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During this 2026 Tax Season, I keep wanting to continue my IRA series and cover more items and nuances, but things keep popping up. For example, the market cooling making me re-evaluate my snowball experiment fund choices.
So I wanted to dig into some meat before I pivot back into the IRA stuff. I have two issues that I think I need to tackle at the same time. The first is that my intention with the entire snowball has been to get a fund to reach self actualization, generate enough dividend each time it pays to buy 1 more share of itself, then roll the rest into more funds. This is my Self-Funding Threshold that I’m using to plot my diversification and security of my portfolio.
The more I’ve lingered on this, I realized I’m missing something. DRIP (Dividend Reinvestment Plan) is pretty efficient, it rolls your entire dividend into the same stock or fund immediately. The problem is nothing I’ve found lets me DRIP 1 share, or even force DRIP whole shares.
This has been resulting in me buying 1 stock of each self funding stock every time the dividend pays. For my weekly payers, at Robinhood, that’s annoying, but kind of important with how fast their NAV decays, and part of why I’ll be altering my plan if February tanks as hard as January. For the monthly funds, I think I’ve found a much better plan. Instead of buying 1 share per month for 12 months. I should just front load it all. Once a fund reaches self-funding, I’ll use left over dividends (like the $140+ from EARN) to buy 12 shares of it and stop worrying about 1 share a month until January 2027. This way I can more quickly pivot 100% of the dividends produced into more funds that I need to prioritize for both diversification and income.
The second issue is fund choices. Highly negative growth is a promise that dividends will recede. My math shows that OXSQ is the shortest single path to $1000 a month at Vanguard, needing roughly $50,000 invested, but its growth chart is a steady decline. That same amount of money in QQQI, or even O results in much more growth, with decent dividends.
| Ticker | Dividend | Shares @ $50,000 | Monthly Dividend | 12 month growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OXSQ | 0.035 | 26,274 | $919.59 | $2.50 – $1.92 (-23%) |
| O | 0.27 | 787 | $212.49 | $55-$63 (+15%) |
| QQQI | 0.6359 | 935 | $594.56 | $52-$53 (Flat) |
If OXSQ trends down 23% again, that $50,000 will lose $11,500 by this time next year, but it produced $11,035 in dividends. Which totaled -$465. While O gains $7,500 in growth, $2,549 in dividends, totaling +$10,049. QQQI gained nothing and produced $7,134 in dividends. All three monthly paying. For an income snowball. I think the pivot for a self funding QQQI after my Vanguard 9 are not only self funded but at their 2026 + 12 shares is a no brainer, though it does take $4,500 to reach self funding at current prices.
I’m still looking, and planning at how my strategy might alter with Robinhood contributions, but while I’m busying catching up on my 2025 IRA funding. This gives me a solid “whats next” plan for my Vanguard Snowball.
~~Miniwing~~
Stoic, Investor, Parent, Wordsmith