Waterfall Portfolio - An Aggressive Income and Dividend Portfolio
I like thinking about asset allocations, and I innovative ideas, so, this is my attempt at creating an aggressive income and dividend portfolio. You usually don't see the word aggressive combined with income and dividends. A portfolio like this might be good for those with a medium to long time horizon and an appetite for high risk and high returns, and also wish to generate a steady stream of income.
The theory of the "Waterfall Portfolio" is that a series of income-generating assets cascades income into a cash allocation (money market account) that can then be allocated to investments or used as income to live off of. The assets are:
Allocation Asset
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13% Money market account, 4.62% interest
14% WTDHYE - WisdomTree DIEFA High Yld Equity, 4.65% div+3.35%
14% DODIX - Dodge & Cox Income (bonds), 5% interest
12% WTHYE - WisdomTree High-Yld Equity 4.05% div +3.95%
15% EGLRX - Alpine International Real Estate 5% dividends +3%
32% prosper loans - 11% interest (mix of A and AA fundings)
Note, I broke the returns into a interest income or dividend portion and a growth portion. They are derived based on the "return with 3% inflation" estimates from PortfolioSolutions. I'd expect this portfolio to generate around 8.1% total annual returns over the long term, though anything could happen in reality. In addition, due to the prosper loan payoffs, a continuous stream of cash amounting to around 2.8% of the total prosper loan amounts is generated, which can be reinvested in prosper or shifted to other investments for rebalancing as needed. One WisdomTree ETF covers U.S. markets and one covers foreign markets, so that there is some geographical diversification. Also, the Alpine International Real Estate fund provides further geographical diversification, so a total of about 29% of the allocation above is international. Since these ETFs and funds invest in companies, they face stock-market volatility and risks. The other assets, the money market fund, bond fund (DODIX), and prosper loans, provide stability.
The weightings are based on the dividend or interest portion, as a fraction of the total expected dividends or interest. Probably a more conservative allocation would be equal weighting in all categories. I'd recommend rebalancing every half year or year to make sure allocations don't go too out of sync with the targets. The amount of risk (and returns) can be of course further tuned by selecting higher risk, higher return loans on the Prosper loan segment.
(DISCLOSURE: I am considering some or all of the above investments in my own portfolio)