A friend and I looked a lot of the high dividend stocks, and I’ve always preferred that kind. But some are very risky like Altria (around 5% yield now but a potential 100 billion dollar debt from a lawsuit). With a lot of looking you can find good stocks, but when they get popular their price can go way up, which can help you if you don’t want to buy them again, or hurt if you planned to keep buying more.
I used to be on Motley Fool, but then they started charging for most content, and after that they stopped their real money portfolios. I think the real money kept them more honest about what they were advocating.
Mainly I don’t fiddle with stocks, I have about 5 that I have money in, and I put a bit extra in every month. When I was trading actively the commisions were hurting me, and only because of the recent stock market climb am I above what I put in.
My favorite high-yielding dividend stock would be:
CUZ - http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=s&s=cuz
Tax Guy,
I had an experience where I inherited a client from another advisor. This client had a brother-in-law who was a CPA. Well, the client was a dairy farmer and had set up an IRA about 20 years ago and made regular contributions to fund it at the maximum level ($2,000 annually back then).
Well he forgot to inform his BIL and his BIL was real keen on him not showing ANY net income from his dairy farm. When the whole mess was dropped into my lap it was determined that the client had made illegal contributions to an IRA and had not paid any taxes on the growth. After taxes and penalties were incurred it wiped out every bit of his gain and even cost him some of his principal.
It seems his BIL should have at least shown on his returns that he made a nominal income (even if it had been just the $2,000 he was contributing annually to his IRA). If he had at least done this there would have been no penalties and the taxes due would have been much much less.
I have seen some smaller instances of financial screw ups but nothing like this. What people need to do is have a team of professionals working for them which communicates with each other. I work in several “Teams” where there is an attorney, accountant and me the financial and insurance advisor.
When you have a team like this you get a much more cohesive approach to your financial planning and achieve things which you could not do if you kept each advisor uninformed on your dealings with your other professional advisors.
This client wasn’t Willie Nelson was it? 
I was incorporated and I think we would basically work backwards from showing “no profit”. But that usually required me to write a big honkin’ payroll check to myself at the end of the year (such a sad story huh). So, I paid the taxes one way or the other. My accountant was a very well-rounded financial kinda guy. He did my original incorporation too.
But I agree it’s good to have more that one person dealing with your financial situation. If you have only one, they can make mistakes, be too conservative or too aggressive, or just plain cheat you. I had a feeling SunTzu2U knew his stuff from his previous posts