welcome to the Simply Save dividends Channel I'm your host Brian Bolinger investors have piled into money market funds ever since the FED started raising interest rates in 2022 but the days of earning 5% on your cash are quickly coming to an end after the FED kicked off its rate cutting cycle last week now I don't think you need to be in a rush to move your cash anywhere but if history is any guide It's a good time to at least start thinking about your options for income with how quickly money market rates could reset I put together this chart showing vanguard's money market fund rate in blue and the federal funds rate in red you can see that these metrics have essentially moved in lock step for decades so it's reasonable to expect rate cuts from the FED to be reflected in how much your money markets pay pretty quickly when rates have jumped a lot like from 2004 to 2007 investors poured cash into retail money market funds which are represented by the black line during the current tightening cycle assets in these funds have nearly doubled since the start of 2022 but when rates fall far enough and take money market payouts down with them assets Retreat to presumably seek other Investments that can earn higher returns you can see the black line dip not long after each of the last three rate cutting cycles that started in 2019 2007 and 2001 this time around the FED projects rates to drop to around 3% by the end of next year which will take money market rates to a similar level but a lot can happen with the inflation Outlook and the economy between now and then to potentially alter that Outlook and it wouldn't be the first time the FED has wildly missed the mark with some of their assumptions about the future if rates do fall towards 3% or even lower dividend stocks are one option that can provide higher income than money market funds while also offering long-term income growth and capital appreciation potential since you're buying an ownership stake in a productive asset a company that can innovate and become more efficient to grow its earnings and pass along part of your share of those profits in the form of a dividend in today's video I'm going to review five quality dividend stocks that yield near 5% or higher so comparable to the rates you can earn on money Market funds today but I want to be clear that I'm not advocating for investors to chase higher returns by buying stocks for short-term gains even the safest companies like Johnson and Johnson have unpredictable share prices any given year so stocks aren't really appropriate to buy if you can't afford to hold them for at least 5 to 10 years to give them enough time to grow in value before you might need to sell at the end of the day you should really think about why you have cash parked and money markets in the first place I think these can be a good home for emergency funds and other short-term cash needs that you have even as rates come down so keep those points in mind as well as your own risk tolerance as we go into these dividend stock ideas I used Simply Safe dividend stock screener to begin finding these ideas I started out by looking at stocks that only had a yield of at least 4% which is probably going to beat money market rates in the next year or less that gets us down to about 300 stocks to consider I also put in safe or very safe dividend safety scores that we've assigned these businesses we spend a lot of time on these ratings each week they range from 0 to 100 companies with a safe or very safe score we give at least a 90% chance of maintaining their dividends over a full economic cycle which includes a recession we post a real-time track record of all the 800 plus Cuts we've seen since we started doing this in 2015 to show you the scores we had on each of these companies before they cut their dividend the bottom line is if you stuck with companies that continued to maintain a safe or very safe rating you would have avoided at least 826 of these 845 Cuts so it's not foolproof but it's a good way to weed out a lot of lower quality stocks that could be yield traps I'm going to put in two more filters here the next one is uninterrupted dividend streak will require companies to have paid a dividend for at least 20 years with no cuts that gets us through the financial crisis the pandemic uh lots of different things going on there to maintain a dividend through and then finally valuation I'll talk more about this when we get into the stocks but we'll look at stocks that we think appear to be reasonably valued or undervalued based on their expected prices so that gives us 29 stocks to look through here I already went through this list earlier and the first stock I will talk through is Enterprise Products Partners ticker symbol epd you're getting a 7% yield here if you're unfamiliar with the business it's in the energy space particularly the Midstream area so epd is a really big company that owns a bunch of infrastructure think pipelines gas processing plants storage tanks everything you really need to help energy producers move their oil gas Natural Gas Liquids uh from the well head all the way down to some of the end consumers that turn these raw materials into useful things like gasoline and other chemicals that go into tons of different products so epd is a very essential business slide deck here kind of shows you where it infrastructure spans it's a one of the largest Midstream companies in America um we couldn't really function as a nation without ppd's infrastructure and all of the products it supports so this business has been very reliable not only because it provides an essential service but most of its business is done under long-term contracts that pay fixed fees and have minimum volume Provisions so the company gets paid to move these materials through its Network even if uh demand has dropped so we saw this during the pandemic when oil prices plunged a lot of producers pulled back on their drill activity consumption was down you would think that would really hurt a company like epd but because of its contracts you can see the company's cash flow here was remarkably stable um epd's dividend or distribution as it's called for MLPs looks quite safe to me as well you can see the company's payout ratio is about 60% so in other words for every $100 of cash flow the business generates it's only paying out about 50 to 60 of those dollars in the form of a distribution epd is very financially concern conservative as well if we flip down here to its leverage ratio net debt to iida this is basically measuring a company's ratio of debt to earnings you can see epd's been at about three times which is pretty low for this space and helps the company earn an A minus credit rating from S&P which is among the highest in the energy industry uh from a distribution perspective epd's dividend here you can see has been increased every single year for 25 straight years growing at about a three to five% annual rate over those different periods I think that's a pretty good bet to continue finally from a valuation perspective here we believe that a lot of mature dividend payers like epd that don't really have a whole lot changing with their long-term Outlook they've been around a long time we think they usually tend to trade at a persistent valuation multiple so kind of the same PE Ratio or dividend yield over time in this case from a valuation perspective doing here at this chart we're saying if epd traded at its 5-year average dividend yield over these different periods what what price would we expect the stock to be at that's the blue band kind of trading around that five-year average yield so you can see during the pandemic when investors freaked out about oil prices dropping epd traded way below that value you would have expected based on its yield it did recover back into that range where it kind of sits today so epd seems like a reasonably value valed 7% yielder with very predictable dividend growth one thing to keep in mind this is an MLP so it issues a K1 tax form instead of a$ 1099 usually you want to hold MLPs in taxable accounts and you need to be comfortable with handling that tax time it's usually not a big deal but something to keep in mind as you consider epd as an income idea all right the next company I wanted to show you that bubble up in our screener here is also quite popular Verizon so this company makes most of its money from Wireless Services Verizon itself was formed in 2000 but its history actually can be traced back to the late 1800s when Alexander granbell patented the telephone and founded AT&T it was Verizon kind of grew out of AT&T and it split up so today Verizon dominates the market with AT&T and T-Mobile it's a super Capital intensive industry Verizon invests more than $15 billion annually to support its wireless network keeping it fast reliable uh the things that consumers and businesses Bank on it's a very mature business that's reflected in Verizon's dividend growth it's been quite slow for a long time growing at about 2 to 3% per year but it's been reliable Verizon and's PR predecessors have paid a safe dividend for 40 years that dividend has grown every year for the last 17 years I think that's a pretty good bet to continue There were some concerns about Verizon it had to spend a lot a few years ago to build out its 5G Network and buy up spectrum that really hurt the company's free cash flow per share it's a super Capital intensive initiative to take on Verizon's balance sheet also became a little stretched you can see leverage ticked up here to fund these big Investments and these Investments have been a little bit disappointing they haven't really fueled a whole lot of growth uh but the good news is Verizon is past its peak spending you can see free cash flow now is increasing over the next year and that keeping Verizon's dividend pretty well covered with the free cash flow payout ratio expected to be just below 60% in the year Ahad which provides some cash the company can use to keep paying down debt uh we touched briefly in a recent note about uh Verizon's planned acquisition of Frontier we don't think that's really going to move the needle with uh Verizon's overall dividend profile so we're comfortable keeping our safe rating on the dividend for now from a valuation perspect perspective here um you can see that Verizon stock price hasn't really done a whole lot over the last 20 years um but the dividend has been safe and you're getting a 6% plus yield the stock is kind of trading in line with its fiveyear average p ratio right now sitting in that blue band so I think it looks at least reasonably valued so Verizon is an interesting idea to consider it performs typically well during recessions during the financial crisis its sales were down just 1% and the stock stock well it lost almost 40% that was still much better than the S&P 500's 55% draw down from 07 to 09 next up in the screen of results that I'll show you here is realy income so a lot of you are probably familiar with this company it's really popular in part because it has paid a reliable dividend for 55 years the dividend has been growing pretty consistently as well for over 25 years at kind of a low to mid single digit Pace but what people really like about realy income besides that track record is it pays a dividend every single month so very consistent passive income coming your way you're getting a 5% yield today we give it a dividend safety score of 80 a safe rating and uh the stock itself as a Reit a lot of these reat will traded a persistent dividend yield and realy income is really uh not an exception here you can see that the stock has tracked pretty closely with its 5-year average dividend yield over time sat below this range as a Fed hiked rates the last couple of years that kind of pushed a lot of downward pressure on interest rate sensitive stocks like REITs that rely on a lot of debt and that investors own for their income but we can see more recently the stock has been recovering and now kind of Trades at the low end of its expected price again based on if the stock traded at a multiple in line with its 5year average dividend yield now I think realy income is going to remain a very reliable uh Cash Cow as a Reit we look at a metric known as adjusted funds from operations or affo it's kind of similar to free cash flow for REITs because it's excluding any um acquisition money they've put towards buying properties and any massive development projects they might be spending on that use cash today but will generate returns later on in realy income's case it's p ratio is about 75% it's come down over the last decade from 85% so the dividend remains well covered RS are required to pay out at least 90% of their taxable income which is again different from affo won't get into all those details but that's why you will see higher payout ratios across the space for REITs realy incomes cash flow per share has very steadily increased over time this really reflects uh the way the re's business model works so realy income owns thousands of mostly retail focused prop properties that it has leased under long-term agreements to all sorts of tenants who are on the hook for paying you know maintenance expenses property taxes Insurance on these properties so it's a very high margin business for realy income and if some of the tenants don't do well it can kind of plug in new tenants because most of its properties are freestanding single tenant nothing like a owning a mall for example and they're in good locations realy income is kind of famous for having an occupancy rate across this portfolio of at least 96% going back 20 plus years now so that kind of signals these properties are generally in desirable areas that businesses want to be so they stay in demand and help support what's been a very stable source of income for dividend investors for a long time so that's realy income for you the next stock on our list that I'll show you is UPS now this one's a little controversial because it's been a a couple of years for UPS we published a note with some additional thoughts on the company in July and I want to show you a chart that kind of sums up some of the primary challenges that UPS is facing so we went back through UPS's annual reports for you know probably about 15 20 years and we pulled out the company's package volumes each year over that time and you can see that until the pandemic they were steadily increasing which is great right that's kind of how UPS makes more money it brings in more packages it keeps its uh Network utilization up delivery trucks airplanes the more packages you can fill them with and the denser your delivery routes can be the more money UPS makes the more efficient the business becomes the more efficiently it can deliver packages and keep a reasonable price to win more business during the pandemic deliveries jumped significantly because everyone was stuck at home and they were buying more stuff online and it was kind of a brief golden ER if you were doing business online U selling Goods in particular but that phase is over and you're kind of dealing with the hangover now as Goods consumption is down the economy has been slowing and the industry is kind of grappling with excess shipping capacity amongst some other challenges that's been really tough for UPS you can see that the company's earnings have taken a really big hit its pad ratio has jumped to 90% over the past year hopefully some improvement will be realized in the year ahead but it's been a very disappointing time for the stock its dividend yield is around 5% today which is actually higher than it was during the depths of the pandemic now I don't think it's all bad news or signaling that the company's future is doomed um UPS owns just a massive massive network of infrastructure re required to deliver packages quickly and at a reasonable price we're talking about over 130,000 Vehicles more than 550 aircraft very few companies can compete with this FedEx and Amazon are the most notable along with the US Post Office uh Rivals with delivering packages Amazon has been growing it's something to keep an eye on Amazon is only around I think it's 10% of UPS's sales today so when I look at this industry I kind of think UPS will eventually get back on track to delivering steady package volume growth in This Global World I think demand for packages will keep rising and this distribution Network the company has is very difficult to replicate um management has also reaffirmed their commitment to the dividend while they do Target a lower payout ratio of 50% they've signal they have no intent to cut the dividend just to make that math work they're still planning to raise a payout each year the good news is UPS has a very strong balance sheet that earns at an a credit rating it's just things could get worse before they get better it's very hard to say especially if the economy does keep slowing but this is a business that's paid an uninterrupted dividend for 55 straight years so if you're looking for something that's out of favor could bounce back definitely facing some challenges in the near- term but has some interesting durable advantages in my opinion UPS is one to keep an eye on all right we've talked about epd we've talked about Verizon realy income UPS the last company I'm going to talk about here is back in the energy space Chevron yield is not quite as high but at 4 and a half% I think you'll be pretty happy with an income Source here that's growing at a nice clip chevron's dividend has increased by about six to 7% per year pretty reliably over the last two decades what's really impressive is Chevron has never reduced its dividend since it started paying one in I believe 1912 over a hundred years ago very very few companies can put up a track record like that especially in a space as volatile as energy so how has Chevron done this well it's been one of the most conservative operators you'll find so chevron's business today is massive it's one of the biggest companies in the world almost a $300 billion do market cap and its activities stretch across really the whole energy spect so it's known as an integrated oil major so it does everything from exploring for and producing oil and gas liquefied natural gas all the way down to Downstream operations so using some of that oil for example to make refined products like gasoline and petrochemicals it owns a network of gas stations as well so usually when you think about Upstream Midstream and downstream in the energy space they're not all performing poorly at once usually something is doing well which helps offset some of the other that could be experiencing cyclical weakness which helps support more reliable cash flow in what's otherwise a very cyclical industry Chevron is huge so it has resources pretty much all over the world I think the US is only about a third of its production so it's operations are very Global and they span lots of different resources too you have deep water you have gas conventional oil shale oil it has a big footprint in the perian Basin which drives most of the energy production growth in the US but but this is another key that helps Chevron optimize his profitability across a full cycle um turning to the financials you can see that chevron's earnings are much more volatile than a lot of the other companies we've looked at so far that can make it harder to support a dividend U chevron's secret is maintaining a really really strong balance sheet so if you look at this net debt to Capital ratio it's showing you the percentage of a company's business that is financed with debt instead of equity so Chevron likes to keep this very low when times are good because it knows there will be a period where its free cash flow drops oil prices are down and it needs to lean on its balance sheet by borrowing some money to keep funding its operations and the dividend to keep it safe over what can be a multi-year period of weak Energy prices so chevron's in a great spot here it debt levels are the lowest they've been in a decade to be able to keep supporting its dividend management thinks that the dividend and chevron's capital spending can be supported with an oil price that's only around $40 $50 a barrel so there's a margin of safety there as well with oil prices currently sitting near $70 from a valuation perspective it's important to look at Chevron from a dividend yield perspective if you tried to look at it with the p ratio it's going to be all over the place because chevron's earnings are very unstable depending on the energy price environment but the stock has traded near its 5-year average dividend yield over time so you can see when oil has dropped a lot like during the pandemic and during 2015 when oil crashed the stock trades at a pretty high yield if stock price drops and there's a lot of value to be had if you can continue to believe that the dividend is safe and uh investors will kind of come to their senses in a couple of years today the stock price is within its expected price range based again on chevron's 5year average dividend yield so shares look pretty reasonably valued but to get a 4 and a half% yield with pretty decent dividend growth built into it it's not a bad idea especially if you wonder about inflation reigniting with the fed's interest rate Cuts owning something that's tied to oil prices and energy um could be a good idea to consider I hope these five income ideas were helpful just remember that stocks have very different risk profiles than money markets and they require a long-term holding period as you think about these ideas when rates come down if you enjoyed this video it would really help me if you hit the like button and considered subscribing to our channel for regular dividend stock analysis and investing tips without all the nonsense that's out there if you're into income investing you might also want to check out our website simplysafe dividend.com where you can get access to research and tools that thousands of investors rely on each day to keep their dividend income safer and ultimately keep their retirements on track it's free to try it only takes a minute to sign up no credit card required or anything like that you can get started by tracking your dividend portfolio safety and income you can read our stock research screen for ideas download our newsletter and model portfolios you can research a company's fundamentals and valuation and a whole lot more thanks again for watching and I hope to catch you next time