what is a stipend base?

i heard if you were a premium resident you get paid 300 a week...or is that too good to be true?? what exactly is a stipend base?? *confused*

ya..it used to be 400 when i was premium...
i believe it was to cover tier on your first land if i'm not mistaken..

I've only ever heard of it as a stipend, not a 'stipend base'. But yes, it's true, you get L$300 per week. There are occasional weeks when it's late, and last week some people got it twice (but they're not paying it this week to compensate).

Way back it was L$500, then for a while L$400. Anyone with an account from those days (me included!!) still gets the higher amount.

Yes, premium members do indeed get L$300L a week, it does help to defray the cost of a premium account, especially if you pay the $72/year option. The lindens themselves would cost almost $60 to purchase over the course of the year.
ETA. The term "Stipend Base" is simply how the transaction appears on your transaction history.

When I got it it was L500.

i always wondered where the heck the money was coming from hahahaha

i used to think my friends were messing with me till they explained it to me..

500 was that the highest they had or was it more for older members i wonder?

L$500 per week was the original amount of the Premium stipend, and Basic, non-Premium members used to get L$50 per week. Two of my Basic accounts still get that little L$50 per week, and apparently if I ever made them Premium, I would still get the L$500 per week Premium stipend.

Then they dropped it to L$400 for Premium and nothing for Basic, shortly after they dropped all identity validation requirements for new free accounts. People were signing up for alts just to farm the L$50 per week per alt, and some realized also that if you signed up for Premium for one month, collected your sign-up bonus and bought nearly free First Land and sold it again, you could cash out less than a month later and cancel the Premium membership and make more profit per created and deleted Premium account than you paid in for membership fees. That scam is what killed First Land...

So now they've reduced the stipend to L$300 per week, which means your annual dues as a Premium member cost you more over the year than it would have cost you to just buy L$ at a rate of L$300 per week, over the same year. No more money farming via Premium account creation...

It's callled the "Stipend Base", because waaaaay back in the mists of time (that is, 2003-ish), you also got a "Stipend Ratings Bonus" which gave you extra money based on the ratings you had from other users.

Naturally, it didn't work. Giving another user a positive rating cost, I think, first L$1 and later L$25. But having a positive rating would earn you money every month, so that cost would cancel out fairly quickly. Thus, two strangers could meet up, rate each other positively (no matter what they actually thought of each other) and both would profit. Naturally, positive ratings went through the roof and almost everyone was on maximum bonus.