Poll: Change Bond/Dividend Payment Schedule

[jckceric]

Since the dividend payments are annual I believe the coupon payments on bonds should be changed to annual payments as well. This would be useful in order to make managing the financials of a holding company with debt easier.

To do this, I think you could either charge a smaller annual payment the first year on the bond (to account for the months after January that the bond wasn't issued in) and then charge the remaining interest from the last year of the bond when the bond is redeemed OR just charge the combined first year and last year interest into one payment (either in the first year or last year).

I don't know if other people feel this is a problem but when I am trying to manage a holding company with no operating assets and funding my subsidiaries with debt my only source of income is through dividend payments so I am constantly running out of cash throughout the year (even though my dividend income would fully cover the interest payment) since I have no reason for my parent company to hold cash. This wouldn't be a problem in a real-life scenario since dividend payments are usually quarterly while coupon payments are usually semi-annually.

Other ways to fix this problem would be to change dividends to quarterly payments and bonds to semiannual payments OR include a special dividend feature for subsidiaries OR make the dividend payments a running number like the bond payments currently and just subtract the dividend percentage continuously from the sub's profit.