How Much Dividend Income Can You Buy With $250,000?

A $250,000 retirement rollover is one of the most common income-planning starting points in America, and the answer to “what does it pay me?” depends entirely on the roster (we sketched a full plan for turning a $250K balance into $1,500 a month of income in a free report here). This edition runs the math in reverse, beginning with a number the reader already knows (what sits in the account after leaving a job) and screening for names that fit cleanly inside a tax-advantaged retirement account. That screen matters: master limited partnerships and other pass-through structures issue K-1 partnership tax paperwork and can create unrelated business taxable income headaches inside an IRA, so this roster sticks to ordinary dividend-paying C-corps and one REIT. For an income benchmark, the 10-Year Treasury sits at 4.77% as of September 3, 2026, which sets a real bar for what equity yield has to justify.

Verizon

Verizon (NYSE:VZ | VZ Price Prediction) pays a quarterly dividend of $0.7075, or $2.83 per share on an annualized forward basis, with shares closing at $50.14 on September 4, 2026. Management flagged the payout as an “ironclad commitment” on the last call, and the cash coverage backs that up: approximately $3.8 billion of free cash flow in the quarter, up 4% year-over-year, against full-year FCF guidance of $21.5 billion or more. The transcript confirms 20 consecutive years of dividend increases.

Bull case for income buyers: the transformation is showing up in operating leverage, with adjusted EBITDA margin expanding 140 basis points to 38.9%, consumer postpaid phone churn at 0.90%, and full-year adjusted EPS growth guidance raised to 5% to 6%.

Risk: leverage is elevated after Frontier. Net unsecured debt to consolidated adjusted EBITDA was approximately 2.6 times at quarter-end, above management’s 2.0 to 2.25 times target for 2027.

AbbVie

AbbVie (NYSE:ABBV) yields 2.57%, with a $1.73 quarterly payout and a $6.92 annualized forward dividend per share. This is the lowest yield in the roster, but growth is doing real work: the per-share quarterly payment moved from $1.55 in 2024 to $1.64 in 2025 to $1.73 in 2026. Coverage is strong. Second-quarter adjusted EPS came in at $3.65, six cents above the guidance midpoint, and full-year adjusted EPS guidance sits at $13.87 to $14.07. Interest coverage is 6.94x and net debt to EBITDA is 2.26x.

Bull case: Skyrizi total sales of $5.5 billion grew 24% operationally and Rinvoq global sales exceeded $2.5 billion, up 23.7% operationally, more than offsetting Humira’s 36.1% operational decline. The pending $10.9B Apogee Therapeutics acquisition extends the immunology runway.

Risk: the balance sheet carries substantial goodwill and intangibles, reflected in a negative price-to-book of -140.4 and negative shareholders’ equity. That is a byproduct of Allergan and pipeline dealmaking rather than operating distress, but income investors should register it.

Realty Income

Realty Income (NYSE:O), the “Monthly Dividend Company,” yields 5.04% and pays $0.271 per share every month, for $3.252 annualized forward. Track record here is genuinely rare: 115 consecutive quarterly dividend increases and 670 consecutive monthly dividends declared as of Q2 2026. Coverage lands where a REIT investor wants it: AFFO per share grew 3.8% to $1.09 in Q2, and full-year AFFO guidance was raised to $4.44 to $4.45. Fitch carries an A long-term issuer default rating with a stable outlook.

Bull case: monthly cadence maps neatly onto retirement bills, and the platform is scaling. Full-year investment guidance was raised to $10 billion at a 7.3% initial cash yield, occupancy sits at 98.8%, and investment-grade client exposure rose to 34% of annualized rent. The $6B hyperscale data center JV with Cloud Capital opens a new asset class without diluting discipline.

Risk: net debt to annualized pro forma adjusted EBITDAre rose to 5.4x from 5.2x, and 65.7% of ABR still comes from non-investment grade tenants, so credit losses can move quickly if consumer discretionary tenants stall.

Altria

Altria (NYSE:MO) most recently paid $1.11 per share on the September 15, 2026 ex-dividend date, up from $1.06, with an annualized forward dividend of $4.44 and shares at $68.88. Per Altria’s own filing, this marked the 60th dividend increase in the past 56 years. Coverage is comfortable: first-half adjusted diluted EPS of $2.80 grew 4.9%, and full-year 2026 adjusted diluted EPS guidance sits at $5.61 to $5.72. Debt-to-EBITDA was 1.9 times as of June 30, just inside management’s roughly two-times target.

Bull case: pricing power is intact. Smokable price realization ran 4.5% in the quarter, smokable adjusted OCI margin held at 64.8%, and Altria returned nearly $3.9 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases in the first half. On! Plus is a live growth lever in nicotine pouches.

Caveat: shareholders’ equity is negative at -$3.211 billion as of Q1 2026. That is a byproduct of decades of buyback-financed capital return rather than operating trouble, but it is worth naming.

Risk: second-quarter cigarette volumes fell an adjusted 4.5%, Marlboro retail share slipped 1.5 share points versus the year-ago period, and NJOY was pulled from the market amid ITC patent modifications.

Exxon Mobil

Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) yields 2.63%, with a $1.03 quarterly dividend and a $4.12 annualized forward payout. The streak is the strongest in the roster: 43 consecutive years of annual dividend-per-share growth, verified in the Q4 2025 filing. The balance sheet is fortress-grade: interest coverage of 56.28x, net debt to EBITDA of 0.54x, and debt to equity of 0.17. In the quarter, Exxon generated more than $17 billion of free cash flow and $23.6 billion of cash flow from operations, while returning more than $9 billion to shareholders and reducing net debt by more than $7 billion.

Bull case: advantaged production keeps compounding. Guyana ran 900,000 barrels per day gross, and management said the company had fully recovered the $55 billion of investment, calling it “very much an inflection into free cash flow.” Permian production topped 1.8 million oil equivalent barrels per day, and cumulative structural cost savings reached $16.3 billion since 2019.

Risk: commodity exposure sets the tone in any given quarter. The quarter absorbed the temporary loss of approximately 10% of upstream production from Middle East disruption, and Q1 2026 GAAP net income fell 45.8% year-over-year on $3.9 billion of unfavorable derivative timing effects and $706 million of Middle East supply disruption losses.

Blended View for a Rollover

Split evenly across these five, a rollover collects one 5.04% monthly-paying REIT, one 2.63% Dividend Aristocrat energy major with 43 straight annual raises, one 2.57% growth-plus-income immunology name, plus Verizon and Altria on the higher-yield telecom and tobacco end, both funding their higher yields with cash flow rather than balance sheet. Only Realty Income clears the 4.77% 10-Year Treasury bar on yield alone, which is exactly why the coverage and streak data matter more than the headline number. One last note on sequence risk: living on dividends differs from living on withdrawals, because dividend income avoids forced selling into a drawdown, but that comfort is only as durable as the coverage behind each name. Tax treatment of ordinary dividends, qualified dividends, and REIT distributions inside versus outside a retirement account varies enough to warrant a conversation with a tax professional.

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