2026 Update

[Kerim]

Not sure if anyone will be seeing this, as I've let the site become a ghost town again. My big personal news is that I retired from my way-too-stressful job a few months ago and am coming up for air. I'm going to weigh whether to spend the time and energy to get this site refurbished and active again, or whether to shut it down, sell or give it away. Not sure yet, but advances in AI seem to give me more options than I had even a year or two ago. Since the site generates no revenue, I wasn't going to pay a lot to have someone else do all that work. But AI makes it much easier for me to do a lot of it myself. So we'll see. If any of you are still out there, any thoughts at all are appreciated.

Special thanks to DW for keeping the hope alive here in my absence!

Best to all, 
Kerim

[Dividend Watcher]

Congrats on retirement and reducing your stress level!       It's been a tough adjustment to retirement for me even though I've kept myself busy enough.   

As to the site, I respect whatever choice you make. I'll still keep adding as I am able just in case someone turns up here. I haven't gotten too deeply into my postings as I haven't noticed any visitors the numerous times I've been here except for Baidu, Google and myself. Crimsonghost popped in a while ago for a couple comments but he's gone away again.

Seems a lot of people may have moved on to Pinterest, X, Seeking Alpha, whatever. I haven't because I'm not excited about being tracked and marketed to nor paying for sites that have plenty of advertising already. To me it's a shame, I also prefer the message board interface but that's probably because I'm old and comfortable with it.

Please keep us (me) updated on what your plans are. You have my email address from my profile, I believe, should you need it. Should you need us to chip in for hosting costs, please let us know.

Best of luck.

[Kerim]

Hey DW, and thanks! I'm right there with you on the preferring this format to comment sections and social media. I'm comfortable being a dinosaur. And yeah, this not working thing is weird. Been daydreaming a thread looking at DGI from this side of things. I did it pretty aggressively, and I think it has made the retirement possible, but I'll definitely be living off a mix of capital and dividends, and not dividends alone.

I'm only a few months into this not working thing, and it is definitely weird, but I haven't come close to boredom yet!

[Kerim]

And that "resist and unsubscribe" link is interesting -- thanks!

[Dividend Watcher]

(04-14-2026, 09:18 PM)Kerim Wrote: Hey DW, and thanks! I'm right there with you on the preferring this format to comment sections and social media. I'm comfortable being a dinosaur.

Now that you mention it, the only other social media stuff I do are two sailing forums just like this one and a LinkedIn account that I only look at it when I get a personal message notification in my email. That's only 3x since I've been retired (17 months). I had/have a FB account that I haven't visited in 12 years -- only used that to track my daughter cross-country when she moved to Portland, OR.

P.S. I'll address the "how I'm financing my retirement" later in another thread because it's quite a tale. Just need some time to compose it.

[Kerim]

That would be an interesting topic; maybe I'll consider the same. At 56, I'm still a few years away from being able to tap my tax-deferred accounts, so (hopefully) those will continue to grow and compound for a few years while I lean on already-taxed accounts.

[Kerim]

Further update -- with AI's help, I've updated / overhauled the registration process so that it should be much more smooth now. So if any actual humans show up to join and play, they should have no trouble. The tradeoff could be more bots / spam accounts, but I'll keep an eye on it. Please let me know if you see anything amiss. But at least now I won't have to manually approve registrations, which likely kept some real potential members out. Fingers crossed!

[Dividend Watcher]

Thank you, Kerim!