Dividend-income

Why should Warren Buffett have all the fun and success? This book shows that you don't need to be a millionaire to make money on Wall Street (though it does still help). A nice, step-by-step guide to investment options for us ordinary souls.

An excellent and impressive treatment of a complex subject. With all the hype about investing in the stock market (and with recent the market swings up and down) it's great to have a basic primer that lays everything out in clear and easily understood language. I'm buying this book for my elderly mother, for friends who have wanted to try investing but have been afraid, and anyone intimidated by the jargon spewed by the financial media, which assumes a level of knowledge and experience beyond the typical American consumer.

Ms. La Plante has taken a complex subject and explained it in such a simple and concise way. And she has included wonderful, common-sense advice. The first two chapters alone were worth the price. What a great concept, too. Most of us would never miss the $5.00 a day! Highly recommended!

It is not my purpose to pan this book. The 5 star rating system is sometimes less flexible than one would like. Ms. Klugman actually has a good point to make. Dividends are very useful in any investment strategy that has twenty or thirty years to run. In fact I would go so far as to argue that as a shareholder, a dividend is your absolute right. You own that company, or part of it. Without your capital, the company would not likely be in business and, when it makes a profit, you the owners, should share that success without having to sell your shares to realize it! Ms. Klugman, however, seems sometimes less than fair and careful when arguing against views she does not share.

For intance, she seems to suggest that if you own bonds, you are a faint hearted chump. She utterly fails to accord to bonds the same compounding effect she claims for dividends. Nonsense. Anything that returns a gain that's reinvested compounds. Let me attempt a quick (and mathematically dirty) example to show the approximate effect of bonds, in this case a bond fund. Say three years ago you had $100,000.00. Say you put it all into S&P 500 quality stocks with no dividends. At the end of 2002, you'd have had about $69,880. If you include a 2.5% dividend yield each year you'd have about $76,568. If, however, you'd put $80,000 into the dividend S&P 500 stocks and $20,000 into Vanguard's Long Term Corporate Bond fund, after paying it's .31% annual cost you'd have a total (between stocks and the bond fund)of about $90,258, a full 20.4% better than 100% stocks without dividends and 13.7% better than the dividend stocks. If you were looking at retirement inside of 10 years, that bond cushion would have made a big difference to you.

I know this is long, sorry. But one more point. Dividends are not guaranteed to rise. Even in a strong dividend culture like Heinz, a company Ms. Klugman cites favorably, this is demonstrably true. From a 3 for 2 stock split in '95, Heinz quarterly dividends climbed steadily from $.26/share to $.43 in 3/02. Then they were lowered to $.41, climbed again to $.44 in December '02 and were slashed (no stock split this time) to $.27/share in 3/03.

Still, dividends are MUY BUENO! If you own stock in a company not paying them, ask them and yourself why. If Ms. Klugman's book motivates you to look into this dividend thing, there's a web site (and newsletter) that you may find very interesting. ... This is put out by Ms. Geraldine Weiss (and her merry men) and will give you some insight into valuing companies by the relative dividend yield of their stock (a concept also practiced by Ms. Nancy Tengler and her associates). Ms. Klugman has the right idea here: take control of your own future. As such this is a useful book, but... there is no one surefire way. It's about dicipline , diversification, and allocation of assets (all of which I say better than I do). Good luck to you all, and remember, neither governments nor corporate managements know how to use your money better than you do.

This is a very good book especially for the faint of heart and those who shirk at aggressive growth stocks.In my opinion, this would be most useful as long as it represented part of your portfolio (especially for younger investors) I also agree with this author on bonds. They cannot compare with equities except in those rare times when interest rate are high and start coming down. Bonds are not a good long term strategy - but equities are.I am using this strategy along with agressive no load mutual funds. You can double your money every 4-5 years with mutual funds and save on the commissions. President Bush's new tax plan will make this dividend strategy program even more lucrative (as longas the Dmocrats don't screw it up)The dividend growth strategy is an excellent book and I highly recommend it along with the WSJ and IBD to research those dividend stocks.

This strategy is what has made patient, long-term investors wealthy and has become the cornerstone of my investment plan. Very readable and insightful. Throw away all your other investing guides.

Anthony Spare and Paul Ciotti make a logical, but uninspired, case for making Relative Dividend Yield part of one's equity valuation and also one's buy/sell decisions. The book is clearly written and offers ample graphs to substantiate the notion of buying equities when dividend yields are high, and selling them once they are low.

Actually, the graphs may be too ample...readers of this rather expensive 248-page book will quickly learn that the text is a bit long on charts showing individual equity dividend yields relative to stock indexes over time, and a bit short on specifics concerning the avoidance of issues whose yields are high for good reason.

That's the book's essential deficiency: the authors devote a mere twelve overly general pages to "Pitfalls and Preventative Measures" (Chapter 6). Also, since investors will likely have a difficult time constructing the kinds of charts the Relative Dividend Yield methodology requires, it would have been helpful to offer tips on a cost-effective means to make this methodology applicable in real-time. The authors do, however, provide graphs with prior relative dividend yield histories, with room to continue plotting these yields, on several "blue chip" dividend-paying equities.