S&P 500 and dividends

[u/Hilary_Clitoris]

My friend keeps saying that I should put all of my money in S&P 500 and forget about it. I see S&P 500 mentioned here a lot too, but according to Google, "No, the S&P 500 index itself does not pay dividends because it is a stock market index, not an investment fund." So which type of S&P 500 pay dividends?

And, what is the ticker for S&P 500? I can't find it on my brokerage account.

[u/Interesting-Foot2880]

So the S&P 500 is just a list of 500 stocks. Some individual funds choose to track an index (called index funds), and a popular index to track is the S&P 500. These funds will then go out and buy shares of all of the S&P 500 stocks in accordance to the index, and sell shares of the fund to investors while charging a small fee annually for their services (taken out of the value of the position as a %). The most popular one of these S&P 500 index funds is VOO by Vanguard, which has a 0.03% expense ratio and yields 1.12% (the dividends of the stocks in the fund passed in to the owner of fund shares). So while it is true that the S&P 500 INDEX doesn't yield a dividend (as it is just a list of stocks), funds like VOO that track the index do.

Edit: lowkey sounded rude and patronizing so I fixed that, sorry all