It's Dividend Day!

One does not simply skip Dividend day! What is Dividend day you ask? Well, to summaries my experience with them, its the one day every quarter of the year where I got paid to invest in a certain company. Sounds like a pretty good deal right - you get to invest in a company's shares, have the opportunity to make money off the shares AND they pay you a certain amount per quarter per share you have... how could this get any better? Well - in my situation it does get better.

My company is one of the few that I know of that offers a share purchase plan. Sounds confusing right? Well- young Dylan agrees. So to simplify things down, my work has offered all of its employees to take a certain amount of money directly from their paycheck to be directly deposited to either a TFSA, RRSP or regular account through our benefit holder. Right away that interested me, take the money from my pay so I don't get the chance to spend it... SIGN ME UP! It gets better. The money deposited into the account gets directly put towards the company stock... okay so the stock could go down - its a risk you take but high risk high reward right? It continues. The company stock pays quarterly dividends per each share you own ($0.375 to be exact). 

You may be asking...you can profit from the company stock going up and from the quarterly dividends? That's exactly right! But my company threw in one more surprise. If we were to put in a yearly amount of $2000 (approx. $87 bi/weekly) they will match half and put $1000 in our account. Free money.

Currently I have invested $5000 out of my own pocket and put it into the work TFSA while the stock was a little lower than usual, I watched the stock for a few days as it went up and down a released a certain pattern through the week - I believe it dipped to $42/share. Currently it sits around $48/share and my returns have been quite nice, an increase of $490! My total amount I received for Dividends was $54.17 - which may not seem like much but compared to the usual 1% interest in a savings account x 3 months (quarterly) I would have only received $15. Not bad!

The word "dividend" on its own use to intimidate me -still does! I don't plan on touching this account for quite awhile - and every 3 months I get a nice little surprise bonus which increases every quarter. My advice to the reader, look to see if your company has a share purchase plan and read the details. Chances are you will make more money from this than a traditional bank account - but don't put all your eggs in one basket! If the stock takes a nose dive all your savings will be gone. We will talk about diversifying where your savings go in the near future!

Time to calculate how much I will need to invest to live comfortably off of dividends as income! I will probably need more than one road to a million! I will share the results soon.

Til the next article, 

Thanks for reading.

-Dylan