Good day. I’m Miniwing and this is supposed to be a blog about short quick thoughts on my journey to Financial Independence. I plan to track down side hustles, acquire extra scratch and get to a goal of replacing my day job with passive income. Like many people who discovered this idea from Mr. Money Mustache I know that frugality can speed up this process, but I want to find other ways of accelerating my journey and preparing my kids to fiscal responsibility.

So over the last 8 weeks I have dug into dividend producing stocks and funds. I took about $14,000 I had in long term growth funds in my taxable brokerage account and started researching high paying dividends. In order to catapult my experiment I started with $10,000 in EARN. My goal was to find something that seemed to be on the border between risky and profitable. EARN was only $5.50 a share which meant I could stuff money from couch cushions into it, and it had not decreased it’s dividend payout in over 5 years. EARN pays $0.08 every month per share. They used to be REIT based but now focus primarily on debt purchases. Previous stability does not promise future rewards however and the goal of any individual entity investing should always be to diversify. Using my intended snowball strategy my EARN will purchase exactly 1 share of itself every time it pays me a dividend and the rest will go into the next fund/stock that will grow this income generating experiment.

As of today 1/18/26 I have 1859 shares producing $148.72 a month, which leaves me roughly $140 to put into other funds after it buys 1 more of itself. That’s around $1700 a year.

~~Miniwing~~