The one thing every retirement-paycheck pitch leaves out
You have roughly $1.5 million in a 401(k) or IRA, and you want it to send you money every month. Simple goal. The internet is full of five-fund portfolios promising a tidy number.
Here's what those articles skip: there is no single right answer, because you can't maximize three things at once. Current income, income growth, and durability in a downturn pull against each other. Push one up and another comes down. Every real portfolio is a choice about which trade-off you're willing to live with.
So instead of one portfolio, here are three honest architectures on the same $1.5 million. Each is designed to do a different job. None of them is free.
Yield is the annual income a fund pays as a percent of its price. NAV is net asset value — essentially the fund's per-share price. A covered call is an options contract a fund sells against stocks it owns to collect cash premium up front, in exchange for capping how much those stocks can gain. Preferreds are a hybrid security that pays a fixed dividend and sits between stocks and bonds in risk.
Performance and yield figures are historical and may change. Total return includes price movement and distributions where available. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Yield is not the same as total return.
The math, on one screen
Before the nuance, here's the raw arithmetic — each fund's current trailing yield applied to $1.5 million. Trailing yield means the last 12 months of distributions divided by today's price; it looks backward, not forward.
| Fund | Trailing yield | Annual income on $1.5M | Roughly per month |
| DGRO | 1.89% | $28,350 | $2,362 |
| SCHD | 3.05% | $45,750 | $3,812 |
| PFF (preferreds) | 5.41% | $81,150 | $6,762 |
| JEPI | 8.06% | $120,900 | $10,075 |
| SPYI | 11.81% | $177,150 | $14,762 |
| QQQI | 13.98% | $209,700 | $17,475 |
That spread — $2,362 to $17,475 a month on the identical account — is the whole story. All figures are as of the September 8, 2026 close. SCHD's 3.05% looks low against its own history only because a roughly 30% run in the share price compressed the yield. The higher numbers aren't a smarter portfolio. They're a different set of trade-offs. Let's walk the three ways to assemble them.
Way 1: Dividend growth — the smallest check that gets bigger
The core here is a dividend-growth ETF or two: SCHD (Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity, 3.05% yield, 0.06% expense ratio, $112.6B in assets) paired with something like DGRO (iShares Core Dividend Growth, 1.89% yield, 0.08% expense ratio, $43.6B). These own established, cash-generative companies — SCHD's top names include Merck, Amgen, Abbott, Coca-Cola, and Chevron — and the point isn't today's yield. It's the raise.
On $1.5 million, SCHD alone throws off about $3,812 a month. A blend that leans on DGRO's lower yield lands lower — a 50/50 SCHD/DGRO mix runs closer to 2.5%, or roughly $3,000 a month. That is the smallest starting check of the three approaches, full stop.
What you buy for that sacrifice: the distribution tends to rise year after year as the underlying companies raise their dividends, and the share price has room to grow with them. Over a 30-year retirement, that growth is the only real defense against inflation on this list. A check that's flat for three decades loses roughly half its purchasing power along the way; a rising check fights back.
One data note, because it trips people up: SCHD did a 3-for-1 split in October 2024. Any per-share dividend figure you compare must be split-adjusted — mixing a pre-split payout with a post-split one will make the trend look broken when it isn't.
