Growth suits most people who are just starting. You see the swings while the stakes are small. You get used to them. You see more upside quicker, which matters, because boredom kills a new plan faster than risk does.
This site is a dividend logbook, so the obvious assumption is that the goblin thinks dividends beat growth. He doesn't. Dividends are a slow burner. Slow is a feature later. It is not much of a hook at the start.
If you need the cash on a schedule, or you just really believe in a company that happens to pay, that is a real reason to lean the other way. It is not a lesser one.
The paycheque test
Here is the whole decision, and it is not about your personality, your risk-tolerance quiz, or how clever you feel.
Look at your income. Is it the stable pile, or the unstable one?
If you have a stable job and know what you get every month, and the chance of it going away in an instant is low, then you already own the stable thing. Teacher. Council. Most salaried roles with a notice period and a boring employer. Your wages are the predictable, pays-on-schedule asset in your life. You do not need to buy a second one. You can look at riskier assets with higher growth potential, because you know what is landing every month regardless of what the market does that week. Arguably you should.
If your income is lumpy (self-employed, commission, seasonal, a business that could be brilliant or could be nothing next year), then the stability has to come from somewhere else. The portfolio is the only place left to put it. That is not a market opinion. It is plumbing.
The goblin is the second kind. Being an entrepreneur, I know I have a pretty unstable job and unstable income, so I lean towards a more stable portfolio of dividends. I don't have the luxury of a known number on the 28th most of the time, which is why I leant pretty heavily the other way, quite early on. The long version of that is the origin story: two piles, and the risk deliberately kept in the loud one.
What dividends actually cost you outside an ISA
This is the part the income crowd skips.
A dividend is a taxable event the day it lands, whether you wanted the cash or not. You did nothing, you made no decision, and there is a liability. Growth doesn't do that. An unsold position that has doubled generates no tax bill at all until you sell it, and you choose when that is. That is genuine control, and it is worth something.
So an income portfolio held in a taxable account creates admin and a tax drag that a growth portfolio, left alone, simply does not. Reinvesting the dividend doesn't help. You're still taxed on money you never saw, then buying with what's left.
Inside an ISA the problem mostly evaporates, which is why "growth or dividends" is a much smaller question in there than outside.
[Rates, allowances and thresholds change, and they depend on your situation and your country. This is a shape, not a number. Look the current ones up, or ask someone qualified. The goblin is neither.]
None of that makes dividends wrong. It makes them expensive in the wrong account. Get the wrapper right first and the argument gets a lot quieter.
The energy bubble
There is a bit of this that is not maths, and pretending otherwise is how people build a portfolio they abandon in year two.
Some people get a little energy bubble when the dividend hits. A notification, a small number, proof the thing is alive. It is a tiny hit of this is working, on a schedule, without you doing anything. For those people the payment is not really about the money at that size. It is the thing that keeps them invested through a bad year.
Others get nothing from that at all and would rather watch a position they believe in grow into something. Also fine. Also a real motivation. Growth investors get their signal from the size of the pile. Income investors get theirs from the frequency of the cash.
Neither of those is a spreadsheet argument. Both are the reason someone is still holding in five years, which is the only thing that ever actually mattered.
What the goblin's choice actually pays
Here is what that unstable-income choice looks like in cash, not as a pitch. Legal & General paid 15.74p per share in June 2026. I owned 126,000 shares. £19,830 landed. That is a real payment from a real name, on a real date. It is also the reason a broker freeze hurts: in September the account got restricted for a KYC review right after a deposit landed, and the next buy sat in a queue I could not touch. Income is only "stable" while you can still operate the account.
I fell short of a round target on another name the same year. Aimed at twenty-five thousand shares of the high-yield fund. Stopped at a bit over twenty-three thousand, because that is what the cash in the account actually bought. The goblin brain noticed. The payment still landed. Round numbers are a personality. The ledger is not.
[I am not telling you to buy Legal & General, or anything else. This is one goblin's ledger, not a shopping list.]
So: no percentages, no template, no "the goblin's allocation".
There are a ton of ways to invest and the best for you is the one you stick to. Some people find dividends give them that little energy bubble when they see the payment hit. Others like to grow their portfolios through growth bets. Most sensible people end up with both and stop worrying about the label.
What this site can honestly give you is one worked example: what one goblin holds, why, what it pays, and where it has gone wrong, with every number on the page read out of the ledger. Steal the thinking. Don't copy the tickers, and don't take the fact that the ledger is full of income funds as a recommendation. It is full of income funds because the person keeping it has an unstable job.
If your job is the stable pile, your version of this site would look different, and it would be right.
Not financial advice. Just the test one goblin actually used on himself, and the reason his answer probably isn't yours.
The vocabulary comes next, so the rest of the ladder stops sounding like a foreign language: What a dividend actually is.