Help with shares

[Maccapacca]

My wife has been laid off by GlaxoSmithKline, no problem really she was told three years ago and the exit and all the help has been really great, now she's having a sabbatical to look after the kids for a bit as they are pretty young 1 & 3.

All of her share options that were locked into share save and bogof schemes automatically mature so we have 2000 GSK shares.

We are trying to work out if it's worth just hanging on to them and reinvesting and dividends or cashing some in and putting some into ISAs leave some in the shares etc.

Just trying to find out where I would be able to calculate the dividends vs other opportunities with other investments so we can make an educated decision on what to do.

 

[dazzerd]

Depends how your scheme works, are you sure they even allow you to take dividends from them? My share scheme is quite simple, they offer you the price on the option date, you then pay monthly into the scheme for a set period. Once the terms has ended you actually receive the shares at the option price but are then free to sell them on the market at whetever the price is at that time.

i.e. price on option day 1 was 30 p, price on last day was 120p = 4 times profit. However we have to sell the shares within 6 months of the term ending else we only get the price at option, i.e. 30p.

If you have "real shares" which pay dividends then the company should be tell you how much dividend they are paying and you can then calculate that manually vs the expected return of another investment vehicle.

According to this http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GSK.L they aint paying dividends anyway but you may want to check that.