One way to gauge a company’s ability to raise dividends, or at least not cut them, is to divide its free cash flow per share by the share price to come up with a free cash flow yield. And that can be compared with the dividend yield.A company’s free cash flow is its remaining cash flow after capital expenditures. To present a useful list of dividend stocks with dividend yields that appear safe, we started with the S&P 500, and then removed stocks with negative returns of 15% or more this year.
After all, investors have little confidence in them. We then pared the list to companies that have paid dividends for at least five years, while removing any that have cut regular dividends at any time over the past five years, according to FactSet.
Here are the results...
Company
|
Free cash flow yield - past
12 months
|
Dividend yield
|
GAP
|
HCP Inc.
|
8.72%
|
6.23%
|
2.48%
|
Mattel Inc.
|
5.99%
|
5.61%
|
0.38%
|
AT&T Inc.
|
7.01%
|
5.56%
|
1.45%
|
Welltower Inc.
|
6.62%
|
5.11%
|
1.52%
|
Verizon Communications
|
10.12%
|
4.96%
|
5.16%
|
Philip Morris International
|
4.68%
|
4.64%
|
0.03%
|
Realty Income Corp.
|
5.40%
|
4.58%
|
0.82%
|
People’s United Financial
|
4.89%
|
4.11%
|
0.78%
|
Kimco Realty Corp.
|
6.15%
|
3.94%
|
2.20%
|
Altria Group Inc.
|
4.88%
|
3.94%
|
0.94%
|