@resjudicata
Dividends are not monthly income. There is 0 difference between selling shares and being paid a dividend.
False, though that canard is popular on /r/bogleheads here. You viewed a Ben Felix video, am I right? You should ignore such misleading info about dividends. They're not "irrelevant", not "taken from the share price" in the sense of being an accounting trick, etc. They're real money, earnings passed through to shareholders.
A big reason dividends are different from selling shares is that the income thus derived doesn't depend on the share price. Can you understand and agree to that? (There are obviously other differences such as taxation.)
Since dividend income from already-purchased shares is not affected by share-price fluctuations, dividend investors typically don't care much about share price fluctuations (if they're in the income/retirement phase) or welcome them (if in the accumulation phase, because lower share prices enhance yield and obviously allow faster accumulation).
REITs in particular exhibit other characteristics that make them excellent for bear and sideways markets:
- They're naturally inflation-hedging due to the type of underlying asset (real property)
- They're often oversold during bear markets and take longer to recover in share price after a recovery, but are extremely reliable in eventual recovery
- Note that these are extremely bullish long-term aspects, as they provide an extended window in which to buy at a discount/enhanced yield
And then you've got the value dividend payers, often mature companies in saturated markets such as KO. For a nervous investor these tend to provide stable share prices as well as dividends, a major reason to hold them in retirement accounts for crash-proofing.
I hope some of this helps. Dividends are not irrelevant in the slightest--and anyone who claims otherwise either has only the most facile understanding, or is posting clickbait.
