I Own 2,444 Shares of SCHD. Here's What It Actually Pays Me.

Every Friday I buy a thousand dollars of stock. Doesn't matter what the market did that week. Doesn't matter what the headlines say. Friday comes, the money goes in.

A big chunk of that has been going into one position for three and a half years. Right now I own two thousand four hundred forty-four shares of SCHD. And I'm about to show you exactly what that pays me — the real number, off my actual statements, not a calculator on some website.

I'll warn you now. It's less than you think. When you see it, your first reaction is going to be "that's it?" And I want you to sit with that reaction, because understanding why that number is small, and why I keep buying anyway, is worth a lot more to you than the number itself.

The Position, No Hiding

Two thousand four hundred forty-four shares. My average cost is twenty-seven dollars and forty-seven cents a share. Do that math, and it's roughly sixty-seven thousand dollars in this one fund.

I started building it at the beginning of 2023, so we're about three and a half years in.

One quick note before somebody does the math and gets confused. SCHD did a three-for-one split back in October of 2024. So if you remember SCHD trading way higher than twenty-seven bucks in 2023, you're not crazy — my share count tripled, my cost per share got divided by three. Same money, more shares. Nothing actually changed.

And if you don't know what SCHD even is, the short version is this: it's a fund that holds about a hundred US companies, and to even be eligible, a company has to have paid a dividend for ten years straight. That's the screen. It isn't chasing the biggest yield on the board. It's holding companies that have already proven they can keep paying.

What Does It Actually Pay?

SCHD pays four times a year. Here are my last four payments, straight off the statements.

September 2025: five hundred forty-two dollars and sixty cents. December 2025: six hundred eighty-seven dollars and fifty-six cents. March of this year: six hundred seven dollars and seventy-four cents. And this past June: six hundred forty-one dollars and sixty-seven cents.

Add those four up, and it's two thousand four hundred seventy-nine dollars and fifty-seven cents over the last twelve months.

Divide that by twelve, and you're at about two hundred seven dollars a month.

Now look at those four numbers again, because I want to be straight with you about something. That is not a clean line going up. December was the biggest, then March dropped, then June came back up. Two things are going on there. One, the fund doesn't pay the same amount every quarter — December tends to run heavier. Two, and this is the part people miss, my share count was different at every single one of those payments. I was buying the whole time.

So you can't line those four numbers up next to each other and call it dividend growth. It isn't a fair comparison, and I'm not going to pretend it is.

Two Percent

So, two hundred seven dollars a month. My goal is ten thousand a month in dividends.

Which means my single biggest dividend growth position — sixty-seven thousand dollars in, three and a half years of buying every Friday — is covering about two percent of the goal.

Two percent.

I could dress that up to sound better, but I'm not going to. That's where I actually am.

And here's the only honest conclusion I can draw from that number. I am not getting to ten thousand a month by buying shares a thousand dollars at a time. The math doesn't work. Not in any timeline I care about.

The Businesses Are the Engine

What gets me there is the business side. The next ten years, I have to absolutely crush it as an entrepreneur — build companies, grow them, and move that money into positions like this one.

I'm not counting on luck, and I'm not counting on picking some rocket ship. I'm counting on the one thing I've actually done for twenty years, which is grow companies — the same thing every company inside this fund had to do to earn its spot in it.

The dividends aren't the engine. My businesses are the engine. This position is just where the money lands.

The Only Position I Auto-Reinvest

Here's something about this position that's true of nothing else I own.

SCHD is the only thing in my entire portfolio that I automatically reinvest. Every dividend it pays buys more shares of itself, and I never touch it. Every other dividend I collect, and I collect from a lot of places, comes to me as cash.

People ask why. It isn't complicated.

I have complete confidence in this position long-term. Not confidence that it beats the market this year — confidence that in fifteen years it's still there, still paying, still raising. That's a different kind of confidence, and it's the only kind that matters for something you plan to hold forever.

The second reason is about price. A lot of what I own swings hard. There are stocks I like where I look at the price on some random Tuesday and think, " Not today; that's too expensive. I'm not buying up here. I have to make a decision.

SCHD doesn't do that to me. It's stable enough that I'm comfortable buying it at basically any price, any week of the year. So I don't need to be in the room for that decision at all. I let it run on autopilot.

Everything else, I want my hands on. Every Friday I look at what I'm holding, and I put that week's thousand plus any extra dividends wherever I think I'm getting the most value right now. That's an active call, and I want to make it. But I don't want to make forty active calls. I want to make a few good ones. SCHD earned its automation by being the one position I never have to think about.

Where I Got It Wrong

Now the part where I tell you I got something wrong.

This whole position sits in a regular taxable account. Not a retirement account. Which means every one of those payments I just read you got taxed the year I received it, whether I spent it or not. And I didn't spend it. It went right back into buying more shares and gets taxed anyway.

There's a reason I did it that way, and I stand behind it. I need access to this money. I'm an entrepreneur. Things come up, opportunities come up, and money locked away until I'm sixty is money I can't move. I've also said before that eventually I plan to borrow against this position instead of selling it, and that's not really something you do inside a retirement account.

So that's the defense, and here's the confession.

If I could go back and do it over, I'd have been putting SCHD inside a retirement account for the last fifteen years. Not this position — this one's only three and a half years old. I mean, if I'd started back when this fund launched and had the discipline to shelter it, fifteen years of reinvesting without getting taxed along the way is a real difference. That's the mistake I made, and it was never the fund. It was the address I gave it.

So if you're young and you've got room in a retirement account, that's where something like this belongs. Learn that from me instead of learning it the way I did.

Behind My Own Goal

One last honest thing.

My goal was three thousand shares by the end of this year. I'm sitting at two thousand four hundred forty-four. That's five hundred fifty-six shares short with a few months left, and I'll tell you exactly why I'm behind.

I started GLZD, a men's beauty brand. And manufacturing a physical product can eat cash faster than you think. Every dollar that went into inventory this year is a dollar that didn't buy SCHD on a Friday.

If I hadn't started that brand, I'd already be at three thousand shares. I'd be there today.

I'm not upset about it. That was a choice, and I made it on purpose. Here's how I think about risk. I take very little risk with my investments like SCHD — it's a boring fund with a hundred companies, ten years of paid dividends required just to get in the door. Almost no risk there, on purpose. But I'll take real risk on a business, because a business is the only thing that can get me to ten thousand a month faster than buying a thousand dollars of stock every Friday at forty-nine.

If you start younger and invest smarter, you won't have to be in the same position I'm in today.

Boring investments. Aggressive business. That's my whole strategy.

So that's the real number. About two hundred seven a month, off sixty-seven thousand dollars, three and a half years in, and I'm behind my own share goal.

Not that impressive. But that's my real story.

Watch the full video above, or on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YPkL0BibgL8