3 High-Yield Dividend Stocks You Can Buy and Hold for a Decade

If you’re looking for high-yielding dividend stocks, there’s certainly no shortage of them right now. Interest rates are high. Dividend yields followed suit.

Finding a dividend stock that you can confidently hold for a decade or more, however, is another story. Too many of them appear to have a risky downside, including the prospect of payment interruptions or dividend cuts. You’ll want to exercise above-average caution if you’re shopping around for some new revenue-generating names.

Or, you can start your search with one or more of the following three low-risk, high-yield dividend stocks.

WP Carey

WP Carey (WPC 0.14%) he’s not exactly a household name, but there’s a chance you regularly benefit from his business without even realizing it.

That’s because it owns a wide range of industrial properties that it leases to businesses that prefer to rent rather than own their own land and buildings. Its tenants range from pharmaceutical companies and schools to grocery stores and auto parts manufacturers — and more — in the U.S. and abroad.

WP Carey is legally structured as a real estate investment trust (or REIT), in effect, which makes it even more cost-effective to transfer rent-based profits to shareholders.

Commercial rental property can be a risky business for a number of reasons. Chief among them is cyclical economic weakness that limits the ability of its tenants to pay their monthly rent or curbs demand for commercial real estate altogether. However, WP Carey is still expected to continue to pay on the loans it took out to acquire the land and buildings. To that end, Carey recently cut its dividend by about 20%.

In addition, most of the tenants of this REIT are larger companies that are able to face economic challenges, WP Carey is also a net leased REIT. This means that the tenant is fully responsible for ever-changing and unpredictable costs such as taxes, insurance and maintenance. This REIT’s leases also inherently include continuous rental rate increases, so they collect payments that more or less reflect the prevailing rental rates at any given time.

That’s not to say that WP Carey is a risk-free investment prospect. But overall it is a reliable dividend payer and dividend producer. You’d be stepping in at a healthy dividend yield of nearly 5.7%.

Enbridge

WP Carey’s yield of just under 5.7% is good, but Enbridgehis (ENB 0.62%) it is even better at 6.7%. It’s also even more reliable in terms of dividend growth, having increased its annual payout for 29 consecutive years.

This may be surprising given that Canada’s Enbridge operates in the oil and gas sector. Crude oil and natural gas prices are all over the map and have been particularly volatile over the past decade. These wild swings can make it difficult to participate in the energy field.

Enbridge’s top and bottom lines are not actually closely tied to gas and oil prices. This is because it is primarily a pipeline and storage facilities operator with over 18,000 miles of pipelines spanning Canada and the United States. They simply collect a tax on the oil and gas they supply, regardless of the price of that oil and gas. His only concern is natural gas and crude oil consumption, which is as strong now in the US as it was in the late 1990s.

US oil consumption data by YCharts.

This is one of the key reasons why Enbridge’s revenues and earnings have remained much more consistent and reliable than crude oil and natural gas prices have remained.

This does not mean that there will not come a time when the world simply does not need gas or oil. However, that time is on the way. Goldman Sachs estimates that oil consumption will continue to rise until 2035, and even after that peak, we’ll still be using a lot of it after 2040. We’ll also need a means of getting it from point A to point B .

That’s what Enbridge does, handling nearly a third of the crude oil produced in North America and facilitating 40 percent of U.S. oil imports.

Verizon

Finally, add in the telecommunications powerhouse of the US Verizon Communications (See 0.14%) to your list of high-yielding dividend stocks you can buy and hold for a decade.

Clearly not a growth stock. Anyone who needs or wants wireless phone service already has it. Landlines are also a shrinking business. Any growth that Verizon achieves will be largely driven by US population growth and customer poaching from rival service providers who are also trying to steal Verizon’s customers for themselves. The only real growth factor in Verizon’s toolkit is its enterprise networking offering, and even that opportunity is somewhat limited.

However, the lack of enormous growth potential doesn’t mean that Verizon won’t continue to pay and grow its dividend. The company still has many ways to grow its business and the resulting dividend-generating earnings.

Think about it. People are actually addicted to their mobile phones to the point of feeling uncomfortable without them. Data from Reviews.org indicates that the average American checks their phone 144 times a day, staring at their screen for a daily average of four hours and 25 minutes. People won’t just stop using them now.

Meanwhile, Verizon is growing its business by acquiring peers, including competitors. Just last week, it announced that it would acquire Border communicationsbringing 2.2 million customers of its fiber broadband business.

It won’t come cheap. Verizon is paying $20 billion in cash to buy the company. It’s worth it, though. Verizon believes there are at least half a billion in annual savings to be found by combining the two organizations’ fiber connectivity operations, so the Frontier acquisition should eventually pay for itself. The deal also gives Verizon more control over this part of the telecom market, adding competitiveness in a different way.

These are just anecdotal examples of what Verizon is willing and able to do while remaining in a position to continue paying and growing its dividend. The thing is, he does them, and he does them well.

Again, Verizon will never be a high growth stock. But it’s a dividend machine, currently yielding 6.6% thanks to 18 consecutive years of annual payout growth — a streak that likely won’t be broken anytime soon.