A 7% “Dividend Fortress” for the Trade War (plus an Easy Way to Track Payouts)

There aren’t a lot of things we can say for certain these days, but there is one: We dividend investors are far better off than the mainstream crowd!

Consider the unlucky souls who hold “America’s ticker”—my name for the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY). I call it that because, well, pretty well everyone owns it (it’s okay if you have SPY hiding somewhere in your portfolio—we don’t judge!)

These poor folks have taken the brunt of the market crash—and they’re getting “paid” a mere 1.4% for the pleasure.

Our Dividend Picks Are Built for Trying Times 

We contrarian dividend investors, meantime, know the value of high, safe payouts. For one, they help keep our bills paid during a market storm like this one. Because one thing we do not want to be forced to do is sell into a mess like this to raise cash.

Consider a stock like Apple (AAPL), whose dividend is fine, but whose share price has cratered. Since late February, Tim Cook’s company has shed a fifth of its value!

Sell Into This Dumpster Fire? A Nightmare for Any Retiree

Being forced to sell into a drop like that to get the cash we need is an absolute retirement killer.

Collecting high, regular payouts, of course also lets us reinvest—growing our income and gain potential as we do.

Even better if we use a dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP), which automatically reinvests our payouts, at a fixed level back into our investments on a regular frequency. That way we’ll automatically “buy cheap” when markets are down (like now) and buy fewer shares when markets are pricey.

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This is how true, lasting wealth is created. And it’s yet another reason why dividends are crucial. But there is one thing that is, frankly, a pain when it comes to dividends: They can be a nuisance to track.

Lots of us still use an “old-school” spreadsheet to try to tell which of our dividends will drop into our accounts in any given month.

To be fair, more brokerages do offer accounts with built-in dividend trackers these days. But they’re almost certainly only useful for any investments you hold with that particular broker.

What if you have more than one account, or invest through more than one brokerage (as many of us do)? Or what if you want to project income from an investment you don’t own (yet) but are considering buying?

For those situations, brokerage-run apps are clumsy at best. Useless at worst.

There are a bundle of “outside” apps out there, too. But switching to one likely means manually entering your tickers and/or learning a whole new system. No thanks!

Know What You’re Getting Paid—and When—With Income Calendar

Here at Contrarian Outlook, we’ve tried a lot of different dividend-projection tools, and we didn’t find any we loved (or even liked much). So we went ahead and created our own—exactly how we want it.

It’s called Income Calendar, and it quickly and easily ensures your dividends are in your account before your bills come out.

Let’s take a walk through this handy tool with a ticker that subscribers to my Contrarian Income Report service will recognize: the Reaves Utility Income Fund (UTG). This one has returned a sweet 38% for us since we added it to our portfolio in June 2023—less than two years ago.

UTG, as the name says, holds US utility stocks like Entergy Corp. (ETR), Xcel Energy (XEL) and CenterPoint Energy (CNP), as well as “utility-like” firms such as pipeline operator Enterprise Products Partners (EPD).

UTG, which yields 7% today, is one of our favorite “bond proxies.” That’s because, like bonds, utilities tend to move counter to the yield on the 10-year Treasury.

That makes it a smart buy now, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent straight-out saying he aims to bring down the yield on the 10-year—and with it interest rates on mortgages and other consumer loans.

Back to UTG, which takes the returns from its portfolio and hands them over to us in the form of that 7% dividend. Payouts come our way monthly, and steadily edge higher over time, with special dividends not out of the question here.

Look at this chart, generated through, you guessed it, Income Calendar:

A Rare 7% Dividend That Grows

Source: Income Calendar

Now let’s swing over to Income Calendar and plug in UTG, along with a couple other Contrarian Income Report holdings that pay quarterly, so we can get a good sense of how our tracker helps us navigate a range of payout frequencies. Those would be Ares Capital (ARCC), a business development company (BDC) with a rich 8.9% yield, and the Alerian MLP ETF (AMLP), a pipeline-holding fund with an 8% payout.

Let’s say we invest $100,000 in each. Income Calendar tells us, immediately, what we can expect in terms of dividends every month from our 3-buy “mini-portfolio”:

As you can see, with just these three buys, we’ve got dividends ranging from $593.75 in a month all the way up to $2,954.39, and a total of $18,432.36 on the year, on just $300K invested. That’s a rich 7.9% yield. (Bear in mind, too, that to be overly conservative, we don’t project dividend growth here, so our “real” payouts could end up higher.)

You can get complete breakdowns by stock, plus a month-by-month calendar giving you a heads-up on earnings dates, ex-dividend dates and other critical periods for every one of your holdings. Instantly!

Check it out. Here’s what our 3-buy portfolio shows us for June 2025, one of our highest-paying months:

We can see our projected pay dates, as well as ex-dividend dates (the dates before which we need to be “in” the stock to get the next payout) and even things like market holidays.

We even get a heads-up on when our stocks are due to report earnings—though there are none of these for our trio in June (understandable, given that one of our three picks is an ETF and the other is a closed-end fund).

There’s more, too, like real-time email alerts when a dividend is declared, a “week-ahead” summary telling us exactly how much we’ll get paid and when, a handy tool that instantly tells us our “yield on cost” (so we can see the “true” yield on each of our stocks, based on the timing of our original buy) and more.

Now, with dividends (and the need to stay on top of) more important than ever, is a perfect time to try Income Calendar.

Click here and I’ll tell you more about this powerful dividend planner and give you the opportunity to “road test” it out for yourself. I’m sure you’ll love it.