If the start of the New Year has you thinking about investing for the first time, scrapping your old portfolio and starting from scratch, or simply rebalancing your holdings and filling some gaps the Dividend Aristocrats could be a valuable place to look for candidates to identify longer-term holdings.

The Dividend Aristocrats is a list of companies that have increased their dividend payout for at least 25 consecutive years.

According to S&P, over the last 80 years the dividend component accounts for 44% of the total return of the S&P500 Index. For long-term investors, if you're ignoring dividends then you're leaving nearly half of all potential returns on the table. This should emphasize the importance of identifying and owning solid dividend paying management teams. Not only is it critical to your total return to find companies currently paying a dividend but you want to ensure that dividend is safe, and better yet, will continue to grow. While not a full proof system, frankly the only thing we have to go off of in identifying future dividend growth is a solid track record of past dividend growth. We assume past is prologue.