Send a text

Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 263 on February 21st of 2026.

My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books".

How much thought have you put in choosing the bank where you deposit your money? What bank stocks have you chosen to invest in? A quick Google query as to your bank’s ratio of uninsured deposits is either going to reassure you or concern you. Those banks reporting a ratio greater than 50% in uninsured deposits to total deposit have an elevated risk.

Bank failures can occur just like they did in 2008 when cheap credit and a failure to determine the credit worthiness of home buyers created an inflated housing bubble. When that bubble burst home buyers lost their mortgage deposits and homeowners saw the equity in their houses disappear. Business and consumer bankruptcies and foreclosures spiked. Mortgage-backed securities failed resulting in a recession leading to the Lehman Brothers bank failure. This was the largest bank failure in US history.

In today's podcast we examine the 5 safest banks in North America and the 5 largest banks in North America.

Ian Duncan MacDonald
Author and Commercial Risk Consultant,
President of Informus Inc
2 Vista Humber Drive
Toronto, Ontario
Canada, M9P 3R7
Toronto Telephone - 416-245-4994
New York Telephone - 929-800-2397
imacd@informus.ca

Send a text

Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 262 on February 14th of 2026.

My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books".

Realizing a good dividend income from a financially strong portfolio does not mean you can ignore unnecessary drains on your income. For example, have you been scammed, conned, cheated, robbed, or otherwise relieved of money today, yesterday, last week or last month by businesses you thought you could trust? Hopefully the loss was only a few hundred dollars.

Scammers know that people tend to be more cautious with larger sums. They deliberately keep their scams under a few hundred dollars to remove your incentive to fight to recover what you have lost. The scammers that you will usually encounter aim for high volumes of small, scams rather than a single big one. They count on you treating your loss as a lesson learned and walking away. This allows the scammers to continue scamming others.

In today's podcast I will explain how you can recover your money from scammers.

Ian Duncan MacDonald
Author and Commercial Risk Consultant,
President of Informus Inc
2 Vista Humber Drive
Toronto, Ontario
Canada, M9P 3R7
Toronto Telephone - 416-245-4994
New York Telephone - 929-800-2397
imacd@informus.ca

Send us a text

Welcome to Safe Dividend Investing’s Podcast # 261 on February 7th of 2026.

My name is Ian Duncan MacDonald, and I am an author of 7 investment books. My seventh investment book, Achieving Financial Independence Safely - 200 NYSE Stocks Analyzed and Scored" became available January 3rd on Amazon. You can easily find it by searching in Amazon or Google for "Ian Duncan MacDonald books". I will maintain the introductory price for this new book until I have finished contacting all the previous buyers of my books have been contacted and given a chance to purchase it at its introductory price.

In this podcast I discuss the 4% rule. It advises that once you retire you should only sell off 4% of your portfolio each year if you want that portfolio to provide you with a steady income until you are ninety. However, I have found over the last 20 years that if you carefully invest equally in 20 financially strong companies that have long histories of paying high dividends you will find that your dividend income and the value of your portfolio will almost automatically keep increasing.

There is no reason your portfolio and your dividend income can not keep growing until the day die. Years will go by, where by living within your dividend income you will have no need to sell stocks to live well. Your income will rise ahead of inflation and if you live to 110 your portfolio will still be growing.

I wonder if promoting the 4% liquidation rule was a strategy spread by investment advisors to assure them of a reliable income from your portfolio for the next 30 years? If your dividend income is going to roll in automatically from your carefully chosen dividend stocks, what are you paying an advisor tens of thousands of dollars for every year? It has been my experience that few investment advisors know much about dividend investing other than it is a threat to their income.

My books are not get-rich-quick books. They are about showing people just like you how to select, from the thousands of stocks available, those few that are financially strong with long histories of paying ever rising high dividends with ever increasing share prices. My objective is to give investors the confidence to consider building safe stock portfolios as self-directed investors. Once your financial independence is realized, you will, like me, enjoy a generous, reliable, income for the rest of your life.

Please, visit my website www.informus.ca if you wish to learn more about me and my writing.

Ian Duncan MacDonald
Author and Commercial Risk Consultant,
President of Informus Inc
2 Vista Humber Drive
Toronto, Ontario
Canada, M9P 3R7
Toronto Telephone - 416-245-4994
New York Telephone - 929-800-2397
imacd@informus.ca