How much do I really have to invest to live off dividends?

Here is a Compound Interest Calculator to help you do the calculation:

Compound Interest Calculator on The Calculator Site

To grow to about $750k 15 years later, assuming no initial lump sum investment, only monthly DCA in an investment of 4% total return, you need to DCA $3060 per month:

You can play with the various parameters such as initial lump sum investment, projected returns, time horizon, monthly DCA amount to estimate your projected portfolio value at the end.

Hi Anon,

Yup, everything you've said is true! If you really want to estimate how much capital you need to invest rather than the final sum of your investments, you'd need to factor in your monthly contribution sum and estimate the dividend yield + capital growth of your investments over the next 15 years.

If you want to do this accurately, it means you need to be able to predict the market reasonably well for the next 15 years because that will give you an idea of the expected dividend yield + capital growth. Otherwise, for simplicity, you can just assume arbitrary values. A simple financial calculator should be able to solve this for you. Ie initial value = $X (current portfolio value), final value = $750k, n = 15 years, r = total % expected annual returns

Hope this helps!

Regards,

thefrugalstudent