Dividend investing is one of the most actionable, repeatable methods of building wealth over time.

Fortunately, there are many resources available to learn about dividend investing. Many of them are published by some of the most successful dividend investors in the business. These include books, websites, and even shareholder letters.

One particular example is the portfolios of large, institutional investors, made visible through the 13F filings required of institutional investment managers with more than $100 million in qualifying assets.

Warren Buffett oversees a $100 billion+ common stock portfolio which holds many dividend-paying companies through his company Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) (BRK-B). These holdings are detailed in a quarterly 13F.

13F filings are only a single source of investment knowledge. There are many others.

This article will provide seven tips to grow your wealth like the best dividend investors.

Invest in Companies With Long Dividend Histories

One of the best ways to grow dividend income is to invest in companies with proven histories of raising their dividend payments over time.

When companies successively raise their dividend payments, investors can benefit from a growing income stream even without contributing more capital.

A great place to search for these companies is the Dividend Aristocrats Index.

The requirements to be a Dividend Aristocrat are:

If 25 years is not enough, then the Dividend Kings Index is even better.

To be a Dividend King, a company must have 50+ years of consecutive dividend increases – twice the requirement to be a Dividend Aristocrat.

You can see all 19 Dividend Kings analyzed in detail here.

Besides the obvious rising dividend payments, there are many advantages to investing in companies with long histories of steady dividend increases.

First of all, these companies tend to outperform the market in general on a total return basis.

The performance of the Dividend Aristocrats is compared to the S&P 500 Index below.

Source: S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Fact Sheet

The Dividend Aristocrats have demonstrated meaningful outperformance over the broader stock market as measured by the S&P 500 over a long period of time (10 years).

Numerically, the Dividend Aristocrats have returned 10.14% per year compared to the S&P 500’s 7.62% per year over the past decade. This represents an outperformance of 2.52% per year (on average).

This outperformance over varying time periods can be seen below.

Source: S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Fact Sheet

There are also many qualitative reasons why companies with sustained dividend histories make good investments.

Companies with 25+ years of steadily rising dividends must have a durableand sustainable competitive advantage.

Otherwise, when economic environments or consumer tastes undergo periods of change, the company’s profitability will be reduced. Without a competitive advantage, companies cannot withstand ‘shocks’ to their operations.

Lower profitability leads to dividend cuts, which triggers an automatic sell according to The 8 Rules of Dividend Investing.

Regular dividend increases are also a sign of shareholder-friendly management teams.

Companies that are committed to increasing dividend payments are also likely to exhibit other shareholder-oriented behavior, such as:

Stock buybacks in particular are discussed in the next section.

Believe in Stock Buybacks

Stock buybacks (alternatively called share repurchases) occur when a company purchases its own stock on the open market with the intention of the reducing the number of shares outstanding.

On a per-share basis, stock buybacks improve a company’s financial performance even if overall business performance remains unchanged.

The reason for this is because the denominator of per-share metrics is reduced. If the same amount of earnings are distributed among less business owners, then each owner’s share of the profits becomes proportionally larger.

The effects of stock buybacks on shareholder returns can be tremendous. The following table shows the financial performance of a company that:

Notice that even though the company’s earnings only grew by a factor of 4.6, the company’s stock price grew by more than a factor of 10.

Despite the obvious advantages of share repurchases, many pundits have been critical of stock buybacks, saying that they divert capital from the ‘real economy’.

They argue that money spent on share repurchases could be better spent on creating jobs, building infrastructure, and investing for organic business growth.

Warren Buffett, arguably the most successful investor of all time, has dispelled these claims.