3 High-Yielding Dividend Stocks That Investors Can Safely Buy and Hold for Decades

These are strange times for the stock market. Although the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) is technically more expensive than it's ever been and the AI stocks leading it higher are finally showing signs of vulnerability, we're also still within sight of the record highs reached early last month.

And that's despite consumer confidence remaining near multiyear lows. Lingering inflation doesn't seem to be weighing too much on investors' minds either, even though it's forcing the Federal Reserve to ratchet up interest rates, which seem likely to stay there for a while.

This might be a good time to rethink what your portfolio looks like for the indefinite future, focusing more on future cash flow and relying a little less on capital growth that may not materialize as much as previously anticipated.

In other words, it may be time to add some long-term exposure to higher-yielding dividend stocks. Here are three to consider.

1. Clorox

Clorox (NYSE: CLX) hasn't exactly felt like a super-safe dividend stock to buy and hold lately. Although the consumer goods ticker rallied during and because of the COVID-19 pandemic, since its 2020 peak it's peeled back by 60%, making a new multiyear low just last month.

Thanks to a 2023 cyberattack that did some surprisingly long-term damage and a migration to a new ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform that's not gone as smoothly as hoped, the company's simply struggled -- with the shrinking sales and earnings to prove it. Never mind the fact that it just doesn't have the same benefit of scale that much larger rival Procter & Gamble enjoys. P&G did $87 billion worth of business last fiscal year, for perspective, while Clorox only did $6.7 billion, down 5%.

But with most of what was broken now fixed, the company's looking for respectable organic revenue growth of between 3.5% and 4.5% for the fiscal year that began in July, driving a similar improvement in per-share earnings. This turn likely does mark the beginning of longer-lived forward progress.

Lost in all the noise is the fact that Clorox has not only continued paying its dividend through this rough patch but has also continued growing it, now into a 49-year streak of annual per-share payment increases. You can plug into this long-term growth trend that's one year away from reaching Dividend King status while its forward-looking dividend yield stands at a frothy 5.7%, taking advantage of the overly aggressive sell-off that looks right past the fact that the company's been planning a smart turnaround for a while now.

2. Brookfield Renewable

Utility companies are usually great dividend payers for the obvious reason: Their customers make a point of keeping their power turned on by faithfully paying their monthly bills.

The business is getting trickier, though. Aside from being capital-intensive and increasingly regulated, growth typically comes only from geographic expansion, which adds complexity and eats away at efficiency.

Brookfield Renewable (NYSE: BEPC) is taking a different tack. Rather than never-ending expansion into adjacent geographic territories, Brookfield Renewable picks and chooses to back -- with capital -- smaller cash-generating utility projects all over the world, like its 38% stake in Colombia's hydropower company Isagen, or its recently acquired share of Canada's wind power specialist Boralex.

These aren't deals that would have been of much interest to a major U.S. utility outfit. Brookfield's management team understands smaller and foreign wind, hydro, nuclear, and solar power opportunities though, knowing when to buy in, and sometimes, when to sell. This is flexibility that more traditional utility outfits just don't have.

Perhaps more important, Brookfield Renewable is structured and invested in a way that prioritizes dividend payments and supports substantial dividend growth. While there is some capital appreciation to be reaped from the company's portfolio of revenue-bearing assets, built for income, the organization believes its distributions will grow between 5% and 9% per year indefinitely. Newcomers will start with a solid, forward-looking dividend yield of 5.4%.

Just make sure you're buying the right version of this stock. There's a limited partnership version that trades under the ticker BEP, but owning stakes in partnerships requires additional tax-filing forms that aren't always worth the trouble.

3. Verizon Communications

Finally, add Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) to your list of safe high-yielding dividend stocks you can buy and hold for the long haul, while you can plug into its yield of 6.3%.

Almost as much as they make a point of keeping their lights turned on and their water flowing, consumers keep their mobile phones connected to wireless networks. Many of them effectively feel like they have to, in fact. Data from Harmony Healthcare IT says the average American spends more than five hours per day staring at their smartphones' screens, suggesting addiction-level usage.

Mentally healthy or not, most consumers aren't apt to let go of the digital centerpiece of their lives now. That's a big reason Verizon's been able to raise annual per-share dividend payments for 20 consecutive years.

There's no great potential for capital gains here, for the record. With data from Pew Research indicating 98% of adults living in the United States already own a mobile phone (91% of which are smartphones), the market is pretty well saturated, with most of the major companies in the mobile telecom business simply swapping customers with one another. Any net growth will come only from population growth and price increases, which won't be much.

As a dividend-supporting cash cow, though, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better business than wireless telecom, and Verizon is one of its best.

James Brumley has positions in Procter & Gamble. The Motley Fool recommends Brookfield Renewable and Verizon Communications. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.