The median annual income for full-time workers aged 25 to 34 was $57,200 in the second quarter, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means after-tax earnings would be about $43,800 in the worst case scenario. Financial planners generally advise saving 20% of after-tax earnings for retirement, which would be $8,760 per year or $730 per month for the median earner.

Even a percentage of that figure invested wisely could grow into a sizable portfolio given enough time. For instance, history says $500 invested monthly in the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (NYSEMKT: VIG) would be worth about $968,400 after three decades. The portfolio would initially generate about $16,000 per year in dividend income.

However, the underlying investment would continue to grow even without further contributions, so the dividend payout could be even larger by retirement, depending on when that occurs. For instance, the portfolio would reach $1.2 million after three more years, at which point it would generate about $19,800 in annual passive income.

Here are the important details.

The Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF provides diversified exposure to financially stable companies

The Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF tracks U.S. companies that have consistently raised their dividends for at least 10 years. It excludes dividend payers with yields in top 25% to avoid companies with unsustainable payouts or limited growth prospects.

The fund includes 337 domestic companies, comprising value stocks and growth stocks, with a median market capitalization of $197 billion. The dividend yield is currently 1.65%. The 10 largest holdings are listed by weight below:

1. Apple: 4.6%

2. Broadcom: 3.8%

3. Microsoft: 3.7%

4. JPMorgan Chase: 3.5%

5. UnitedHealth Group: 2.9%

6. ExxonMobil: 2.9%

7. Visa: 2.2%

8. Procter & Gamble: 2.2%

9. Johnson & Johnson: 2.2%

10. Mastercard: 2.2%

The Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF lets investors spread money across a group of companies with the financial stability needed to not only pay a regular dividend, but also to raise the payout consistently. It bears a below-average expense ratio of 0.06%, meaning the annual fees on a $10,000 portfolio will total just $6.

How to turn $500 per month into $16,000 in annual dividend income

The Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF has returned 473% since its inception in 2006, assuming dividends were reinvested, which is equivalent to 9.9% annually. At that pace, $500 invested monthly in the ETF would be worth $95,100 in one decade, $339,700 in two decades, and $968,400 in three decades.

As mentioned, the Vanguard ETF currently pays a dividend yield of 1.65%, which is slightly below the 10-year average of 1.9%. But I will use the smaller figure to ensure a conservative estimate. To that end, if dividends are no longer reinvested after three decades, the $968,400 portfolio will generate about $16,000 per year in dividend income.

Story continues

Meanwhile, the underlying investment will continue to grow even without further contributions. For instance, when dividends are excluded, the Vanguard ETF has returned 7.6% annually since its inception. At that rate, the $968,400 portfolio would be worth $1.2 million after three more years, and that sum would generate about $19,800 in annual dividend income.

Importantly, the scenario I just described involved saving $500 per month. But the median worker should be saving about $730 per month, meaning we have yet to account for $230. That money (and additional capital) could be invested in individual stocks, as long as the investor does the requisite research. Alternatively, the money could be invested in an S&P 500 index fund, which provides diversified exposure to the most influential U.S. stocks.

Should you invest $1,000 in Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF right now?

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JPMorgan Chase is an advertising partner of The Ascent, a Motley Fool company. Trevor Jennewine has positions in Mastercard and Visa. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Microsoft, Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF, and Visa. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom, Johnson & Johnson, and UnitedHealth Group and recommends the following options: long January 2025 $370 calls on Mastercard, long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2025 $380 calls on Mastercard, and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

1 Vanguard Index Fund Could Turn $500 Per Month Into a $968,400 Portfolio That Pays $16,000 in Annual Dividend Income was originally published by The Motley Fool

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Enormous wealth

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HOUSE raffles have boomed in popularity – and they could be the key to you becoming the owner of your dream home for just a few quid.

These property competitions are prize draws, which you can enter for free, or by buying at least one ticket.

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The winner is then drawn at random on a specified date and is given the advertised home as a prize.

Of course, the chances of winning are slim, but if you’re one of the lucky ones, scooping your dream home can be life-changing.

Simon Williams, 41, scooped the picturesque cottage in Devon and £100,000 cash to spend after entering the Omaze Million Pound House Draw.

While Rose Doyle, 73, and husband Tony were able to move out of their three-bed council house in Birmingham after winning a £3million mansion in Cornwall.

But before you buy a ticket to win your dream home, it’s important to bear in mind the pros and cons.

Consumer expert Martyn James said: “There’s nothing wrong with having big dreams or fantasising about getting a brand new house of a big cash payout. But bear in mind that lotteries are a form of gambling and as such, can be addictive to many people.

“So set yourself a maximum spend and never go over it – and be realistic. Whenever you gamble, the house always wins.”

We round-up all the current house raffles – and how you can win a property worth up to £4million with just a £2 ticket.

£2million home in Devon – Omaze

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A stunning three-bedroom coastal home in Devon worth over £2million could be yours in Omaze’s million pound house draw.

One lucky winner will get the keys to a beautiful contemporary home and entries start from as little as £10.

This two-tiered West Country residence comes complete with countryside views, a guest annex and a heated pool.

In addition to the property itself, the Omaze winner will receive £250,000 in cash to help them settle in.

The winner has the option to move straight into the property, or they can rent it out, or even put it back on to the market.

An estimated monthly rental income is around £4,000, according to Omaze.

Additional costs including stamp duty, mortgage fees and conveyancing costs are also covered.

The house also comes fully furnished.

The cost of entries starts at £10 for 15 entries and goes up to a costly £150 for 320 entries. The full details are below:

• £10 – 15 entries
• £25 – 40 entries
• £50 – 85 entries
• £150 entries – 320 entries

Omaze has guaranteed a minimum donation of £1,000,000 from the draw for suicide prevention charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM).

The Draw closes on Sunday, October 27 for online entries and Tuesday, October 29 for postal entries.

£4million home in Surrey – Raffle House

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Raffle House allows people the chance to win either their multi-million pound dream home.

You may have heard about Raffle House, which was established in 2017, but might not know what it entails, or how to get started.

The company operates by selling raffle tickets for a small fee and then selecting a winner randomly.

The current Raffle House prize is a £4million property in Surrey, complete with £200,000 of furnishings.

The kitchen and family room overlook and have access to a garden terrace, perfect for alfresco summer mornings.

The dining room and living room both have huge glazed sliding doors, perfect for taking in the sun while keeping warm.

There are five bedrooms in total, with the principle featuring its own private bathroom.

If all this wasn’t enough, there’s also a private gym.

As with the Omaze draw, there’s no Stamp Duty or fees to pay for the winner.

If you want to be in with a chance to win, the draw closes at midnight on Thursday, October 31 and it costs the following to enter:

• £10 – 15 tickets
• £25 – 50 tickets
• £50 – 150 tickets
• £100 – 500 tickets

£450,000 apartment in London – Raffall

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Homeowners and organisations can pay to host their own raffle on a portal such as Raffall.com.

Users have a web page which advertises their property, the maximum tickets they will sell, the price and the closing date.

Raffall draws the winner at random.

If the owner doesn’t sell enough tickets to make the raffle a success, the platform gives 75% of the money as compensation to the winner and keeps 25% for commission and costs.

The two-bedroom apartment in Catford, south east London is valued at over £450,000 and is being raffled by Kerb Appeal Raffle through Raffall.

Once a neglected and rundown property, the apartment has undergone a dramatic transformation.

A brand-new kitchen and bathroom has been installed, plus it has a striking glass banister in the entrance hallway, and stylish, trendy interiors ready for immediate occupancy.

Entries cost £2 and the raffle draw will take place on Friday, November 8 at 12pm or when the last ticket is sold – whichever comes sooner.

£1.2million Town House in Somerset – Raffall

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This seven bedroom property in Frome, Somerset, is also being raffled off by Raffall.

There’s no stamp duty, mortgage or conveyancing fees to pay and you chose to rent it out, sell it on or move in.

You could earn £3,500 per month by renting the property out, according to the raffle’s host Taylormade.

The property measures 3,000 square and has oak wood flooring, bespoke lighting, high-end fittings, premium wool carpets and encaustic tiling.

It is set in a generous plot with a the stone walled garden, which is perfect for entertaining.

It can be accessed directly from the main dining kitchen area through two sets of glass doors.

There is also road parking, with space for four cars.

Entries cost £5 and the draw will close on Saturday, December 7 at 11pm, or when the last ticket is sold – whenever is sooner.

In addition, 10% of the host’s revenue goes directly to the charity Busoga Trust, which brings clean and safe water to rural communities in Uganda.

£850,000 home in East Sussex – Raffall

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This Idyllic Country House in Sedlescombe, East Sussex, is set within large gardens close to the historic town of Battle.

It has its own heated swimming pool and is close to beaches in Hastings, Bexhill-On-Sea and Camber Sands.

Plus, there’s no stamp duty, mortgage or conveyancing fees to pay.

Tickets for this raffle cost £5 and 5% of the host’s revenue goes directly to Alzheimer’s Research UK.

The draw ends on Friday, 10 2025 at 5.30pm or when the last ticket is sold.

£25,000 narrowboat – Raffall

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It’s not just houses that pop on these rafffles, you could even be in with the chance to set up home on a narrowboat.

The boat, called Sloe Patrol, has been restored over a four-year period with a new fully fitted kitchen, a bathroom with a shower and a bedroom with an extending king size bed and storage space.

The raffle’s host – James Posner – said that while the boat is currently worth around £25,000, he expects its value to increase to £40,000 over the next few years.

The raffle ends on October 16, or when the last ticket is sold.

Tickets for this raffle also cost £5.

Houseboats are exempt from stamp duty, and if you have a residential mooring and you fill fall into the lowest council tax band.

What should you check before entering?

National Trading Standards Estate and Letting Agency Team advises entrants to make sure they are aware of the terms of the raffle before entering.

The advert should explain what happens if not all tickets are sold. It should spell out if a lesser cash prize is offered, when the raffle closes and when the draw will take place. 

If the date of the draw keeps changing the organiser is struggling to sell tickets.

Check the odds of winning. Competitions that specify the number of tickets they need to sell give you a chance of working out the odds.

Look for hidden bills. Lots of adverts state that stamp duty and legal fees will be paid for. If they don’t you need to foot the bill.

Check you can afford the maintenance and council tax for the house too.  

Before handing over your cash, read past reviews of the organiser’s raffles, look at how long they’ve been established and whether there have been previous winners. 

If it’s a homeowner hosting their first raffle, then it’s a case of buyer beware.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories

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According to reporting by NPR in December 2022 and The Conversation in January 2023, unions won more than 70 percent of their certification elections in 2022. In fiscal year 2022, 2,510 petitions for union representation were filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) between October 1, 2021, and September 30, 2022. This figure is up 53 percent from FY 2021 when 1,638 petitions were filed. In FY 2022, 1,249 certification elections were held, with workers voting to certify a union as their collective bargaining agent 72 percent of the time.

As Marick Masters explained in his January 2023 article for The Conversation, one business that saw large-scale union activity was Starbucks, with workers holding union elections at 354 stores nationwide, more than a quarter of all US union elections held in 2022. Workers at Starbucks prevailed in four out of every five elections. Workers at Chipotle, Trader Joe’s, and Apple unionized for the first time, while workers at Microsoft and Wells Fargo also had wins.

Union activity, Masters reported, most often spikes in times of societal upheaval. From 1934 to 1939, during the Great Depression, the percentage of American workers in a union rose from 7.6 percent to 19.2 percent, and during World War II between 1941 and 1945, from 20 percent to 27 percent. Masters described the current wave of union activity as driven by record levels of economic inequality and continued mobilization of workers in “essential industries,” such as healthcare, food, and public safety, who were thrust into harm’s way during the global pandemic.

Labor activity—including organizing efforts and strikes—surged in 2022, compared to preceding years. The NLRB tracked twenty large work stoppages that involved more than a thousand workers in 2022, four more than documented in 2021, and 25 percent more than the average number of large work stoppages during the past sixteen years. Since 2021, Cornell University has tracked all labor actions, counting, according to Masters, 385 strikes in 2022, up from 270 in 2021. Moreover, the general public is growing more favorable towards unions. Seventy-one percent of Americans now support unions according to Gallup—a level of support not seen since 1965.

Significantly, the vast majority of recent labor activity is being driven by workers of color. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recorded a substantial rise of two hundred thousand unionized workers in the United States from 2021 to 2022, most of whom are workers of color, Prem Thakker reported for the New Republic. According to BLS, unionized workers of color increased by 231,000 last year, while White unionized workers decreased by thirty-one thousand. Recent data shows that the largest increase in union membership in 2022 occurred in state and local government positions in the South. Low-wage workers of color in the public sector have been driving the overall gains.

Thakker noted that, according to BLS data, “industries that saw the largest increases in unionization were state government; durable goods manufacturing; arts, entertainment, and recreation; and transportation and warehousing.” States with the largest increases in unionization included California, Texas, Ohio, Maryland, and Alabama. Whereas Republican and Democratic politicians often separate concerns over working conditions and pay from issues of identity, these data demonstrate how identity and workers’ rights are closely connected. “After all, unionization and labor struggles are direct mechanisms to better accomplish racial and social equality; the ability for people to afford to live happy and dignified lives is inherently tied to their ability to enjoy fundamental social and civil rights within those lives, too,” Thakker wrote.

Despite recent inroads at employers like Starbucks and growing popular support for unions, the power of organized labor is nowhere close to what it once was. As Masters pointed out, more than a third of workers were unionized in the 1950s, whereas only a tenth were in 2021. Before the 1980s, there were typically more than five thousand union elections in any given year, and as recently as 1980, there were two hundred major work stoppages.

Corporate media coverage of the labor resurgence of 2022 was highly selective and, in some ways, misleading. The establishment press has published hundreds of articles on union organizing at corporations such as Starbucks and Amazon and among graduate students at universities across the country. Yahoo republished Masters’s The Conversation article about union success in elections, and Vox, Bloomberg Law, and the Washington Post all remarked on organized labor’s recent string of certification vote victories. Yet corporate coverage of current labor organizing often fails to address the outsized role played by workers of color in union growth, the sectors and geographic areas where unions are adding members, and the shrinking number of White workers represented by collective bargaining agents.

Moreover, corporate coverage of recent union successes has rarely placed them in a proper historical context. One exception was a January 2022 article in the New York Times which reported that, despite the growing popularity of unions, high-profile organizing campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon, and the significant involvement of women in union activities, there has been a pronounced downward trend in union membership during the past forty years. The article even quoted a labor studies professor, Ruth Milkman, who attributed the decline in union membership to private employers’ heavy-handed efforts to undermine organizing campaigns and labor laws that strongly favor employers.

Mike Elk, “Workers of Color Accounted for 100% of Union Growth in 2022,” Payday Report, March 28, 2023.

Marick Masters, “Worker Strikes and Union Elections Surged in 2022–Could It Mark a Turning Point for Organized Labor?” The Conversation, January 5, 2023.

Prem Thakker, “Workers of Color Made Up 100% of Union Growth in 2022,” New Republic, March 24, 2023.

Andrea Hsu and Alina Selyukh, “Union Wins Made Big News This Year. Here Are 5 Reasons Why It’s Not the Full Story,” NPR, December 27, 2022.

Student Researchers: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College) and Cem İsmail Addemir (Illinois State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College) and Steve Macek (North Central College)

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Cameroon President Paul Biya is alive and in “excellent” health, the central African country’s government has said in an attempt to quell intense speculation about the wellbeing and whereabouts of the world’s oldest leader who had not been seen in public for more than a month.

The 91-year-old, who has been in power since 1982, has not been pictured since attending a China-Africa summit in Beijing at the start of September.

He missed the UN General Assembly meeting in New York at the end of last month and cancelled a planned appearance at last week’s International Organisation of La Francophonie summit in Paris.

The Paris no-show in particular raised eyebrows, given his country’s warm ties with France and his presence at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in the city in July.

The head of the cabinet sought to explain Biya’s absence by saying the president was in Geneva, the Swiss city where he spends a considerable amount of his time. Indeed, Biya’s visits to Geneva are so common that he has earned the nickname “President of the Hotel InterContinental”, a reference to the luxury accommodation where he is said to base himself while in the city.

That Biya did not make the short flight to Paris fuelled speculation in his home country that he was seriously ill, or even dead.

The Guardian Post, a respected newspaper in the capital Yaoundé, channelled the national mood on Tuesday when it splashed its front page with the headline: “One month after China-Africa summit: Biya’s whereabouts unknown!”

“Biya’s government doesn’t communicate much. That’s always been the case for the past 25 years of his travels,” said a political consultant with ties to the Biya government. “But there’s something different this time.”

The clamour was such that the Cameroon government was forced to issue a statement late on Tuesday, with spokesperson René Sadi saying Biya was on a “brief private stay in Europe” and would return to Cameroon in the “next few days”.

The cabinet secretary also sought to “reassure all our compatriots as well as the international community about the excellent state of health of the head of state”.

He continued: “For some time now, a few people, malicious through social networks, have undertaken to make believe that the president of the republic would be seriously ill, or even passed from life to death.”

The statements are unlikely to quell unease in Cameroon, where the nonagenarian president has become an increasingly isolated figure, with only a small band of advisers and family members, including first lady Chantal Biya, having unfettered access to him.

Cameroon, which has had only two presidents since becoming an independent country more than six decades ago, is beset by a long-running secessionist war between government troops and English-speaking guerrilla fighters seeking an independent state along the border with Nigeria.

Cameroon is also in a part of Africa where Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Chad, Sudan, Niger and Gabon have suffered coups since 2020.

Under the Cameroon constitution, the president of the senate would become head of state in the event of the president’s demise. That would be 89-year-old Marcel Niat Njifenji.

“Their hand has been forced,” the person familiar with the government’s thinking said of the government’s statement insisting Biya was alive.

“There are worries that if something were to happen, who would take over? Biya has centralised power so much around him that all the potential presidential hopefuls are either in jail or — because he’s been there so long — they’ve passed away.”