Be Sure To Check Out HomeTrust Bancshares, Inc. (NYSE:HTB) Before It Goes Ex-Dividend

It looks like HomeTrust Bancshares, Inc. (NYSE:HTB) is about to go ex-dividend in the next 3 days. The ex-dividend date is usually set to be one business day before the record date, which is the cut-off date on which you must be present on the company's books as a shareholder in order to receive the dividend. The ex-dividend date is important because any transaction on a stock needs to have been settled before the record date in order to be eligible for a dividend. Thus, you can purchase HomeTrust Bancshares' shares before the 12th of November in order to receive the dividend, which the company will pay on the 25th of November.

The company's upcoming dividend is US$0.15 a share, following on from the last 12 months, when the company distributed a total of US$0.60 per share to shareholders. Based on the last year's worth of payments, HomeTrust Bancshares stock has a trailing yield of around 1.3% on the current share price of US$46.98. Dividends are an important source of income to many shareholders, but the health of the business is crucial to maintaining those dividends. We need to see whether the dividend is covered by earnings and if it's growing.

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Dividends are typically paid from company earnings. If a company pays more in dividends than it earned in profit, then the dividend could be unsustainable. HomeTrust Bancshares paid out just 14% of its profit last year, which we think is conservatively low and leaves plenty of margin for unexpected circumstances.

Generally speaking, the lower a company's payout ratios, the more resilient its dividend usually is.

View our latest analysis for HomeTrust Bancshares

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Businesses with strong growth prospects usually make the best dividend payers, because it's easier to grow dividends when earnings per share are improving. Investors love dividends, so if earnings fall and the dividend is reduced, expect a stock to be sold off heavily at the same time. It's encouraging to see HomeTrust Bancshares has grown its earnings rapidly, up 28% a year for the past five years.

Many investors will assess a company's dividend performance by evaluating how much the dividend payments have changed over time. HomeTrust Bancshares has delivered an average of 12% per year annual increase in its dividend, based on the past eight years of dividend payments. It's exciting to see that both earnings and dividends per share have grown rapidly over the past few years.

Final Takeaway

From a dividend perspective, should investors buy or avoid HomeTrust Bancshares? Companies like HomeTrust Bancshares that are growing rapidly and paying out a low fraction of earnings, are usually reinvesting heavily in their business. This is one of the most attractive investment combinations under this analysis, as it can create substantial value for investors over the long run. HomeTrust Bancshares ticks a lot of boxes for us from a dividend perspective, and we think these characteristics should mark the company as deserving of further attention.

Wondering what the future holds for HomeTrust Bancshares? See what the five analysts we track are forecasting, with this visualisation of its historical and future estimated earnings and cash flow

If you're in the market for strong dividend payers, we recommend checking our selection of top dividend stocks.

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