Alright, after yet another dismal year of poor performance, I'm converting all of my high dividend stocks to VTI! They returned 0.8% this year, including dividends, as compared to 17% had it been invested in VTI. This isn't a one-off basis, I have noticed this for several years that the divided stocks have underperformed VTI.
Thus, I put in a number of sell orders to sell the dividend stocks, and once the orders are filled, will purchase VTI instead. I'm reasonably confident that will be an improvement.
I'm a little sad that my dividend paying stocks didn't work out better. I've owned them for a number of years and just spent the dividends, which was nice, but once I realized that my overall gains were dismal, I realized that I should focus on returns and not dividends.
I'll have to figure out later how best to extract money from the account so I can continue using it on spending, but that's for another time.
Hope all works out!