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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

Any low-fees index fund.

Vanguard had very low fee reit index funds. If you want to generate income it is a good option (as opposed to stock index funds) because reits are required to pay 90% of their income as dividends. You can look at all the historical dividend data on the website

I parked some money in a vanguard reit a year ago as an experiment, and to create more of a balanced portfolio. Yes, it has paid quarterly dividends but it's also down -11% in total. So as usual, it all depends...

They tend to be very volatile though. The VIG (Vanguard Dividend ETF) pays 2.4%. Dollar-cost average in on bad market days.

Is there a Bay Area REIT index fund?

In terms of throwing off a lot of passive income, they just aren't very good though. Looking mainly at income-generating investments, the best index one might be Vanguard LifeStrategy income (with provides income and moderate capital appreciation to protect against inflation).

The yield? 2.1% Nothing to write home about. [1]

Is there some high-yielding, regular-income fund I should know about? Even allowing for sorta-irregular funds, you probably can't do much better in this environment, though I'd like to be proven wrong.

[1] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0723&...

I found Choosing The Right Dividend ETF [1], which discusses several dividend funds and mechanisms they use to predict which companies will continue paying high dividends. A poster on another forum [2] warned that you should watch out for companies that prop up a dividend and then tank but don't roll out of the index right away. I guess that's where the more conservative filtering ETFs come into play (or you can screen stocks from the index yourself and monitor them).

The chart in [3] shows a few funds against the S&P 500. Prices seem to largely track the S&P index. Maybe there's a way to chart the dividend yield over time, too.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2014/08/22/choosing...

[2] http://gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/stocks/what-about-a-hig...

[3] https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

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