Will this bull market actually die of old age this year?

The macro picture is dicey and stock valuations are pricey, but we must stay invested. The stock market goes up about two-thirds of the time. Permabears miss out on compounding and it’s not as easy to be a part-time bear as it sounds.

To illustrate this let’s consider a study by Hulbert Financial. The firm looked at the best “peak market timers”–the gurus who correctly forecasted the bursting of the Internet bubble in March 2000 and the Great Recession in October 2007.

These were the clairvoyant advisors who had their clients out of stocks and mostly in cash when the S&P 500 was about to be chopped in half.… Read more

We’re just three weeks into 2020 and it’s already a dividend wasteland!

Happy New Year! Enjoy Your 1.7% Dividend

Drop $500K into the typical (miserly) S&P 500 stock today and you get a pathetic $713 a month in dividend payouts. That’s no retirement; it might cover the cost of your commute and coffee on the way to your job as a Walmart (WMT) greeter—so long as you avoid going to Starbucks (SBUX)!

Treasuries? Forget it. At a 1.8% yield, we’re not retiring on them, either.

No wonder I hear from so many investors wary of putting their cash in a market yielding less than inflation.… Read more

It’s the No. 1 retirement question: how much income do you need to quit the 9 to 5?

Today I’m going to help you find your number.

The best place to start is by asking yourself how your post-retirement lifestyle goal stacks up that of the average working American. Do you want to live lavishly or closer to the middle class?

Once you’ve answered that question, the next step is to look to this number: $33,706.

Average American Incomes

According to the Federal Reserve, that’s the average income an American worker earns, and it gives us a handy jumping-off point. This figure has been rising lately, but has stayed stable over the long haul.… Read more

Income hunters that made their way into real estate investment trusts (REITs) at the start of 2019 are rolling in more than rent checks right now. Not only did they enjoy the sector’s generous dividends, they enjoyed big price gains to boot.

Even the “dumbly indexed” Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ) peeled off a sweet 28.9% in total returns last year. That’s its best showing since 2014, and more than double its average annual return of 11%-plus over the past decade.

But do these big 2019 gains mean that we’re due to regress in 2020?

I’ve previously warned about the dangers of holding REITs whose fundamentals are out of whack with its valuation.… Read more

Today I’m going to show you how one lucky group of investors nailed a once-in-a-lifetime shot at a huge, tax-free dividend stream and a quick 18% gain, too!

Well, not exactly “once-in-a-lifetime.” Because this opportunity is still waiting for you today—you just need to know how to tap it.

In a moment, I’ll give you the goods (including a name and ticker) on a closed-end fund (CEF) to target now. It hands you a 4.2% dividend you likely won’t have to pay a penny of federal tax on (and your payout could be exempt from state taxes, as well). 

To cut to the chase, thanks to its lucrative tax breaks, this fund’s 4.2%… Read more

A big “thank you” to the 1,358 subscribers who attended our How to Bank 20% Returns (Plus Sky-High Yields!) in 2020 with Safe Dividend Stocks webcast last Wednesday! We had a lively question and answer session. I love the enthusiasm!

Let’s use our time together today to review some of the questions that kept popping up.

Q: In terms of expected returns, what is the difference between your Contrarian Income Report, Hidden Yields and new Dividend Swing Trader strategies?

Our Contrarian Income Report service is designed to maximize the income you receive from your portfolio today. In CIR, we’re fattening up your monthly and quarterly dividend checks as much as we can without sacrificing principal.… Read more

I hope last week’s Iran head-fake didn’t have you thinking about buying so-called “safe” dividends like Treasuries. Because these tired income standbys aren’t safe at all!

With your nest egg yielding a pathetic 1.9%, you’re guaranteed losses, with inflation running at 2.1%. So today we’re going to make a simple contrarian move that will:

• Hand us huge 8.6%+ cash dividends—nearly five times what Treasuries pay.
• Pay us every month, not every quarter.
• Set us up for nice price gains “on the side,” and …
• Give us “Iran insurance,” helping shield our nest egg against swift drops triggered by global instability, an economic downturn—any reason, really.

Today we’re going to talk about the biggest threat to your portfolio (and dividends!) you face in 2020.

It’s not a recession. It’s a near-irresistible human impulse—purposely amped up by the financial press—that could lock in big losses for you, or cause you to miss out on a huge gain, like the 486%+ some investors left on the table.

Let’s talk about that now. It starts with all the doom-and-gloom stories you’ve likely read about a looming market crash lately. (They’re hard to miss: you can find at least one on most major news sites every day.)

First off, don’t believe the hype: truth is, there’s a lot of data saying we aren’t anywhere near a downtick, let alone a full-blown once-in-a-lifetime collapse.… Read more

The “race to zero” heats up again. You’ve surely heard that Vanguard is now slicing and dicing its already-low fees and commissions. That sounds great, but in reality, the low-fee race is pennywise yet dividend-foolish for us income investors.

To retire on secure, high-yielding long-term investments, we actually prefer to pay a fair management fee. I’ll outline this in a moment via a trio of secure 7% payers. Their generous yields tower above mainstream low-fee options:

More on these three dividend funds in a minute. First, let’s review why we prefer to pay for professional management.

Vanguard kicked off the new trading year by joining the “no-commission” fray that caught the likes of Charles Schwab (SCHW) and E*Trade (ETFC) by surprise in 2019.… Read more

What’s does 2020 hold for your utility stocks (and closed-end funds)? Will these steady income plays hand us another round of big gains and dividends? Or is there trouble ahead?

These are reasonable questions to ask after these “boring” stocks poured on a huge—and rather “un-utility-like”—26% total return last year:

Utilities or Exploding Small Caps? Tough to Tell.

Let’s dive into three critical factors that will tell the tale for utilities in 2020. And because it’s the season for forecasts, I’ll throw in my verdict on the sector for the coming year, too, and name five utility closed-end funds (CEFs) paying huge dividends of 6.3%… Read more