AHB -Amanah Hartanah Bumiputera's first dividend halved.

I was tickled pink with one of my Bumi colleagues, DMJ's adventure or was it misadventure? with this REIT. When this product was launched last November 2010, he went along to the nearest Maybank in late December hoping to apply for some units. He could not have registered immediately as he had wanted to write in a cheque so he applied first for 1000 units with the cash that he then had. When asked into which account he wanted the dividend to be credited to he promptly gave his foreign bank's account number.

Busy as he was, he forgot about  topping up his units. Once you are registered you can then issue a cheque but our friend failed to do that. So recently when the dividend was declared in April , he calculated his meagre gain and found that it was about RM20. Then a week later after his RM20 was credited into his bank account, to his dismay he found out that RM10 was deducted as bank charges! So he  received only 50% of his dividend :) There would not have been any  bank charges had he had an account with Maybank which manages the REIT.

He learned the hard way . The moral of the story is to read your prospectus before your purchase of any unit trust/stocks but how many people usually do that?

By the way, if I am not mistaken all the 1.5b AHB units have all been taken up and they are launching another 0.5b units sometimes this year. So those eligible people who missed out on the first launch can apply this time around. And don't forget to open your account with Maybank.

By the way, if you had 200K AHB units, the bank charges at RM10 per transaction would only be at  about 0.3% of your dividend at the current rate of 6.2 sen per annum.

Playing with figures and statistics can be fun! Sorry DMJ...