Getting passive income has always been attractive but in uncertain times, that proposition becomes even more interesting. As we wrote yesterday, holding cash is critical these days and buying a strong dividend portfolio is a great way to hold cash. With dividend stocks now yielding better than government bonds, it’s the perfect timing to get involved. So it is time for our always anticipated top dividend stock post. Every month, we do additional research on specific names both on the blog and in our free newsletter.

If you are interested in finding out what our top dividend stock picks are, simply join our mailing list… It’s free! Next week I will take a deeper look into the top picks from that analysis.

What To Look For

Over the past few months, we have looked at quite a few criteria that have helped us find the best dividend stocks including current yield, dividend growth and also companies that produce solid enough earnings to keep up the dividend payments. We summed it all up when we discussed the 20 things that we look for in dividend stocks.

FTR is once again at the top of our list and while it’s not clear how the stock will perform as a long term dividend play, what is clear is that many of these stocks are probably much better picks if you have a long term perspective. We will discuss how we filter through these in the coming weeks. As we discussed this week, stocks in the communications sector were one of the two sectors that reduced dividends the most in the last quarter, a worrying sign for anyone invested in those stocks.

Hopefully this will help you when building your passive dividend portfolio.

We will be filtering out the top 100 list to find the ones that fit all of these criteria! In the meantime, here is the list!