Filtered 134 dividend stocks (SCHD + Aristocrats) by 4 basic safety rules. Only 39 passed. Am I being too conservative?

Filtered 134 dividend stocks (SCHD + Aristocrats) by 4 basic safety rules. Only 39 passed. Am I being too conservative? I’m 58 and have spent the last 16 years driving a commercial sanitation truck. When you work that kind of physical job, you don't have the stomach or the time to gamble your retirement on speculative hype or 50-slider screeners with DCF guesses. A few months back, I decided to test a no-nonsense filter on the SCHD universe and the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats. I wanted to cut through the Wall Street noise and find companies that can survive a brutal recession without cutting their cash payout. I settled on four strict rules: 1. At least 15 consecutive years of dividend increases. (Forces a company to have raised payouts through 2008, 2020, and recent inflation). 2. Payout ratio capped at 55%. (Leaves a real earnings cushion for downturns). 3. Market cap of at least $500M. (Avoids micro-caps). 4. Daily volume of at least 2M shares. (Ensures smooth liquidity). When you run 134 candidates through those four rules, the attrition is brutal. As of this week, only 39 companies qualify. 95 failed. What surprised me most was how many sacred cows failed the 55% payout test. Popular staples like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Johnson & Johnson have decades of dividend hikes, but their payout ratios have crept into the 60% to 70% range. They’re great companies, but they fail the fortress safety margin. Meanwhile, names like Caterpillar, Lowe's, Abbott, and Walmart cleared all four hurdles easily. To test this with real data instead of theoretical backtests, I launched an equal-weight $100,000 paper trading benchmark on Webull on June 8th across the original qualifying stocks. We just crossed the 90-day mark. After this past week's market slump where SCHD dropped over 2%, the Webull screen sits at $101,291.60. Here’s the catch most people miss with paper trading: broker apps like Webull completely ignore dividend cash payouts in paper accounts. When you tally up the actual quarterly dividend checks collected from these companies over the summer, that’s another $411.20 in cash sitting on the sidelines. That puts our true account value at $101,702.80, absorbing a rough 2% market drop this week and still beating the broader dividend ETF on drawdown. The other part of the system is valuation. We don't try to guess 10-year cash flows with DCF models. We simply rank the 39 passing fortress stocks by who is trading closest to their 52-week low. When an elite compounder pulls back into the bottom of its range, it's on sale. Right now, McDonald's is sitting in our top spot, trading within a dollar of its 52-week low despite a 48-year dividend growth streak. I ended up putting together a simple, free web app to track the screener, the live $100k benchmark, and the 52-week low rankings for all 39 qualifying stocks. If anyone wants to test their own portfolio against the rules, let me know and I'm happy to drop the link in the comments. Mainly, I’d be curious to hear what other dividend growth investors think of the 55% payout ceiling. Is that too conservative for mature consumer staples, or do you prefer having that extra cash cushion before buying the dip? \*Disclaimer: For educational and informational purposes only, not financial advice. Live paper trading benchmark. Always do your own research.\*