Choosing a Dividend Aristocrat

The following is a guest post from Justin at Investing Ninja. If you’d like to guest post on the Dividend Ninja, be sure to check out our Guest Posting Guidelines.

Many articles and books have been written about choosing a dividend paying company.  Within these sources you will find numerous calculations that can be used to narrow down the seemingly infinite list of dividend paying companies – payout ratios, dividend yield, dividend growth rate, annual earnings per share (EPS) growth rate, debt to equity ratio are just a few of the many ratios that can be used.

But where is a good place to start looking for solid, consistent dividend paying companies?  As the Dividend Ninja posted in his Ninja Lessons, the dividend aristocrats are a great place to start.  Standard & Poor’s created dividend aristocrats list called the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats index which only includes companies within the S&P Composite 1500 and have increased total annual dividends for at least 20 consecutive years.  This list currently is comprised of 60 companies including Procter & Gamble, AT&T, Aflac, and McDonald’s.

Starting with 60 companies is a much easier place to start, but what if you want to compare all of these companies by their dividend payment dates?  Or by their ex-dividend dates?  What about comparing the companies’ dividend growth rates?  Would that be useful to you?  These were the questions I had when I set out to find this information.  I quickly ran into a major problem – this information is not located in a single place that allows me to quickly and efficiently narrow the list of companies to a handful for further evaluation.

This led me to create a resource that solves this problem.  This eBook allows anyone to quickly choose a company based off of payable date, ex-dividend date, and industry.  It also contains further detailed information for EVERY company on the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats index including company background and investor website.  Most importantly for the dividend investor, the dates and amounts for the last 5 years are listed as well as the total annual dividends and annual dividend increases!

Let’s go through an example.  You are searching for a company that pays a dividend in the month of October (see pic below).

You’ve narrowed your search down to the consumer staples industry and would like to look at the background and dividend payments for Kimberly-Clark.  You simply scroll down to the company information section, which is sorted alphabetically by company name, and find Kimberly-Clark.

You’ll find a company overview, link to the company website, dividend distributions for the last six years, as well as year-over-year increase of the dividends. Here is a sample page from my Aristocratic Dividends eBook, with Kimberly Clark (KMB):

  Kimberly Clark PDF (KMB)


Based off of this information, you can decide whether you want to research this company further, invest in the company now, or move on to a different company altogether!For a limited time, I am offering this resource, Aristocratic Dividends eBook, for free to anyone that subscribes to my email list at InvestingNinja.  Come check us out and get your copy of Aristocratic Dividends!


6 thoughts on “Choosing a Dividend Aristocrat”

  1. Hi Justin,

    Great idea to help narrow down the selection process. I love the grouping by payable date function in particular. 🙂 I’m confident enough in investing in Canada, but I’ve found the enormous number of companies traded in the US to be very daunting. I’m just starting to get my feet wet with US dividends, so your ebook is perfect timing.

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