Cisco and Ben for Dividend Growth

Boyhood Memories

We did not watch much television when I was a boy living in Naperville, Illinois. My parents knew that sitting in front of the “boob tube” was a huge waste of time. As a family we watched Gunsmoke and Dragnet. Sometimes our parents would let us watch Saturday morning shows, including Roy Rogers, Sky King, Zorro, Rin Tin Tin, and Poncho and Cisco. The Cisco Kid was “the Robin Hood of the old West.” One line that they repeated often was, “Oh Poncho” and then “Oh Cisco!”

Modern Cisco (Ticker CSCO)

Whenever my brain hears the word “Cisco” two things come to mind. One is Cisco the Kid. The other is a good dividend growth technology company, Cisco Systems. Today I sold 200 of my 500 CSCO shares so that I could buy another good dividend growth financial stock in a different sector.

Ben Franklin and his Double Spectacles

When I hear the words “Ben Franklin” I think of a couple of things. I think of “a penny saved is a penny earned.” But apparently Ben never said that. According to the internet, the source of all great fact-checking, “Benjamin Franklin never actually said this, one of the adages most often attributed to him. He did, however, write in the 1737 Poor Richard’s Almanack: ‘A penny saved is two pence clear.’”

I also appreciate my bifocals, and I have Ben to thank for his foresight. (Pun intended.) “Like most of us, Franklin found that his eyesight was getting worse as he got older, and he grew both near-sighted and far-sighted. Tired of switching between two pairs of eyeglasses, he invented ‘double spectacles,’ or what we now call bifocals. He had the lenses from his two pairs of glasses – one for reading and one for distance – sliced in half horizontally and then remade into a single pair, with the lens for distance at the top and the one for reading at the bottom.” – The Franklin Institute web page (https://www.fi.edu/benjamin-franklin/inventions.)

Cisco and Ben Dividend Growth Comparison

Bear in mind that neither CSCO nor BEN are likely to have wonderful growth. My goal isn’t to see our portfolio of investments appreciate dramatically in value. The primary goal is dividend income that grows year-after-year.