In year one, I earned €22.70. In year four, I earned €1,077.84. Almost fifty times more. And this was the year everything in my life changed simultaneously — I spent close to a year searching for the right job, swallowed my pride, started earning my first real salary, and watched my dividend income cross four digits for the first time.
The Job Hunt — A Year of Rejection
Let me be honest about something that most people don’t talk about on investing blogs: the career part. Because while my portfolio was quietly compounding through 2024, my professional life was anything but smooth.
I’d graduated before the summer of 2023 with an ICT bachelor’s degree and one clear goal: build native Android apps. That’s what I was passionate about. That’s what I’d studied for. That’s the job I wanted.
The market didn’t care.
What followed was close to a full year of searching. I sent application after application. Android developer roles were either looking for senior experience I didn’t have, or they simply weren’t hiring juniors. Weeks turned into months. The rejections piled up — some polite, most silent. There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from knowing you can do the work but not being able to convince anyone to let you prove it.
While friends from my studies were landing roles and posting about their new jobs, I was still sending cover letters into the void. The financial pressure was real — I wasn’t earning a full-time salary, which meant my ability to invest was severely limited. After three years of steady portfolio growth, the momentum slowed. Not because the strategy was wrong, but because life got in the way.
Eventually, I made a decision that felt like giving up at the time but turned out to be one of the smartest moves I’ve made: I went back to my internship company. They offered me a full-time position — not in Android development, but building Angular web applications. It wasn’t what I’d dreamed of. It wasn’t the plan. But it was a real job, with a real salary, and it meant I could finally start building my life.
First full-time salary: €2,800 per month.
That number changed everything.
What €2,800/Month Meant for My Portfolio
During my student and internship years, I was investing hundreds of euros at a time, scraped together from part-time work and internship pay. That was enough to get started and learn the mechanics, but the amounts were small by necessity. And during the months of job searching after graduation, new investments had nearly stopped entirely.
€2,800/month was a different reality. After rent, food, and basic expenses, I had genuine investable income for the first time. Not huge amounts — I wasn’t living with my parents and saving everything — but consistent, predictable capital that I could deploy month after month.
This is where the flywheel concept I talk about in my company analyses becomes viscerally real. The flywheel has three forces: new capital you add, dividends you reinvest, and organic dividend growth from companies raising their payouts. During the job search, the first force (new capital) was nearly zero. Once the salary kicked in, it had real power behind it. Combined with the other two forces — which had been building for three years already — the acceleration became noticeable almost immediately.
The Dividends — Breaking €1,000 for the First Time
Total dividend income for 2024: €1,077.84
That number deserves a moment. Let me put it in context.
In year one, earning €22.70 felt like a milestone because it proved the system worked. Breaking €1,000 felt like a milestone because it proved the system scales. A thousand euros in passive income is no longer a rounding error. It’s a month’s grocery budget. It’s a short holiday. It’s a real number with real purchasing power.
The Dutch Core Kept Delivering
The Dutch holdings I’d built over the previous three years continued to form the bulk of my income. Shell, ING Group, NN Group, KPN, and Ahold Delhaize all paid their dividends on schedule, many with increases over the prior year.
NN Group was a particular highlight. The company’s progressive dividend policy delivered another increase, and combined with the shares I’d accumulated, it was becoming one of my largest income contributors. What I’d learned about how insurance company dividends work — the role of Operating Capital Generation and solvency ratios — gave me confidence that this income stream was structurally sound.
Ahold Delhaize continued to play its role perfectly: the boring, reliable grocery company that never makes headlines but never disappoints either. During those long months of job searching, having positions like this — companies where the dividend feels almost guaranteed because people will always need to buy food — provided genuine psychological comfort. When your career feels uncertain, a portfolio full of steady payers is an emotional anchor.
KPN also kept doing what it does best. My 500 shares, accumulated since my very first purchase in March 2021, were now generating meaningful annual income from a company that pays like clockwork. The telecom subscription model is exactly the kind of recurring revenue that makes dividend payments predictable — and after four years of owning KPN, that predictability felt earned.
The US Sleeve — Income With Growing Questions
The US BDC positions (Main Street Capital, Ares Capital, Prospect Capital) continued to pump out frequent dividends. The monthly and quarterly payments from these holdings kept the income flowing between the Dutch companies’ payment dates, creating the near-weekly dividend income stream I’d first experienced in year three.
But my confidence in the US high-yield sleeve was more nuanced by this point. The withholding tax drag was a constant irritation — every US dividend arrived with 15% already deducted. Prospect Capital’s management decisions continued to raise questions. And I was increasingly aware that some of these high yields existed specifically because the market was pricing in risk that I might be underestimating.
This is the yield trap awareness that takes years of real experience to develop. Reading about it is one thing. Watching a position in your own portfolio pay a high yield while the share price slowly erodes is another.
The Growth — 50% Year-Over-Year
| Metric | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Year 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dividend income | €22.70 | €534 | €719.67 | €1,077.84 |
| YoY growth | — | +2,254% | +35% | +50% |
| Cumulative dividends | €22.70 | ~€557 | €1,272 | €2,350 |
The 50% year-over-year jump was the largest since the year one to year two explosion. The full-time salary enabled larger investments once it kicked in, the companies in my portfolio were raising their payouts, and the compounding effect of three years of reinvested dividends was starting to show in the numbers.
The December Diversification
Toward the end of 2024, with a few months of full-time salary behind me and a growing sense of what I wanted my portfolio to become, I made a move that marked a clear departure from my previous approach. In a single day in December, I bought small starter positions across more than a dozen new companies — spanning Europe and the United States.
The list included names like BASF, DHL Group, Hugo Boss, Bouygues, and Orange on the European side, and Bank of America, Leggett & Platt, NatWest, and several smaller income plays on the US side. Each position was small — one to three shares — but together they represented a deliberate strategy: cast a wide net, see which companies I want to build larger positions in, and start collecting dividends from a broader base.
This was a different mentality from my earlier years. In year one, I bought a few companies and went deep. In year two, I added a handful more. The December 2024 spree was more like planting seeds across a garden — small initial investments that I could nurture into larger positions once I’d watched how they performed and how comfortable I felt holding them.
Some of these positions were also my first ventures into sectors I hadn’t owned before: chemicals (BASF), logistics (DHL Group), fashion (Hugo Boss), construction and telecoms (Bouygues), and traditional banking beyond ING (Bank of America, NatWest). This sector diversification was intentional — I’d learned from building my Dutch core that spreading income across different parts of the economy makes the overall stream more resilient.
What the Career Detour Taught Me About Investing
Here’s something I didn’t expect: the frustration of my year-long job search actually made me a better investor.
When you apply for dozens of jobs and get rejected from nearly all of them, you learn something about the difference between what you want and what the market values. I wanted to build Android apps. The market wanted Angular developers. Stubbornly holding out for the “perfect” opportunity would have meant more months of unemployment and zero income to invest.
The parallel to investing is direct. You can hold out for the “perfect” stock at the “perfect” price — or you can deploy capital into good-enough opportunities and let compounding do its work. Perfection is the enemy of progress in both careers and portfolios.
Taking the Angular job wasn’t settling. It was recognizing that building skills, earning income, and making forward progress is more valuable than waiting for ideal conditions that might never arrive. The same applies to investing: starting with KPN at €2.92 wasn’t the optimal entry point for building a dividend empire. But it was the entry point that got me started, and four years later, that imperfect beginning has produced over €2,350 in passive income.
There’s another parallel too. During the months without full-time income, my portfolio kept paying me. Not much — but the dividends kept arriving regardless of my employment status. That experience crystallized why I’m building this portfolio in the first place. A salary depends on an employer choosing to keep you. Dividends depend on companies selling products that people need. One can disappear overnight. The other is far more resilient.
The Emotional Milestone — When Passive Income Becomes Real
€1,077.84 divided by 12 is about €90 per month. That’s not financial independence. But it’s a number that covers real expenses. My phone bill, my internet, my gym membership, my streaming subscriptions — all covered by money I didn’t work for.
There’s a psychological threshold that gets crossed somewhere between €50 and €100 per month in passive income. Below that, it feels like a hobby. Above it, it feels like the beginning of something that could actually change your life. Year four is when I crossed that threshold.
I started thinking differently. Not “how much can I save this month?” but “how many more shares do I need before my dividends cover my rent?” Not “what should I spend my bonus on?” but “if I invest my bonus, how much additional annual income does that create?”
This shift in thinking — from spending to planting — is the real return on four years of dividend investing. The €2,350 in cumulative dividends is nice. The mental framework that will guide my financial decisions for the next 40 years is priceless.
Looking Ahead
At the end of year four, I was 24 years old with a growing career in tech, a dividend portfolio producing over €1,000 per year in passive income, and a clear sense of direction. The Dutch core — Ahold Delhaize, KPN, ING, NN Group, Shell — remained the foundation. The US BDC positions contributed income but needed reassessing. And the December diversification spree had planted seeds across a dozen new companies that I’d spend the next year tending.
The portfolio wasn’t perfect. Some positions needed pruning. The overall allocation could be more intentional. But the system was working, the income was growing, and the flywheel was spinning faster every year.
Year five would bring the biggest jump yet — more than doubling my annual dividend income. But that’s a story for another post.
Read how it all started: My First Year of Dividend Investing — €22.70 Received
Read the previous chapter: My Third Year of Dividend Investing — €719.67 Received
