5 Surprising Dividend Aristocrats Yielding 3% or More

Generous dividend stocks that reliably raise their payouts year after year can be an important piece of an income portfolio.

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Generous dividend stocks that reliably raise their payouts year after year can be an important piece of an income portfolio. A smart way to identify attractive dividend stocks is to focus on the Dividend Aristocrats, 50 companies in Standard & Poor’s 500-index that have raised dividends for at least 25 years in a row.

Big Dividend Aristocrats with yields of more than 3% are well known to income investors and feature prominently in many retirement portfolios. (Think AT&T (T), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Procter & Gamble (PG), Coca-Cola (KO) and the like.) But there are many smaller Dividend Aristocrats with above-average yields that can go unnoticed. Take a look at five surprising dividend stocks with 3%-plus yields whose dividends have increased annually for 25 years or more.

Disclaimer

(Dividend yields and other figures are as of June 30, 2017. Companies are listed in order of market capitalization—share price times total shares outstanding—starting with the highest. The following five stocks were selected from among the 25 smallest Dividend Aristocrats by market cap. The full list of all 50 Dividend Aristocrats is maintained by S&P Dow Jones Indices. Dividend history based on company information and S&P data. Analysts’ ratings provided by Zacks Investment Research.)

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Dan Burrows
Senior Investing Writer, Kiplinger.com

Dan Burrows is Kiplinger's senior investing writer, having joined the august publication full time in 2016.

A long-time financial journalist, Dan is a veteran of SmartMoney, MarketWatch, CBS MoneyWatch, InvestorPlace and DailyFinance. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Consumer Reports, Senior Executive and Boston magazine, and his stories have appeared in the New York Daily News, the San Jose Mercury News and Investor's Business Daily, among other publications. As a senior writer at AOL's DailyFinance, Dan reported market news from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and hosted a weekly video segment on equities.

Once upon a time – before his days as a financial reporter and assistant financial editor at legendary fashion trade paper Women's Wear Daily – Dan worked for Spy magazine, scribbled away at Time Inc. and contributed to Maxim magazine back when lad mags were a thing. He's also written for Esquire magazine's Dubious Achievements Awards.

In his current role at Kiplinger, Dan writes about equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities, funds, macroeconomics, demographics, real estate, cost of living indexes and more.

Dan holds a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a master's degree from Columbia University.

Disclosure: Dan does not trade stocks or other securities. Rather, he dollar-cost averages into cheap funds and index funds and holds them forever in tax-advantaged accounts.