Dividend Investing Workbook: Screening, Analyzing, and Building an Income Portfolio

Knowing what makes a dividend safe and sustainable is useful; being able to sit down with a company's financials and quickly evaluate whether its dividend meets your criteria — then build a portfolio from multiple positions that delivers target income while managing concentration risk — is the operational skill that dividend investing requires. This workbook course develops that skill through structured practice. By the end of this course you will be able to apply a dividend screening checklist to a set of candidate stocks, calculate free-cash-flow payout ratio from a company's reported financials, build a simple dividend income model for a target portfolio size, and set up a tracking system to monitor dividend safety and income over time. What you will learn: - Building a dividend screening checklist: yield range, payout ratio limits, streak length, and sector constraints - Calculating free cash flow payout ratio: extracting the relevant numbers from a cash flow statement - Evaluating dividend safety during stress: how to assess whether a dividend survived or was cut in a past downturn - Portfolio income modeling: projecting annual dividend income from a target allocation across multiple positions - Sector and position sizing for an income portfolio: managing concentration risk while maintaining adequate yield - Comparing two candidates in the same sector: a side-by-side scorecard exercise - Dividend reinvestment planning: modeling the long-term compounding effect of a DRIP strategy - Building a dividend tracking spreadsheet: recording positions, yield-on-cost, and income by quarter Each module presents a realistic but fictional company scenario — you receive excerpts from income statements, cash flow statements, and dividend history tables — and guides you through the analysis with step-by-step worksheets. Annotated answer keys explain what the numbers mean and what alternative interpretations are possible. A final exercise asks you to build and justify a five-position fictional income portfolio. This course is written for individual investors actively building a dividend portfolio, financial planning students learning income investing mechanics, and advisors who want a structured analytical framework for dividend analysis. Basic income statement familiarity is helpful. This course is informational and educational; it does not constitute investment or tax advice.