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Hi, I'm Onno Scheffers

I've been working as an Independent Software Developer for many years and just 2 years ago I never even heard of passive income, can you believe that?

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Onno Scheffers
educate financially

Education

I never saved much money in my life or put much money aside for retirement. Then one day I decided I should dive in and get serious about it. I wanted to be able to retire without financial problems and I wanted to leave something behind for my family after I pass away. It takes time to build capital and I felt like I was wasting precious time.

Sadly none of the 'normal' retirement plans made much sense to me. That's when I started reading books to educate myself financially. Some books really clicked with me, such as "The Richest Man in Babylon", "Rich Dad, Poor dad" & "The Stock Market Cash Flow".

I was flabbergasted. I was reading things in these books I never knew before or just never thought about and recognized I had been doing pretty much everything in my life wrong when it came to finances. I learned to look at things differently and a lot of things I always took for granted suddenly seemed backwards.

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Earn Income Working.

I learned you could earn income without actually working. Sure, I knew about popular musicians that had royalties coming in or famous inventors who kept making money on their inventions well into their old days. But I never figured it was within reach for me.

Yes, I was making a couple of bucks per year in rent on a savings account, but I never quite took that seriously since it wouldn't cover more than a couple of cups of coffee at Starbucks.

And I sure as hell didn't know they were calling it passive income. I just spent most of the money coming in on enjoying life in the here and now.

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Building Passive

As I kept reading more and more, I got convinced building passive income was the path forward for me if I ever wanted to have a chance of a comfortable retirement. And even though many of the authors in the books I read recommended buying real-estate with 'good debt', I shied away from taking out loans and was always drawn much more to paper assets.

Then I read the Dutch book 'Beter Beleggen dan de Bank', which roughly translates to "Invest Better than the Bank Does".

I found out there are actually pretty well-paying dividend stocks that easily pay yields of 8-12% per year, which absolutely blew my mind.

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DiviDragon -

So I subscribed to a model portfolio provided by the author of that book and started investing in stock that payed dividend. I simply loved it and investing turned into a new hobby of mine. Soon more and more people around me started to do dividend-investing as well.

The one thing I noticed was they all tried to manage their portfolio in self-created spreadsheets of varying complexity and they all had troubles getting accurate predictions of how much money would come in each week or month. The brokers typically only focus on capital gain and provide little information about dividends.

Now, how useful is income if you do not know when it comes in or how much you're getting? So I had already written a very early version of DiviDragon for my own personal use and when I showed it around to other people they expressed interest in using it as well. So I decided to partner up with another developer to turn DiviDragon into an actual product that everyone can enjoy.

I hope it is as useful for you as it's been to us.

Richard Jaspers

Hi, I'm Richard Jaspers

Like Onno, I've been working as an independent Software Developer for many years now and I've just recently learned and read things about passive income thanks to him. Wait, just recently?

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What About ?

Yes, recently. I have tried the stock market before, hoping to make a profit from the rising stock prices. After several sleepless nights and a rollercoaster of portfolio values I quit, luckily with some profit. But never again!

Now, back to 2021. Since interest rates are dropping close to 0% and the stock market seemingly no reliable option, there's no easy way to gain profit from your saving. Oh wait, there's also something like a pension which must be taken care of for the future; still no good retirement plans available.

Income Actually Working?

This is where Onno kicked in. He has been doing great results on high dividend stocks and proposed reading the same book he read. Well, it was a true eye opener. Gaining 8-12% results on your investment and using the interest leverage this would make some serious money over time allowing me to get a passive income and a decent pension. No focus on stock prices which caused me some sleepless nights but steady results with monthly/quarterly payments.

So after some hesitation about entering the stock market again and reading this book I started with an account at a broker and started my first dividend stock investment. After some time the balance on my account grew with the received dividend. All while doing nothing. How great is that?

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Building

Unfortunately the broker doesn't offer any insight of cash flow growth or decent reports of expected dividend income or any predictions at all. It's mostly focussed on stock prices and that's not what I want.

Onno noticed more people were having the same issues and had already made a first version of DiviDragon for his personal use. So, when he asked me to join him, I said yes!

I'd love to help him turn DiviDragon into an actual product that everyone can enjoy!

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