Based on the general idea of considering the stock price as the sum over future expected discounted dividends, a flexible approach for the modeling of discrete cash dividends is developed. From a theoretical perspective, such a viewpoint automatically implies an arbitrage-free modeling approach and allows for embedding almost any kind of commonly applied stock price model and dividend specification. The practical implications are discussed and a tractable pricing framework is presented. The proposed method is easy to implement whenever there exists an efficient tree approximation for the underlying driving process, which is an arbitrary martingale.