One of the main strategies employed by my premium newsletter, The Daily Paycheck, is dividend reinvestment.
Based on the power of compounding, reinvesting dividends back into the securities that pay them accumulates our money faster. Even one reinvested dividend makes your position bigger and its income generation potential larger.
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In simplest terms, dividend reinvestment can make you richer quicker.
The beauty of this strategy is in its simplicity. When you reinvest dividends, you put more money into the security, and this larger position pays you more the next time its dividend is due. This cycle continues for as long as you are willing to hold the security.
Easy enough, right? You’ve done your homework on the security, and now it’s working for you.
But there is more to this strategy than you might realize at first. For instance, when you reinvest dividends, the frequency of the payments matters.
Behind The Numbers
I ran a dividend reinvestment strategy for two hypothetical stocks. Each of the two stocks in this example yields 10%, costs $120 at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year. (In other words, the price of this hypothetical security does not change over the course of the year. This allows for an easier comparison of the total return for each security.)
At year-end, the total return from the first security, which pays out its dividend monthly, will be $12.566 and its effective yield will be 10.47%. For the other security, a more traditional one that pays dividends quarterly, the results are somewhat lower: $12.45 in total dividends and a 10.38% effective yield.
And the next year, the monthly payer would start you off with a slightly larger amount, which will then be reinvested again. The principle is the same: Dividend reinvestment pays, and every little bit counts. In five years, the difference will be even more pronounced: For the first security, with monthly dividends, your effective annual yield will be 12.91%, clearly better that the 12.77% annual effective yield for the quarterly payer.
This easy calculator will allow you to input your own numbers and see how much the frequency of distribution matters, especially in the long run.
But there is more to monthly payers than just the possibility to faster accumulate dividends.
For investors who reinvest dividends, monthly reinvestments minimize market risk — specifically, the risk of reinvesting at peak prices — and opportunities for second-guessing.
Another good reason to like monthly payers is the easier decision when it comes to selling. You don’t need to wonder if you should wait months for the next dividend to be paid. With 12 payments in a year (and each one is relatively less important than a quarterly payment), the decision to sell would be easier, should it come to that.
Also, monthly payers offer big benefits to income investors, especially those who count on this income to pay bills and cover regular expenses.
Finding Monthly Dividend Payers
Of course, you’re probably aware that most U.S. stocks pay quarterly dividends. This schedule is related to the way public companies’ financial reporting is organized: Companies report their earnings quarterly, and they pay dividends on a similar schedule. But for investors, receiving monthly income is simply more convenient than receiving it quarterly (or semiannually, which is how most foreign stocks pay their dividends).
A select few equities do pay monthly, and we own a lot of them in our Daily Paycheck model portfolios. (One of our top-performing holdings even labels itself “The Monthly Dividend Company”.) But the majority of monthly payers are funds, both Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and closed-end funds.
My newest recommendation is from that latter group: It’s a closed-end fund that pays its distributions monthly. It’s a well-managed fund that invests in quality dividend payers while also minimizing your tax bill. What’s more, it yields a healthy 7.3%.
If you’re looking for quality monthly dividend payers, they’re out there — you’ll just have to do a little searching to find them. But if you’d like know which ones we hold in The Daily Paycheck, you’ll need to try a risk-free subscription to learn more. To get the name and ticker symbol of the pick I just discussed — as well as the rest of the monthly dividend payers we own — you can go here.
