The Lemon Fool

Gerry557 wrote:A nice thought, a dividend a week. It reminds me of an apple a day saying but I'm not sure how to finish "A dividend a week".... Keeps the debts away!

It is disheartening when you look and there has been no dividend. Initially a month would have been good. Weekly sounds great so how about daily?

I suppose it depends on what you want, one £365 divi, 12 x £30.41 divis, 52 x £7 divis or a quid every day.

I suppose you should pick the best investment not just the payday but I have considered looking to fill payment gaps. Its a secondary thought when I've bought something that fills a payment in a low month. It might be a deciding factor if it was a toss up between two possibilities.

Is it a waste when you get three payments all at once?

The HYP-ish part of my portfolio used to pay a useful amount of dividends every month but over the years some companies moved their dividend dates to different months and others stopped paying dividends entirely.

I must say I do not care when dividends are paid as long as they are, as promised. I check that dividends are paid at least once a week, on 'busy' weeks more often. It is always satisfying to me when a dividend is received and so I feel Arb's anguish when there is no dividend one week. I never though even think about when dividends are paid when thinking of buying a share.

Dod

Nothing for last week, this week just gone, and next week (the last being ABF) then five due in one week. Although I note due dates in my diary I don’t check anything until the end of month reconciliations. If anything is wrong it’s usually me with a wrong date or something has slipped to the next month because it was due on the last day of the month but the broker hasn’t dealt with it until the next month.

Best wishes,

Steve

A divi a week gives the income you seek!

I'll get my coat.

FD

Gerry557 wrote:A nice thought, a dividend a week. It reminds me of an apple a day saying but I'm not sure how to finish "A dividend a week".... Keeps the debts away!

It is disheartening when you look and there has been no dividend. Initially a month would have been good. Weekly sounds great so how about daily?

I suppose it depends on what you want, one £365 divi, 12 x £30.41 divis, 52 x £7 divis or a quid every day.

I suppose you should pick the best investment not just the payday but I have considered looking to fill payment gaps. Its a secondary thought when I've bought something that fills a payment in a low month. It might be a deciding factor if it was a toss up between two possibilities.

Is it a waste when you get three payments all at once?

I'm not worried about getting frequent dividends - it's just more hassle. I mentioned it only because it seemed unusual. It all blends out in the end, especially so as mine get paid into a "holding tank" account, and a regular pension is paid from there to my current account.

I check once a week to keep things orderly: to check more often is unecessary; to check less often just means a build up of records to update. In truth, my system could probably go for ever without updating or checking anything - it would run itself except for occasional takeovers etc. That would be true HYPing but I would find that difficult to do.

Arb.

Arborbridge wrote:
I check once a week to keep things orderly: to check more often is unecessary; to check less often just means a build up of records to update.

In truth, my system could probably go for ever without updating or checking anything - it would run itself except for occasional takeovers etc. That would be true HYPing but I would find that difficult to do.

I'm still growing my income portfolio, and on some days I allow myself to think I can squint a little and perhaps see a vague light at the end of a working-life tunnel, and as such, I have over recent years taken a close interest in the scale, reliability, and volatility of my incoming dividends, knowing that this is likely to form the basis of any real confidence I might gain that leads towards my ultimate goal of finishing work.

I have a coup!e of very simple and regular routines that I carry out to help with this, one of which is a monthly 'forward look' using the great info available from DividendData, that lists the expected dividends for the month ahead, with which I then perform a look-up against my own income holdings -

https://www.dividenddata.co.uk/dividend-payment-dates.py?m=alldividends

That very realiably gives me a monthly list of expected dividends, along with payment dates and actual payment amounts, based on my own individual holdings, and about once a week I will verify that those expected payments have been made - a simple overall process that takes minutes per week at the most.

One of the great things about the DividendData link above, is that they will update sterling announcements as those figures are released by individual companies, so this now removes what used to be a niggly complication with this type of data-gathering, where the dividend announcements might originally be made in non-sterling currencies...

At the end of each month, I will copy over the previous monthly details to a set of Excel worksheets that hold account-level dividend payments, for long-term recording purposes, and I'll also then copy the overall monthly total into a separate worksheet that tracks both the rolling 12 month payments received, and also tax-year amounts, to help with my original aim of tracking scale, reliability, and volatility of those ongoing payment levels, and it's great to see those figures build over time, towards the sort of levels I might need them to be were I to allow myself to start thinking about finishing work...

It's that final process that is currently proving the most worthwhile to me personally, at this stage of my working life, as I can clearly now begin to judge the growing level of confidence that I have with my long term income strategy, as I begin to see how I might one day throw my dividend-switch from the current 're-invest' position, and move it over to the 'pay out as monthly-income' position...

Like others, I will sometimes see a slight delay of a couple of working days with some dividend payments, which often seem to affect my Halifax account more than my other sharedealing accounts, but I cannot ever remember not actually receiving the expected payments themselves, so I have a very high degree of confidence over any actual payments being made, and don't fret at all if there's any slight delay - they'll all be there come the end of any given month....

As mentioned earlier, it's still a case of having to squint a little to see that future point in time, but the above quick and simple processes all really help in both planning for that day I might finish work, and also giving me the confidence that the right things will be in place when I decide to do so, and finally throw that payment-switch...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Itsallaguess wrote: and finally throw that payment-switch...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Off topic, but.... I threw that switch at the end of December last year and have been using the paid out dividends to build up a 1 year float that I shall use to live on from January, making that switch from reinvesting to paying out was very satisfying as it meant retirement was getting closer.

Still not there, but aim to resign in 1 month and have already drafted my resignation letter...

Arborbridge wrote:In truth, my system could probably go for ever without updating or checking anything - it would run itself except for occasional takeovers etc. That would be true HYPing but I would find that difficult to do.

Same here. The HYP way could, in practice, have us with very little to do at all barring the odd purchase. Because most of us clearly have an interest in personal finance we have a tendency to generate overmullable¹ content for our virtual friends here.

Chris

¹ Don't forget, you heard it here first.

On the first of each month I look back at the rns publications for all of my holdings for the previous month and write in to the Excel spreadsheet the dates of when dividends are due. It’s usually more than a month away from publication. I then look back at the dividends paid during the last month and write these amounts next to the anticipated dates already written in. That way I know when a payment is due and can check that it’s been paid. I’ve also extended ‘No-look November’ so that I just check my pension portfolio once a month and if there are dividends to be re-invested, do so at this time. I do check the rns every day so if a Corporate Action is due I am aware of this. Retirement is about 12 years away so don’t feel I need to look at my portfolio every day (I used to though but it was becoming a distraction!).

Cheers, OLTB.

funduffer wrote:A divi a week gives the income you seek!

I'll get my coat.

FD

Much better than mine, even with the hat

csearle wrote:
¹ Don't forget, you heard it here first.

I offer my most enthusiastic contrafibularities.

Depending on the definition of missing, during covid announced dividends got stopped or delayed. Lloyds and BAE spring to mind. We're they missing or cancelled.

I have an excel sheet, investments x months with expectated dates of dividends and ex divi dates highlighted. This gets honed on actual announcements so should pick up any deemed missing for further investigation. Occasionally the pay month can change especially if it's month end/beginning.

New investments get added with expected dates. Funds tend to be more difficult than shares as the dividend amount is not always easily identified. You have a payment but is it the right amount.

Gerry557 wrote:Depending on the definition of missing, during covid announced dividends got stopped or delayed. Lloyds and BAE spring to mind. We're they missing or cancelled.

I have an excel sheet, investments x months with expectated dates of dividends and ex divi dates highlighted. This gets honed on actual announcements so should pick up any deemed missing for further investigation. Occasionally the pay month can change especially if it's month end/beginning.

New investments get added with expected dates. Funds tend to be more difficult than shares as the dividend amount is not always easily identified. You have a payment but is it the right amount.

This sounds a little like one of my spreadsheets. It covers dividends payable over 12 months. When a dividend is announced by one of my holdings, I adjust the dates if announcement, ex-dividend and payment, plus the value of the dividend per share. Periodically I update the amount of cash in my account (an ISA in my case) and increment the dates of payments already received by one year. I then sort by payment date to keep a rolling forecast 12 months ahead. If I trim a holding or top it up, then I adjust the number of shares in each holding where the XD date is yet to come.

It is an easy way to forecast the flow of dividends and to plan when top-ups might be possible.

TJH