7 Dividend Stocks to Buy and Hold Forever If you’re looking for dividend stocks to buy and hold forever, a good place to start is companies that have done an excellent job increasing their dividends and are expected to keep doing so in the future. While the first place to look for such names should logically be a list of SP 500 Dividend Aristocrats, I widened the search to the SP 1500 . That way, I had three times more stocks to choose from, giving me a much better chance of finding special dividend stocks that deliver income and capital appreciation. From Dec. 31, 1999, to Dec. 31, 2018, the average SP 1500 stock had a dividend yield of 1.8% . All of the stocks included in this column have yields that meet or exceed that level. In addition, all of the companies have solid balance sheets. To make things even more interesting, I’ll select only the stocks of companies whose net debt is less than $5 billion. I’m confident that, after five years, these dividend stocks to buy and hold forever will be very profitable for investors who purchase them now.