Investing 102

[toy71camaro]

Originally Posted by GregWeld

You - having paid a lower price per share - are getting a higher percentage of dividend rate on your money invested. So you always need to do your own calculations on what YOU PAID - and what you're currently receiving. I don't know what you paid so can't calc that for you.

The MATH for doing that is:


The ANNUAL DIVIDEND amount (4 times the quarterly amount) in this case the annual amount is .80 (4 x .20) DIVIDED by the share price. And move the decimal two places.


So let's use this actual stock and price.


.80 dividend by 82.63 = .009681

Move the decimal point -- and you have .97 %

This brings up a good reminder. When you log into your brokerage accounts, your not going to see your "Total Return", and this could play tricks on your mind! hahaha.

I ended up writing my own tracking spreadsheet using Google Docs. Where I document each purchase I make for each stock (price/qty/total amount), and also note each dividend payment. It then calculates my total shares, my Avg Cost on those shares. Then it automatically grabs the current share price. I then have a "Summary" tab/sheet (I have a "sheet or Tab" for each stock), where it monitors the daily basics such as todays price +/- %, todays Dividend %, MY dividend % based on my original purchase, plus the TOTAL RETURN.

Just as an example, when I log into my brokerage account and take a quick peek at my page, it shows I'm DOWN 0.22% on my AT&T. Bummer right? Well, not really. My Total Return for it is actually 28%. There's a HUGE difference there.

Once again Greg, thanks for taking time out of your day to keep us all on the Up and Up and moving forward with this stuff. It's made a huge difference in my retirement accounts since starting this within the last 2 years.