyond what I imagined at the time.
What €22.70 Taught Me
The Emotional Power of Receiving Your First Dividend
There’s a difference between understanding compound interest intellectually and feeling money arrive in your account that you didn’t work for. The first dividend, no matter how small, crosses a psychological threshold. Suddenly, dividend investing isn’t a theory you read about — it’s something happening to you.
That emotional shift is what keeps you going during the early years, when the numbers are too small to matter financially. You keep investing not because €22.70 is life-changing, but because you can see where it’s heading.
The Flywheel Starts Invisible
In my analyses of companies like ASML and KPN, I talk about the flywheel concept — how small inputs compound until the system generates its own momentum. Year one is the hardest part of the flywheel because the results are invisible. You’re pushing with all your effort and the wheel is barely turning.
€22.70 is the sound of a flywheel that hasn’t started spinning yet. It’s not impressive. It’s not motivating on paper. But it’s the first push — and without it, the flywheel never turns at all.
You Don’t Need a Perfect Portfolio to Start
My first-year portfolio wasn’t optimized. I bought companies I knew rather than companies I’d researched deeply. Some of those picks — like PostNL — would later teach me hard lessons about the difference between a high yield and a sustainable one. That’s exactly the kind of yield trap warning sign I’d learn to spot over the following years. Others — like KPN and Ahold Delhaize — turned out to be exactly the kind of reliable, defensive holdings I’d come to value.
The lesson: don’t wait until you’ve built the perfect strategy. Start, learn, adjust. The cost of waiting for perfection is far higher than the cost of learning by doing with real money.
Small Amounts Are Not a Reason to Delay
I started with about €500. Not €50,000. Not even €5,000 for my first purchase. It would have been easy to tell myself that €500 wasn’t enough to bother with — that I should save up more before starting.
That would have been a mistake. Starting small forced me to learn the mechanics: how brokerage accounts work, how dividend payments are processed, what ex-dividend dates mean, how withholding tax works in the Netherlands. By the time I was investing larger amounts, I’d already made my beginner mistakes with small money. That education was worth far more than the €22.70 itself.
The Bigger Picture — Where This Was Heading
At the time, I couldn’t know that €22.70 in year one would become over €534 in year two, then €719 in year three, then over €1,000 in year four. The growth curve of dividend income from a portfolio you keep feeding is steeper than you expect — because the compounding isn’t just from reinvestment, it’s from three forces working together: new capital you add, dividends you reinvest, and organic dividend increases from the companies themselves.
But none of that happens without year one. Without the €502 KPN purchase. Without the nervous click of the buy button. Without the anticlimactic €14.96 notification that turned out to be the most important financial moment of my life.
What I’d Tell Someone Starting Today
Start now, not when you have “enough.” There is no minimum amount that makes dividend investing worthwhile. The mechanics of compounding don’t care whether you start with €500 or €50,000 — they work the same way. The earlier you start, the longer the flywheel has to build momentum.
Buy companies you understand. My first purchases were all Dutch companies I interacted with in daily life — KPN for telecom, Ahold Delhaize for groceries, ING for banking. That familiarity gave me confidence during the inevitable market dips. When KPN’s price fluctuated, I didn’t panic — I knew people were still paying their phone bills.
Don’t check your portfolio every day. I made this mistake early on. Daily price movements create anxiety that’s completely unnecessary for a long-term income strategy. The dividends arrive whether or not you watch the stock price between payments.
Reinvest everything in the early years. That €22.70 could have bought me a pizza. Instead, it went back into buying more shares, which generated more dividends, which bought more shares. In the accumulation phase, every euro you reinvest accelerates the feedback loop.
Track your income, not your portfolio value. The number that actually matters for a dividend investor isn’t your portfolio’s market value — it’s your annual dividend income. That’s the number that grows most predictably and that will eventually fund your life. I track mine year by year, and watching it climb is the most motivating metric in my investing life.
Looking Back From Where I Am Now
Today, my portfolio has grown to a place that first-year me wouldn’t have believed. My annual dividend income is measured in thousands, not tens of euros. But the foundation was laid in 2021, with a €502 KPN purchase and a €14.96 dividend payment that taught me more about investing than any book ever could.
Every dividend investor’s journey starts with a number that feels embarrassingly small. Mine was €22.70. The only thing that would have been more embarrassing is if I’d never started at all.
This is part of my ongoing dividend journey series. Read about what happened next in my second year, where the snowball started to grow: €534 received.
