Dividend investing is a huge part of my investment strategy. As I’ve mentioned in my now monthly passive income updates, receiving dividend income from my both my Ultimate Sustainable Dividend portfolio and my ETF portfolio is a primary driver of how my retirement will be like a few decades from now:)

Today, I am back with our list of the top 100 dividend stocks from the S&P500 and we have a familiar name still on top.

Pitney Bowes is dominating the list but if you look at its stock chart just below, you will see that the rising dividend is caused not by raising payouts but because the stock price keeps declining. That is NOT a good sign. The fact is that numbers don’t look great when you look at the year over year comparisons and I’d be very reluctant to buy PBI, especially in a long term portfolio such as the USDP.

I’ve said over and over how using the top dividend yield as a point of reference could be dangerous and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see Best Buy (BBY) climb up there… as investors continue to jump off of the Best Buy ship (rightfully so!!), the dividend remains the same (for now) and thus the yield increases. Of course, no one expects that dividend to remain the same so the yield is not actually useful in such a case right?

One of my favorite ways to screen through dividend stocks is to use the 7-7-7 rule. Basically, I look for stocks that have average a 7% growth (or better) over 5 years for the:

-dividend growth
-earnings per share growth
-sales growth

Companies that fit here generally have strong profitable businesses and are dedicated to increasing dividends..! I actually did that screening for the 100 stocks that you can see here and got 2 results!!

Surprised to see so few? Those are the types of stocks that I look to add to the USDP. If you are interested in finding out more, I will do further analysis for the free mailing list, you can subscribe here, it’s free!:)