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Why do people always talk about stocks that pay high dividends?
Dividends are one way to discriminate between companies to invest in. In the best of all worlds, your investment criteria is simple: "invest in whatever makes me the most money on the timeline I want to have it."  If you just follow that one golden rule, your future financial needs will be taken care of! Oh... you're not 100% proof positive certain which investment is best for you?  Good.  You're mortal.  None of us magically know the best investment for us.  We wing it, based on what information we can glean.  For instance, we know that bonds tend to be "safer" than stocks, but with a lower return, so if something calls itself a bond, we treat it differently than we treat a stock. So what sorts of information do we have?  Well, think of the stock market linguistically.  A dividend is one way for a company to communicate with their stockholders in the best way possible: their pocketbooks.  There's some generally agreed upon behaviors dividends have (such as they don't go down without some good reason for it, like a global recession or a plan to acquire another company that is well-accepted by the stockholders).  If a company starts to talk in this language, people expect them to behave a certain way.  If they don't, the stock gets blacklisted fast.  A dividend itself isn't a big deal, but a dividend which isn't shunned by a lot of smart investors... that can be a big deal. A dividend is a "promise" (which can be broken, of course) to cash out some of the company's profits to its shareholders.  Its probably one of the older tools out there ("you give investors a share of the profits" is pretty tried and true).  It worked for many types of companies.  If you see a dividend, especially one which has been reliable for many years, you can presume something about the type of company they are. Other companies find dividend is a poor tool to accomplish their goals.  That doesn't mean they're better or worse, simply different.  They're approaching the problem differently.  Is that kind of different the kind you want in your books?  Maybe.  Companies which aren't choosing to commit a portion of their profits to shareholders are typically playing a more aggressive game.  Are you comfortable that you can keep up with how they're using your money and make sure its in your interests?  It can be harder in these companies where you simply hold a piece of paper and never get anything from them again.