Yeah – I fail at the fixed amount of money too (but not too often thankfully, and it is not the market that determines the change). And I haven’t seen RobinHood before, but it is defiantly going to change the way I do DCA if there is no fine print that causes problems! It looks fantastic.

Forgot to add that Iike the idea of taking the brokerage percentage of the initial years dividends… 🙂

Hi Tom,

DCA doesn’t need to be monthly it can be anytime period where you invest a fixed amount of money. 🙂

After crunching some numbers I’m going to start investing in chunks of 5k per quater.. I’ve been 2k every month or so before and the fees are way too high. Can’t wait for RobinHood to launch in Australia… Our brokers need a shake up.

Thanks Rohan! Believe it or not I don’t know the current numbers exactly (bad Tom). I know when I calculated them originally a $10k investment would hit the point where the flat fee equated to the percentage charged for amounts above that. With the initial flat fee I was paying the same amount no matter how much I bought. Like I said, I am not doing it regularly enough because of this. I am also not currently diversified well enough. To change both of those I will have to lower my expectations around fee percentages.

Currently they are between $1500 and $5k (occasionally $10k, but that is more one of than DCA). Many things I read seem to talk about DCA being regular monthly investments. Unfortunately mine are more typically every quarter to year, but given I plan to own them all (pending changes) for a long time, I see it as just stretching out the DCA timeline. If it was more frequently, or with a larger number of shares, then I would probably have to do some more thinking around frequency/amount vs fee.

Almost everything I own pays a dividend, so one way to calculate the return is to just take the brokerage percent off the initial years dividends. If that is not negative, then the first year pays for any brokerage (and hopefully more) while allowing the underlying price to hopefully rise as well.

Great job with the goals. A questions about DCA, what size packets are you investing in? I was comfortable paying 2% brokerage but slowly am moving into larger size investments and paying 1% commission.

Regards,
Rohan

Interested to know when you say declining rental market, are you talking about yields? I suppose for me I’m really getting clear on what the end game i.e. residual or investment income is and am then going to align investments with that.. Of course capital growth is nice and important as well

Good work on some of the other goals as well, especially the holiday one! 🙂

One thing that struck me is that you are maxing out your super. Is there a reason for that? There’s obviously a tax advantage but I don’t like the fact that the money is locked away for such a long time. Although, it seems like SMSF rules are allowing more and more flexibility with what can be done with your super funds.