Create Your Own Blueprint for Retirement Income -- 3 Stocks to Start With

Contrary to a common way of thinking, not all dividend stocks are the same. That's a good thing, though. After all, no two income-minded investors are exactly the same either. It takes a varied collection of dividend-paying tickers to meet each and every income seeker's needs at a degree of risk they can live with.

To this end, here's a closer look at three very different dividend stocks that serve very different purposes in an income-oriented portfolio. At the very least, this list should help you think about exactly what you need from your income-producing investments. But these particular tickers may also be the exact ones you need to begin fine-tuning your dividend-paying holdings.

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Realty Income: Reliable dividend growth

Realty Income (NYSE: O) is far from being a household name, although it's likely you or someone living in your household regularly visits one of its properties. See, Realty Income is a real estate investment trust, or REIT for short. That just means it owns rental real estate and passes along the majority of its profits to its shareholders.

There are all sorts of REITs, which hold assets ranging from hotels to office buildings to apartment complexes. Realty Income's specialty, however, is brick-and-mortar retailing. All told, it owns 15,600 properties leased to 1,600 different customers, the biggest of which include 7-Eleven, Dollar General, Walgreens, and Dollar Tree, although FedEx, Tractor Supply, and Walmart are also a big part of its revenue mix.

It's concerning at first blush. The brick-and-mortar retailing industry is supposedly on the ropes, so to speak, with store closures seemingly happening at a much faster pace than openings.

The industry's headwind isn't so much an apocalypse, however, as it is a thinning of the herd. It is getting smaller, but the names that remain are the strongest in the business. And that's predominantly who Realty Income serves. That's what its performance metrics suggest, anyway. As of the second quarter, 98.3% of its properties were occupied, extending a long streak of strong occupancy rates even through pandemic-riddled 2020.

More important to income-seeking investors, Realty Income boasts an incredible track record of not just dividend payments, but dividend growth. Not only has it paid a dividend every month (yes, a monthly dividend) like clockwork for over 55 years now, but it has raised its per-share payout every quarter since 1997. You'd be plugging in while this REIT's forward-looking dividend yield stands at just under 5.4%.

Verizon: Big starting yield

Telecom giant Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) doesn't have quite the same dividend pedigree as Realty Income; it's only raised its quarterly payout every year for the past 19 years. Still, the company as we know it isn't a great deal older than that. It was only formed by the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE back in 2000, and was more concerned at the time about the still-nascent mobile phone business than its dividend.

That's changed over time, though. In fact, it wouldn't be wrong to suggest the entire well-saturated industry has become dividend-focused, recognizing that meaningful growth opportunities in the telecom business are now few and far between.

If you're going to be hyper-focused on one business for the purpose of generating a steady stream of income, however, this is the one to be in. Americans aren't just in love with their mobile phones. They're practically addicted to them. Data from Consumer Affairs indicates the average mobile phone owner checks their mobile phone 144 times per day, and spends over four hours every day looking at those handheld screens. Indeed, over half of North America's internet traffic is routed through smartphones rather than PCs or laptops. We're not about to give these devices up now. They're just too convenient.

The only arguable downside for investors is the aforementioned lack of growth potential. As was noted, the industry is already highly saturated. Pew Research reports 98% of U.S. adults already own a cellphone, with 91% of them owning a smartphone that's presumably connected to a for-pay wireless broadband network. Most of any revenue or profit growth in this business is going to come from population growth or price increases, both of which are relatively muted.

What Verizon lacks in growth potential, though, it more than makes up for in immediate income. Newcomers will be stepping in while this stock's forward-looking dividend yield is 7.1%.

Qualcomm: Capital appreciation with respectable income

Finally, add Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) to your list of prospects for the income-producing portion of your portfolio.

While most technology stocks don't pay any real dividend to speak of, this one does. Qualcomm's forward-looking dividend yield right now is a respectable 2.1% Not thrilling, but not bad. Its payment is raised on a reasonably regular basis, too.

The dividend isn't the sole reason you might want to consider a stake in the chipmaker, however. It's not even the biggest reason; the income-producing potential of this ticker is just a nice perk for being patient enough to stick with this technology name through the ups and downs that most tech companies go through. Rather, the key here is the sliver of the chip market that Qualcomm serves, and the newly developed backdrop.

It's still predominantly (although not exclusively) a supplier of mobile processors, but the business recently changed in a major way. Namely, rather than punting this work to the cloud, mobile devices like your smartphone and some laptop computers are increasingly handling generative artificial intelligence (AI) duties themselves. This requires ultra-high-performance power-efficient processors though, like Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 for smartphones, and the Snapdragon X for laptops.

It's still too soon to say that onboard AI has entered the mainstream. Consumers are certainly curious, but for now, cloud-based options like OpenAI's ChatGPT are good enough. Even interest in Apple's home-grown mobile artificial intelligence tech for its popular iPhone has been modest.

The revolution is almost certainly coming, though. Global Market Insights predicts the worldwide mobile AI market is poised to grow at an average annualized pace of 25% between now and 2034. Qualcomm stands ready to capitalize on this growth with its affordable processors that have already proven they're up to the task.

Just a starting point

These obviously aren't the only dividend stocks that might work for you. They're not even the only names worth owning that meet the specific dividend needs cited above. IBM is another dividend-paying technology stock with a lot of growth potential, for instance, while Coca-Cola is another name that offers a decent dividend yield based on a payout that's now grown impressively every year for 63 consecutive years.

The key for you is just making your dividend blueprint by first defining exactly what you want from your income-generating stocks (and you can have more than one goal), and then picking the names that best meet those long-term needs based on their track records.

James Brumley has positions in Coca-Cola. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple, International Business Machines, Qualcomm, Realty Income, Tractor Supply, and Walmart. The Motley Fool recommends FedEx and Verizon Communications and recommends the following options: short October 2025 $60 calls on Tractor Supply. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.