[philfree]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Interesting.

I'll admit that I'm kind of irrationally a fan of dividend stocks. I think some of it is psychological. If I'm having to sell stocks in retirement to fund my lifestyle, that's a retreat in my mind. I'm giving up assets. But if I'm getting dividends, my original asset stays intact. That would help me sleep at night.

I realize that I'm likely giving up some total return, but in a normal market I don't want to find myself selling stocks in a downturn so I can buy a pizza or broccoli. With dividend stocks I won't really care about normal stock market fluctuations so much because I'm not selling the stock.

The kicker this past couple of years is that the markets have been far from normal. Massive drops, big runups, and as I mentioned earlier, stable dividend stocks that immediately lowered their dividend to zero, which screwed over my strategy. But with change comes opportunity, so I'm trying to figure out if there's way to get some of that money back.

It's probably good to have dividend and growth stocks both.

And I also look very closely at cash on hand and debt.

If a company has a lot of cash in the bank... and it isn’t heavily in debt... again, you can expect the dividend to continue to rise quickly.