5 Monthly Dividend Stocks To Pay Your Bills In Retirement

We all have bills to pay. And whether it’s your mortgage, your utilities or just that pesky credit card bill, life’s little expenses tend to recur every month.

Even if you have a diversified portfolio of bonds and dividend stocks, this schedule is going to make your monthly cash flows lumpy.There’s just one problem with this: If you’re living off of your investments, you normally get paid on a very different timeframe. Dividends are usually paid quarterly, and bond interest is usually paid semi-annually.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like trying to plan my expenses three to six months in advance. And for a retiree, I can’t think of too many things scarier than running out of money in between quarterly dividend payments.

Well, fear not. I have a solution: Monthly dividend stocks.

Many closed-end bond funds have traditionally paid their dividends monthly, which is nice. It shows that the managers understand their investors and try to accommodate them. But among everyday dividend stocks, it’s still surprisingly rare and usually limited to a REITs and business development companies.

Today, we’re going to look at six solid monthly dividend stocks that can be used to round out an income portfolio.

Monthly Dividend Stocks: STAG Industrial (STAG)

I’ll start with a young REIT that I’ve owned for years, STAG Industrial (STAG). STAG is a small-cap REIT with a market cap of about $1.3 billion. That makes it large enough to be diversified but still small enough to fly under the radar of most investors. STAG switched from a quarterly dividend to a monthly dividend in late 2013.

STAG’s business model is simple enough to understand. The REIT invests in single-tenant industrial real estate — things like warehouses and light manufacturing facilities — that tend to require little in the way of maintenance and ongoing expenses. As of the most recent investor presentation, STAG had a portfolio of 253 properties spread across 36 states and 231 tenants, most of which are investment-grade rated.