Why Investors Should Skip Top Dividend-Yielders; Hough: Investors should be careful about reaching too high for yield.

Income investing used to be easy. A retiree who plunked $1 million into 10-year Treasury notes during the past half century locked in, on average, a yearly income of around $67,000. But with interest rates at record lows, that same investment recently paid less than $15,000 a year.

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Some investors are looking to stocks with high dividend yields to recoup this lost income. Standard & Poor's 500-stock index yields 2.2 percent, but its top 50 stocks, by dividend, yield an average of 5.5 percent. That's enough to turn that $1 million into $55,000 in yearly income.

Be careful about reaching too high for yield, however. Income investors are better off skipping those top 50 high-yielders and looking instead to the 50 that are just below them, whose yields average 3.8 percent.

Here are three reasons: First, high-yielders were stars last year but have been slipping of late. The S&P's top 50 yielders returned a whopping 18.5 percent in 2011, beating the 2.1 percent total return for the broad index as well as the total returns for more than 30 stock-picking strategies tracked by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. But so far this year, high-yielders have performed near the bottom of the pack.

Second Best?

These S&P 500 firms are second tier in terms of dividend yields, but they may be safer bets for steady-income hunters.

• NextEra Energy (NEE)
• ConAgra Foods (CAG)
• Hasbro (HAS)
• Eaton (ETN)
• BlackRock (BLK)

Second, because dividend yields rise as share prices fall, the highest yields are often attached to troubled firms. Investors who give up a little yield can get a lot more safety -- and they may not even have to settle for lower total returns. For example, among the top 50 S&P members by dividend yield, the median paid more than 80 percent of its earnings as dividends over the past year, compared with 53 percent in the next 50. The higher that number, the greater the risk of a dividend cut if earnings dip. Also, the top 50 yielders' dividends grew by a median rate of just 2 percent during the past year, compared with 10 percent for the 50 below them. Dividend growth can lead to higher share prices, which boost total returns. According to Bank of America, both groups have generated handsome average returns of more than 16 percent in rolling 12-month periods since 1984 -- but the top group has lost money more often.

The third reason: The dividend tax is capped at 15 percent; but the cap expires at the end of this year, and without action from Congress, the rate for high-income investors could more than double. That could lead to a short-term sell-off in high-yield stocks.

The stocks below come from the S&P 500's second-highest-yielding group of 50. Each firm has manageable debt and affordable dividends, and each recently boosted its payment -- as good a sign as any that management sees healthy profits ahead.