So I guess my main question is, is anyone aware of resources for how dividends effect portfolio success rates? Or would I need to build a spreadsheet for that myself (which may or may not be beyond my ability)?
First, it's incorrect to set up a battle between "dividends" and "4% SWR". They are not opposing strategies. That's because "4% SWR" also involves dividends. 4% is the Safe Withdrawal Rate from a historical portfolio of both dividend and non-dividend paying stocks. Even if your dividend income exceeds your expenses, you still need to decide "can I spend all that dividend income, or do I need to reinvest some of it to keep from running out of money?" And the SWR research says:
no, it has not always been safe to spend all your dividends.
Otherwise, why not just put your whole portfolio in one of the
350 stocks currently yielding more than 4% (or an index of all of them) and call it a day as you luxuriate in the >30% yield thrown off by some of them?
Given today's low dividend yields, we're tempted to believe that "4% SWR" tells us we can spend all our dividends, and then generate the rest of our cashflow by selling shares. But in reality, it's also a ceiling on how much of our dividend income we can spend, in cases where dividend yield is greater than 4%.
Between 1906 and 1954,
S&P 500 dividend yield averaged 5.67%. Yet for the 19 30-year cycles in that period, even if we don't spend all of the dividends (starting with a 5% WR), 47% of them fail.
I posted another example
in this other thread, which I'll repost here:
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Dividend payouts may be more volatile than you realize. In the US, say you owned enough shares of VTINX (S&P 500 index fund) in 2007 to produce your necessary income of $1000 per month. Here's how that income would have changed over the next 6 years:
2007: $1000
2008: $1008
2009: $847
2010: $791
2011: $903
2012: $1088
2013: $1189
"$791" sure doesn't equal "about $1000", at least not in my mind.
In order to have generated that $1000/month income from dividends in 2007, you would have needed a stash of ~$630,000.
In contrast, if you had started with only $300,000 and simply withdrawn/sold 4% each year, that would have been sufficient to generate a much-more-steady $1000/month income for the entire time. And while your net worth would have certainly been volatile over that period, your balance at the end of 2013 would have been $341,846, or 14% greater than when you started.
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I'm not aware of any other resources out there to compare portfolio success rates on dividend-focused portfolios. It was hard enough to come up with the limited stuff I came up with in this post. It almost makes you think, if no one has compiled the data to show the superiority of dividend-focused portfolios, maybe that's because no such data exists? :-)