My Marriott status reset this year. Although I had been traveling a lot, I hadn’t been the one booking the hotels. I didn’t like the “peasant” status—no late checkouts, no surprise suite upgrades. It was especially rough after I traveled with friends who had higher status than I did. I have corrected the situation with my 2025 travel.

As a dividend investor, I already feel more VIP than speculators. While they wait for share prices to rise, we’re getting paid. Don’t get me wrong, we want to see our stock go up, too, but we’re getting paid to wait.

Unfortunately, we know from experience that dividends are at the mercy of the Board of Directors. They can be cut or suspended at any time. It can happen even after the Board reassures investors in its latest earnings call that rewarding investors is a priority.

I’ve already seen this happen a handful of times this year. In one instance, the company had a below average payout ratio but still cut the dividend 90%!

This year is shaping up to be the weirdest and hardest of my career. That’s not a complaint, because there are plenty of opportunities. It does, however, mean that we should be thinking outside the box.

Invest Like a VIP

You’ve heard me talk about preferred shares and exchange traded bonds (also called baby bonds) before. They are essential tools in the income investors toolbox. These are the true VIP status of the dividend and income world.

Both give you greater income security because the payouts are set by the prospectus and not by the Board of Directors. And both have a par or face value which limits share price volatility. And both move you up the claim line if the absolute worst were to happen—default.

If a company defaults, debt holders get paid first, then preferred shareholders. Common shareholders are stuck waiting for scraps at the end of the line.

Preferreds and exchange traded bonds are harder to find. Most stock screeners don’t cover them, and the ticker format and available information can vary between brokers.

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However, Fidelity has a great screener to find preferred shares, and you don’t need an account with them to use it. It offers a full selection of filters to choose from, and I like to start my search with two: price and yield. I want an above average yield at a below average price.

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Notice the benchmark column in the “Screening Criteria” section. It will autofill after I enter my screening selections. Sure, it gives us the median instead of the mathematical average, but above I meant typical not necessarily arithmetic mean. As of Monday night, there were 157 preferred shares that met that criteria.

This is a great place to start your search, and there are other ways to look for preferred shares. Keep in mind that screening is not a substitute for analysis. Your results don’t mean that all of them are good investments. It just narrows the field for you to do more research on the company and the specific offering.

Want More Beyond This Weekly Email?

A few weeks ago, my Yield Shark readers got another of my favorite preferred stocks. We currently have four in the portfolio—two in the Bedrock Income section, and two in the Current Yield section. Three of them are trading below my recommended buy-up-to price.

If you’re not ready to commit to Yield Shark, but want to learn more, there are other options. You can join the Dividend Digest online community and interact with me and other income-minded investors. You can post questions or comments to each article to keep those conversations going.

In the Dividend Digest online community, I’m going to do a live event on July 10. Once a quarter, I touch base live with my Yield Shark readers. This is the first time I’ll be offering this service to those without a paid subscription.

The event is titled Building Reliable Income and Wealth with Dividends and will take place at 2pm. There will also be a Q&A session where you can submit questions ahead of time or ask them live in the chat. And don’t worry, if you can’t make the call, just use that link to log into the community and watch the replay.

I hope to see you there, and make this the biggest dividend event we’ve hosted anywhere on the Mauldin Economics platform. And don’t forget to share this link with anyone you think would benefit from unlocking streams of passive income or building wealth using the power of dividends.

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For more income, now and in the future,

Kelly Green

• how to screen for dividends
• preferred stock dividends
• VIP dividends