4 Dividend Stocks Showing You the Money

Not every company is slashing its dividend these days. Some of the market's better performers are easing up on their purse strings and sending more money out to their shareholders. Readers of the Income Investor newsletter service can appreciate that kind of thinking.

Let's take a closer look at four of the companies that inched their payouts higher this past quarter.

We'll start with Guess? (NYSE: GES  ) . The fashionable apparel giant surprised the market with a robust quarterly report. Its refreshing strength granted Guess? the luxury of boosting its quarterly distributions by 25% to $0.125 a share.

ESSA Bancorp (Nasdaq: ESSA  ) is also banking on a 25% upgrade. The Pennsylvania bank's new rate will send $0.05 to its stockholders every three months for each share they own.

If seeing one bank jacking up its yield grabs your attention, let's go for two. Alliance Financial (Nasdaq: ALNC  ) , the banker behind the 29-unit Alliance Bank chain in upstate New York, is also on the move. Alliance's new dividend of $0.28 a share is 7% higher than its previous rate.

Finally, we have Kewaunee Scientific mastering the art of yield science. The maker of scientific and technical furniture is growing its quarterly payouts by 25% to $0.10 a share.

Some of these moves may not seem like much, but many companies have had to go the opposite way with their dividends lately. Retailer Macy's (NYSE: M  ) and office-furniture seller Herman Miller (Nasdaq: MLHR  ) had to cut their dividends earlier this year. More recently, Indiana Community Bancorp did what larger banks Citigroup (NYSE: C  ) and Bank of America (NYSE: BAC  ) did back in January: It slashed its quarterly dividend to a mere $0.01 a share.

Subscribers to Income Investor like seeing companies send more and more money to their investors. The newsletter service singles out companies that are committed to growing their distributions with market-thumping results.

Want to see what's being recommended these days? Give the service a shot with a 30-day trial subscription. Who knows? Maybe the next thing to get a boost will be your interest.