Simply Safe Dividends Review – Can It Help You Build a Better Income Portfolio?

About Simply Safe Dividends

Simply Safe Dividends is an online research platform designed for dividend investors. The platform helps you monitor your portfolio for changes in dividend payouts over time and makes it easy to spot companies that are at risk of cutting their dividends. Simply Safe Dividends is also packed with investing ideas to help you build a new dividend portfolio or add to your existing portfolio.

In our Simply Safe Dividends review, we’ll cover everything you need to know about this service to decide if it’s right for you.

How Much Does Simply Safe Dividends Cost?

Simply Safe Dividends costs $399 per year. You can try out the service with no limitations for 14 days and your subscription comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee.

What Features Do Members Have Access To?

Dividend Safety Score

A lot of the value that Simply Safe Dividends provides comes from its experienced research team. The research team does in-depth dives on over 1,000 US dividend stocks to evaluate whether their payouts are at risk. All the research is done manually in-house, and companies’ financial data is re-checked at least once per quarter following earnings.

Instead of providing raw data for you to then analyze yourself, Simply Safe Dividends boils down its analysis of a company’s financials and performance into a single score: the Dividend Safety Score. This single number ranges from 0 to 100, so it’s very easy to interpret.

Better yet, Simply Safe Dividends’ scores have been 98% accurate in avoiding dividend cuts since the platform launched in 2015. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, 93% of companies that ultimately cut their dividends and that Simply Safe Dividends covered had a Dividend Safety Score of 60 or lower. 

Portfolio Monitoring

While it may not be a dedicated portfolio management service such as SigFig, Simply Safe Dividends offers a basic portfolio manager that enables you to import holdings from your brokerage or enter it manually. You can import an unlimited number of portfolios as well as create “play portfolios” to serve as watchlists. For each portfolio, Simply Safe Dividends provides basic information about your dividend payout dates, your income forecast, and your 5-year dividend growth.

For any stock in your portfolio that Simply Safe Dividends rates, you can easily see its Dividend Safety Score, its dividend growth, and how its dividend yield compares to its 5-year average yield. Scores are color-coded, so it’s easy to spot stocks that are at risk of cutting their dividend. You can also sign up for email alerts when a stock’s Dividend Safety Score is re-assessed and drops below 60.

Stock Screener

Simply Safe Dividends offers a stock screener to help you find new dividend stocks worth owning.

The screener doesn’t have many of your typical filters based on fundamental or technical metrics. Instead, you’ll find custom filters like “20-year dividend growth” and “payment schedule.” There’s also a “recession dividend” filter, which enables you to search for companies that maintained or increased their dividend between 2007 and 2009. Of course, you can also filter stocks based on Dividend Safety Scores.

Results can be easily sorted according to most of the filter parameters. You can also export the results to Excel, which makes multi-tiered sorting relatively simple.

Investment Ideas

Simply Safe Dividends also offers investment ideas to help you build a portfolio of dividend stocks. The platform has 10 lists of dividend stocks, which includes categories like high-yield stocks and dividend aristocrats. 

The platform also has three model portfolios on a spectrum from high yield, low growth to low yield, high growth. These portfolios each have 20-30 stocks and are updated monthly. 

Is it Easy to Use Simply Safe Dividends?

Simply Safe Dividends is well-organized and easy to navigate. The web interface doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles, but the stripped-down aesthetic makes the platform very straightforward to use.

The portfolio import process only takes a minute, regardless of whether you input data manually or import it from your brokerage. You can combine holdings from multiple brokers in a single portfolio and add and remove stocks from a portfolio in seconds.

One thing we especially like about Simply Safe Dividends is that most data is displayed in tables. You can customize what columns are shown and how the results are sorted. Plus, all data can be exported to Excel if you want more control.

How Does Simply Safe Dividends Compare To Other Services?

The main thing that sets Simply Safe Dividends apart from other services is its Dividend Safety Scores. While it’s relatively easy to find data about how companies have grown or cut their dividends over time, these scores are forward-looking instead of backwards-looking. That makes them much more actionable for figuring out what stocks to add to your portfolio and when to sell.

In addition, these scores have proven to be extremely accurate. An impressive 51% of companies rated “Unsafe” or “Very Unsafe” by Simply Safe Dividends ended up cutting their dividend. Simply Safe Dividends points out that no other service has publicly available long-term records comparing expectations for a dividend cut to whether or not a cut actually happened.

Is Simply Safe Dividends Right For You?

Simply Safe Dividends is best for long-term dividend investors who want to be confident that their dividend payouts are safe. 

Notably, Simply Safe Dividends isn’t something that every dividend investor needs. Most companies that pay dividends work hard to avoid dividend cuts. This is particularly true for blue-chip stocks and dividend aristocrats. For investors that stick to these stocks, Simply Safe Dividend’s $399 per year price tag might not be worth it.

However, Simply Safe Dividends can be extremely useful for investors who want to find growth stocks that also offer dividends or who want to focus on high-yield stocks that don’t have a long track record of payouts. In these cases, having access to professional analysis of how likely those dividends are to be paid out can be important.