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Beginner dividend investor - first steps
Question 1: How do I start? or "the broker" problem Get an online broker.  You can do a wire transfer to fund the account from your bank. Question 2: What criticism do you have for my plan? Dividend investing is smart.  The only problem is that everyone's currently doing it.  There is an insatiable demand for yield, not just individual investors but investment firms and pension funds that need to generate income to fund retirements for their clients.  As more investors purchase the shares of dividend paying securities, the share price goes up.  As the share price goes up, the dividend yield goes down.  Same for bonds.  For example, if a stock pays $1 per year in dividends, and you purchase the shares at $20/each, then your yearly return (not including share price fluctuations) would be 1/20 = 5%.  But if you end up having to pay $30 per share, then your yearly return would be 1/30 or 3.3% yield.  The more money you invest, the bigger this difference becomes; with $100K invested you'd make about $1.6K more at 5%.  (BTW, don't put all your money in any small group of stocks, you want to diversify).  ETFs work the same way, where new investors buying the shares cause the custodian to purchase more shares of the underlying securities, thus driving up the price up and yield down.  Instead of ETFs, I'd have a look at something called closed end funds, or CEFs which also hold an underlying basket of securities but often trade at a discount to their net asset value, unlike ETFs.  CEFs usually have higher yields than their ETF counterparts.  I can't fully describe the ins and outs here in this space, but you'll definately want to do some research on them to better understand what you're buying, and HOW to successfully buy (ie make sure you're buying at a historically steep discount to NAV [https://seekingalpha.com/article/1116411-the-closed-end-fund-trifecta-how-to-analyze-a-cef] and where to screen [https://www.cefconnect.com/closed-end-funds-screener] Regardless of whether you decide to buy stocks, bonds, ETFs, CEFs, sell puts, or some mix, the best advice I can give is to a) diversify (personally, with a single RARE exception, I never let any one holding account for more than 2% of my total portfolio value), and b) space out your purchases over time.  b) is important because we've been in a low interest rate environment since about 2009, and when the risk free rate of return is very low, investors purchase stocks and bonds which results in lower yields.  As the risk free rate of return is expected to finally start slowly rising in 2017 and gradually over time, there should be gradual downward pressure (ie selling) on the prices of dividend stocks and especially bonds meaning you'll get better yields if you wait.  Then again, we could hit a recession and the central banks actually lower rates which is why I say you want to space your purchases out.