One of the first comments on my Five Levels of SCHD video stopped me. A guy wrote: “I buy one share a week. I’m fifty-four, and this goes into my Roth IRA. Also, I’m not rich. I have thirty-eight shares currently.”
I read that twice, because I’m about to turn fifty. By the time you’re reading this, I probably already have. So I took his plan and ran it on a guy exactly my age. Start at fifty with zero shares of SCHD. Buy one share every single week. Stop at sixty-five.
Where it lands surprised me. It’s a number you’ve maybe already heard from me. And then there’s a second number that made me a little mad, and I’ll show you that one too. And later I’ll tell you why I know exactly what starting over late feels like.
What One Share a Week Becomes
Fifteen years of one share a week lands you at about one thousand shares of SCHD. A thousand. That’s Level Four from my Five Levels of SCHD post. From only one share a week.
Now here’s the part I like. Fifteen years times fifty-two weeks is seven hundred and eighty shares. That’s what you bought with your own money. The other two hundred and twenty or so? You didn’t put in a dime of new money for those. Your reinvested dividends bought them.
Two Numbers: One Is Yours, One Isn’t
Here’s how I want you to think about this. There are two numbers in this plan. One of them is yours, and one of them isn’t.
The share count is yours. How many shares a week, and how many weeks. You control both. If you buy one a week and reinvest the dividends, you land near a thousand shares at sixty-five. And in my model, I hold the yield where it is today. So the price and the dividend grow together, and that thousand-share number stays put no matter how fast SCHD grows.
And the reinvesting kicks in faster than you’d think. Somewhere around two and a half to three years in, a typical quarterly payment is buying you a whole new share on its own.
Now, I know this doesn’t sound like much, but you can easily double or triple the number to see your results. Doing the math with one share also makes this easy to understand.
Anyways, the dividend is not yours. How fast it grows is up to the companies inside SCHD, and which ones the index swaps in every year. That’s the second number.
The Dividend Growth Number Nobody Shows You
If you’ve seen an SCHD projection that looked amazing, check which growth rate it used. A lot of them plug in the ten-year dividend growth rate. For SCHD, that’s been about eleven percent a year. That’s the number that made this fund famous. And probably one of the reasons I own it, and most likely you do too if you’re reading this.
Over the last twelve months, as I’m recording this? About two percent. And the June payment was actually a little smaller than the June before it. (I went into this slowdown in my post on SCHD hitting an all-time high.) SCHD just announced its next dividend, and I will talk about that in an upcoming video.
So I ran the thousand shares three ways. At the ten-year rate, at sixty-five those shares pay you about four hundred and ten dollars a month. At the three-year rate, about eight percent, it’s about two hundred and eighty-four. And if the last twelve months are what the next fifteen years look like? About a hundred and twenty-two dollars a month.
Remember, these are the same thousand shares. But not the same money. In the fast-growth version, the price climbed too, so you paid about twice as much for those shares. And honestly, that top case assumes SCHD does even better over the next fifteen years than it did over the last ten. And the last ten were great. (I covered what those ten years really looked like in SCHD for 10 Years: The Numbers Aren’t What You Think.)
And all of those are dollars fifteen years from now. With normal inflation, in today’s money, the range is more like eighty-something dollars a month to under three hundred.
Yeah, inflation sucks!
The Number That Made Me Mad
Looking at the lower SCHD projections. Geez. Well, that’s the number that made me mad. Not because it’s bad. Because the projections that get passed around hardly ever show you the low case.
For what it’s worth, about half of my new money every week goes into SCHD. I’m not quitting it. I’m just not planning my life around the eleven percent.
What This Plan Actually Costs
So what does this plan actually cost? One share of SCHD right now is about thirty-four bucks. That’s today’s price, and it’ll move around. Hopefully up over time. So you’re looking at around seventeen hundred and fifty dollars in the first year.
And the guy in my comments has it in a Roth, which I like. In 2026, if you’re fifty or older and you’re eligible, you can put up to eighty-six hundred dollars a year into an IRA. That includes an extra eleven hundred just for being over fifty. At today’s price, one share a week is using about a fifth of that.
So what if you maxed it? Eighty-six hundred every year, fifty to sixty-five. You’d have put in a hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars. And depending on the dividend growth, at sixty-five that pays you somewhere between about five hundred and about eleven hundred dollars a month. Same fifteen years with five times the effort. That’s the shares lever I want you to think about.
Don’t settle for one share a week if you don’t have to. Find ways to increase that number as fast as you can.
Daily, Weekly, or Monthly?
Somebody else asked me whether it’s better to buy daily, weekly, or monthly. Honestly, over fifteen years, I don’t think that choice matters much. What matters is whether you skip. Pick the schedule you won’t break. Mine is Fridays.
Consistency is key when it comes to investing. Really, consistency is key in all parts of your life. And once you get good at being consistent, all this becomes much easier. Trust me, it took me a while to learn this.
The Guy in My Comments
Now for his actual numbers, because he’s not starting from zero. He’s fifty-four with thirty-eight shares. If he keeps doing one a week to sixty-five, he lands around seven hundred and forty shares. It’s not life-changing, but it’s also not nothing, and he started it at fifty-four.
The Other Lever: Years
Here’s the other lever, and this one’s uncomfortable for a guy my age. Years.
Keep buying one share a week until seventy instead of sixty-five, and the thousand shares becomes about fourteen hundred and fifty. And the income more than doubles in two of my three scenarios. At the ten-year rate, it’s close to a thousand dollars a month. Those last five years do so much because by then you’ve got a big pile of shares, and the dividend on each one has had five more years to grow.
And here’s the number I didn’t want to run. Same plan, one share a week, but you start at thirty-five instead of fifty. OMG, that would make life a lot easier, and if you are in your thirties reading this, please make it make sense. Please!
You’d hit sixty-five with about twenty-six hundred shares. That’s fifteen years I can’t get back. Nobody can. That’s why the best time to start is now!
Why I Know What Starting Over Feels Like
And I know that one personally. Back in 2006 I started an import business called CurrySimple. In 2008, the currency moved against me, and it crushed my margins. And instead of shutting it down, I held on for two more years trying to save it.
By the time it closed in 2010, it had taken my savings. My retirement accounts. My investments. And I’d taken on debt to keep it alive. The only thing I kept was the house. (I told that story in more detail in I Cashed Out My Retirement Twice. Only One Still Hurts.)
So when I talk about starting late, I’m not guessing. Those twenty-five hundred shares of SCHD I talk about are about three and a half years of buying. That didn’t come from a head start. It came from showing up every week after losing basically everything.
What I Took Away
So here’s what I actually took away from running all of this.
At fifty, you don’t fix the plan by finding a better fund. You fix it with the two numbers you control: how many shares a week, and how many years you keep going. The dividend growth rate is going to do whatever it does, and you should plan for the low case, not the high one.
Plan on the hundred and twenty. Be happy with the four hundred.
And that low case is exactly what I’m watching with SCHD’s September payment. If that growth rate really is stalling out, I’m going to show you what it actually paid me on twenty-five hundred shares, and what I’m doing about it.
Run It Yourself in Ten Seconds
Before you go, do this math for yourself. It takes ten seconds.
Take the number of years until you want this money. Multiply by fifty-two. Multiply that by how many shares you buy a week. That’s the floor, the shares you’ll buy with your own money. Then the reinvested dividends add about a fifth on top at ten years, a little over a quarter at fifteen, and around forty percent at twenty. That’s at today’s yield, in a Roth.
Then take that share count and look at it at the low end of the dividend range, not the high end. If you can live with that number, you’ve got a plan.
Or if you don’t want to do all that math, ask an AI assistant or open a spreadsheet. It’s all good. The key is to know the numbers.
So which lever are you pulling, more shares or more years? Comment SHARES or YEARS on the video to let me know.
And if you want to see where your share count puts you right now, that’s my Five Levels of SCHD post.
Watch the full video above, or on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qFFwr4zsDKQ
