Various ads telling you ”how” to collect government money that ranges from several hundred to thousands of dollars/month april39
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We do see these kinds of adds all the time — often headlined with the word “Checks” — “Trump Bonus Checks” or “Federal Rent Checks” or “Freedom Checks” or dozens of other similar-sounding ideas.
In pretty much every case, these are investments — they are not, of course, “free checks” or “benefit” programs, they are investments you can make that provide income in exchange for the risk you’re taking in buying a share of an enterprise. Most often they are REITs or MLPs or similarly high-yielding pass-through entities, but the same kinds of spiel are used to tease just about any stock that pays a dividend.
The sad news for most readers is that, of course, the huge numbers teased in the ad are what catch the eye but the yield on these “bonus checks” (or whatever they call them) is always something much more pedestrian. These days you can typically find dividend yields from pretty steady REITs that are in the 5% neighborhood, and pipeline MLPs in the 8% neighborhood. Those are expected annual yields, they are not guaranteed, and your investment capital can also be lost or fall in value. That translates to you making an up front investment of anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000 for each $100 in monthly income you want to try to achieve from dividends.