Owen Raszkiewicz

The board of directors has the right to not pay a dividend.

There are certain instances where they can't pay dividends for financial reasons.

So they could be going out of business.

If they don't have enough assets to cover their liabilities, these types of things, they won't.

They're not allowed to.

But it's up to them.

And what they will do...

If you find their annual report or their media release, which typically is in your brokerage account when they release their annual report, they'll say there's a dividend of this much on this date, etc.

But then they might also have a dividend policy that's in the annual report.

Or they might just say in the media release, the board of directors resolved not to pay a dividend to shareholders this year.

This is the thing, dividends are not guaranteed.

You can look at historical figures, go into your brokerage account, go to Morningstar, go to any of those data providers, and you will see companies that have a consistent track record of dividends.

That still doesn't mean they'll pay one next year because they're not guaranteed, but it's a really good question because dividends can be oh so juicy when they do roll in.

If you're new to dividends, make sure you keep an eye out for where your dividends are going.

If you're getting them by check, which is pretty strange these days, you might be.

Just make sure you open all your mail.

Go to computer share, go to link market services, all the big share registries and register to have your dividends paid as cash or a dividend reinvestment plan.

Yeah, we try and summarize the, because the ETF providers sometimes bury the how often it pays a dividend.

Yeah.

So we tried to summarize that on our best ETFs website.