Anyone hear about the 2008 Alaska PFD estimate??

Question

Just wondering with gas prices and all...DH and I would like to buy plane tickets...

Answer 1

the fund lost about $400 mil in value during the fiscal year that just ended. compared to when the .com bubble burst and the fund lost $1.3 bil in fiscal year 2002, this is doing pretty good, but who knows what this new fiscal year will bring.

but to get an idea of how your pfd check is calculated, you have to look at the funds net income for the last five years. and to estimate the 2008 pfd, it helps to look in to the most recent recession and how it affected the pfd.

during the last recession, the fund lost 5.2% in value in fiscal year 2002 but still had just over $200 mil in net income. the following fiscal year the fund had increased in value by 2.8% but had net income of $355 mil. the 2008 fiscal year saw the fund lose value of about 1.1%. i can't say what the net income was because they have not released their financial report yet.

to guard against large fluctuations in the pfd checks from one year to the next, the actual pfd payment is based on the average of the fund's net income of the previous 5 years. 2003's net income of $355 mil was very low compared to the 4 years that followed, so it was bringing down the average for 2007's check. for 2008's check, we will get rid of 2003's bad year but will be replacing it with this year's net income.

so until the pfd corp releases the annual report, we can only guess at what this year's check will be. so long as 2008's net income is higher than $355 mil, this year's check will go up.

i'm guessing that this year's net income will not go bellow $355 mil. but i'm not really hopeful that it will manage to be much higher than that. so i'm guessing that this year's check will be slightly higher than last year's.

hope my long winded answer to your simple question helps. most of it was to give info for those who know nothing about how the pfd is calculated.

the first link shows how 2007's check was calculated.

Answer 2

I would guess it would be at least the same as last year.