Simple Dividend Income Calculator (Early Beat)

[petershk]

So I calc'd my initial purchase that I made on 8/6/2012 manually and compared. Since the tool starts at the beginning of the year, I entered data in the tool starting from 2013. But, the price was actually lower, thus showing more dividends. Since my purchase in late 2012 included one dividend payment, the numbers weren't super far a part for my small purchase. The tool also shows a better return on share price. The 2013 price was around $35 but I bought around $37.

Final Score: Div Calc Return: 28.06%; Annualized: 8.59%
My manual Calcs: 21.57%; Annualized: 5.67%

(Note, I do re-invest my dividends, but my calculations like yours did not factor that in)

cd :O)

UPDATE:
-Thanks for this info! I found a pretty stupid bug in my annualized return calculation, so hopefully it's more correct now.

-I added support for arbitrary start and end dates. It might be buggy in some browsers, but I have tested it quite a few times. It TRIES to find a valid date if you pick weekends and holidays, but this was more of a PITA than I had expected.

-Still working on graphs. Not hard to display them... hard to make them meaningful.

-Working on side by side compare in the summary table.

-Working on some kind of "stability" measure that somehow represents the lumpiness of returns... this will be especially important when there's multiple symbols supported.

-Having more fun than a real job

 

[target2019]

It's very generous of you to share this work with everyone.
Somewhere in my folks I have a sheet that downloads dividend data for multiple stocks. I'll think about this some more and post a link.

What you are accomplishing can be partially done with yahoo finance. No surprise there.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=VZ&a=10&b=21&c=1983&d=04&e=28&f=2016&g=v

There is a button near the bottom that exports to a spreadsheet. Your effort goes further by adding CAGR, etc.

An app is very useful when it can handle a portfolio. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

 

[petershk]

Thanks for the support!

Yes. The yahoo data is powering the site for now and when you do the query you get pretty much that same data as a text file, which is great.

It was just a bit of a pain to then convert it to monitor cash flows.

It's probably easier in the short run for me to just use a Google sheet and do the math that way but writing the software is fun and easier to share... plus... hopefully eventually it'll have enough functionality to be more useful than a spreadsheet... although time will tell on that front.

If people find it useful I'll be pretty motivated to keep working on it... I really enjoy the rapid development process!

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[tripods68]

Wow! this is very useful. I own VWEXL so it's nice how much i need to accumulate before retirement to know my expected dividend payout in the future.

Thank you!!!

 

[Earl E Retyre]

Good job. This is very cool. For some reason, I sometimes get an error when entering certain symbols saying:

"Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /home/ divicalc/ public_html / index.php on line 86"

For example it works for VWELX but not VTI.

 

[target2019]

Good job. This is very cool. For some reason, I sometimes get an error when entering certain symbols saying:

"Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /home/ divicalc/ public_html / index.php on line 86"

For example it works for VWELX but not VTI.

I used VTI with the default entries elsewhere.
I did not see any errors.
It is very cool.

 

[petershk]

Good job. This is very cool. For some reason, I sometimes get an error when entering certain symbols saying:

"Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /home/ divicalc/ public_html / index.php on line 86"

For example it works for VWELX but not VTI.

For VTI what date did you use... I'm not doing good error checking on the situation where the symbol didn't exist at the starting date.

Also... added a very simple graph. I highly recommend doing it on Vbmfx going back to 1987. I found it neat to see the long term payout for bonds. I'm going to add inflation adjustment but actually I kind of hate inflation adjustment the way it's done.

I had a thought about doing a separate inflation adjustment that targets biggest costs: house, car, health and school. I am pretty sure those costs have risen a lit more and reflect the real impact mire accurately than bananas and milk

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[hesperus]

petershk,

I find this tool very useful, especially if you can work in the following functions:
1) Be able to enter a portfolio of any number of holdings (I have 45+ securities)
2) Show monthly (& annual) estimated dividend income from the entire portfolio

Having total return, CAGR, highest & lowest months, etc would be great in a 'total portfolio' setting.


Nice work, thank you for sharing this

 

[Earl E Retyre]

For VTI what date did you use... I'm not doing good error checking on the situation where the symbol didn't exist at the starting date.

Yes, that was the problem. I initially put in a date that was too old and instead of telling me, it gave the error. I agree with adding functionality as a higher priority than good error checking. Thanks again.

 

[Fedup]

I got error message too, can't remember what fund or ETF I put in. But it generated error at year 2000 but not year 2002.
Perhaps the ETF didn't go back that far.

 

[petershk]

Yes, that was the problem. I initially put in a date that was too old and instead of telling me, it gave the error. I agree with adding functionality as a higher priority than good error checking. Thanks again.

It's always a balancing act which is why I think live development is so effective .

As a developer I always crave adding new features and dread dealing with edge cases and error handling. By knowing that other people have to use it, it keeps me balanced because I have to think "hmm... if someone doesn't know how this works, how will they know this special weird problem that I know how to avoid cause I wrote it."

There's definitely a better catch all than an incomprehensible error message.

 

[petershk]

Some meaningless but entertaining stats.

Apologies for non-US people... I'll add everywhere else next time if people are actually interested.

Just a Screenshot of the small # of google stats.

I just assume that the overlap of users of divicalc and statistics lovers will overlap. Whenever I use a site/app I'm always curious to know how that site's use breaks down.

Looks like a couple people in NC are spending a fair amount of time beta testing. Thanks for that!

Also a fairly active user in the Philippines.

I think session duration and bounce rate are much more meaningful than # of sessions or # of users. I care about the quality of a solution as opposed to the number of people looking at it .


Thanks for the support and feedback. It's how I'm "paid" for this "job" .

 

[petershk]

I got error message too, can't remember what fund or ETF I put in. But it generated error at year 2000 but not year 2002.
Perhaps the ETF didn't go back that far.

It's the most common problem I run into when I use it myself. I haven't found an easy way to know when the "start date" of a given symbol is, and I've just been too lazy to solve the problem. almost every other calculator handles this problem so I shouldn't be so blasé about it.

 

[nvestysly]

Seems like a useful tool. I've bookmarked it and will plan to do some comparisons later this week.

 

[petershk]

Yes, that was the problem. I initially put in a date that was too old and instead of telling me, it gave the error. I agree with adding functionality as a higher priority than good error checking. Thanks again.

Should be fixed now. It should automatically change the start date to the earliest data it has available.

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[Lakedog]

As others have noted, this will be quite useful for comparing divs/returns. Thanks for sharing!

 

[ownyourfuture]

I like it.
Thanks for posting Peter

 

[Chris7]

Peter,

I see that you added the ability to enter the full date. Now, the calculations are pretty much spot on.

When I was first playing with it, I was using my initial AT&T (T) purchase. I purchased 20 shares at 37.62 (calc shows 37.61) and paid $752.40 on 8/6/2012. I guess maybe allow people to enter the # of shares and/or amount paid. I also paid a $8.95 Commission. That could be another good optional field. I guess in the long-run, that commission won't matter much, but in the short-term with the amounts I have been able to invest it is around a 1% drag.

 

[target2019]

Distributions is misspelled in the onscreen instructions.

If the date pop-up can be easily enhanced, it would be more friendly if the year, month and day were individual spinners.

Where do I insert coin before playing?

 

[petershk]

That's for feedback guys!

Doh! Spelling mistakes in this day and age are unacceptable.

I agree on the date spinners. Different browsers implement the HTML5 date tag differently (many terrible) I have to implement a uniform one.

Sorry it hasn't been updated in the last week. I recently had a big move after a month long vacation and am settling in. I hope to restart regular updates in a few days or so.

I find it a strangely addictive "game" myself. Maybe we are sick with the same disease

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[target2019]

If it's not a trade secret, could you describe how the calendar spinner works? My first guess was that it is a php thing. When you mentioned html5 I realized I had not a clue.

 

[Sunset]

First off, I like this tool.
I'm using firefox and don't see any date spinner,
You could use jquery to popup a calendar.

 

[target2019]

Sunset, when the calendar pops up, you spin to get a different monthly calendar. I was asking about a three part spinner year month day, instead.
The unstated point was that it takes a bit of spinning to find a particular year.

 

[petershk]

First off, I like this tool.
I'm using firefox and don't see any date spinner,
You could use jquery to popup a calendar.

That's what I plan on doing. Jquery is so nice!

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[Sunset]

Sunset, when the calendar pops up, you spin to get a different monthly calendar. I was asking about a three part spinner year month day, instead.
The unstated point was that it takes a bit of spinning to find a particular year.

I was pointing out I don't see any calendar at all.
there is no pop up.
I have to type in the start and end dates, nothing to spin, click or anything.

I use firefox 46.0.1