I recevied a dividend for the shares of Verizon I had as of January 9, 2024. A dividend has four dates which matter for it. They are the announcement date, ex-dividend date, record date, and pay date. I would look to this website by the SEC to understand what these dates mean, but the one which can cause the most confusion is the ex-dividend date. I bought a share on January 18th, so I did not get paid a dividend amount on it this time. The dividend was paid to me on February 1st.
I held 1.019 shares at .665 cents per share for this dividend payment to give me .677 cents. The .677 cents got reinvested at $42.30 per share to give me .016 shares more. This gives me a total of 1.035 plus 1 from 1/18 for 2.035 shares. Next quarter, I would expect the dividend to remain at .665 cents per share. This will pay me $1.35. Stacking up pennies into dollars is a win for my change jar flip.
Thought on dividends versus buying low price items to flip
Interesting to me to think some of the first things I was buying were puzzles which costs me less than the amount of $1.35 each. The risk versus reward of the dividend compared to buying a puzzle is on two opposites. The dividend involves very little risk to receive from a company like Verizon, but the reward amount is clearly defined by the dividend payment amount at the time Verizon is bought.
Buying an item which costs $1.35 on its own is a very risky proposition to hope it sells. This is why I wanted to get as many items initially to make sure things started selling. I was around 50% on being able to sell one of those items within a year. I was able to make around $20 in profit off of the items I sold and got back the amount I spent for them which gave me a total value back of about $8 to reinvest. I lost about $5 on the items which I couldn’t liquidate at my garage sell. This means I invested about $16 to begin with and turned it into $23 in a year. On a dollar for dollar basis this works out much better, and why you can start flipping with a very small amount and run it up like I’m doing. However, to take the time to find flips at around a dollar requires more effort than I want to at this point. If I wanted to keep going with very low amount flips I would need a storage space at this point, because I would have well over 600 items, and would be having to find a lot of items to flip on a weekly basis.
As I wrote earlier, going to let to pennies stack up into dollars at this point with no effort to make that happen with the dividends.