Any well diversified portfolio will also include to some extent a few dividend paying stocks. Whether in a bull market or a bear market dividend paying stocks boost your portfolio performance and when you reinvest those dividends (DRIP) you are able to take advantage of stocks that have gotten cheaper or just build on a position you already own.

So, how do you find dividend paying stocks? Easy. Just us a stock screener and filter the results to show only dividend and yield stocks. I’ve set up a stock screener on E*Trade looking at stocks that yield between 4-6% and payable between .50 cents and 1.00 a share. Stocks that pay higher dividends are usually a lot more expensive so I wanted to focus on stocks that are affordable to the everyman.

I haven’t done any due diligence into who these companies are or what they do, that’s for you to figure out yourself but again, this is about adding one or two stocks to your portfolio that can pad your account. The other upside of dividend paying stocks is consistent price action. For buy and hold strategies, dividends are key to long term investments.

Here’s 5 that You could consider for your portfolio:

1. Lorillard Inc (LO) – 6.21% yield or $.92 cent/share dividend
2. Consolidated Edison (ED) – 5.98% yield or $.585 cent/share dividend
3. DTE Energy (DTE) – 5.98% yield or $.53 cent/share dividend
4. Boston Properties (BXP) – 5.48% yield or $.68 cent/share dividend
5. VF Corp (VFC) – 4.58% yield or $.59 cent/share dividend

So, just 5 stocks I found screening for specific criteria. I don’t own any of these stocks but this is the kind of thing you want to find in a bear market. All of these stocks are also down way off their highs for the year and otherwise are cheap.

To recap, dividends add to your portfolio and if you reinvest them, you not only boost your position in that stock but get stocks cheaper for essentially nothing since the company is paying you to own their stock.

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