Income and returns, dividends and royalties. That’s why investors are clamoring to move to 2023. And who can blame them after a year when the S & P 500 slid 20% and when six months and one year Treasury bills are now yielding north of 4.7%? After all, analysts’ forecast returns for the S&P 500 as a whole in 2023 are still only around 1.8% today. But investors should tread carefully when hunting for extra dividend yield from common stocks. To be useful, dividends must be reliable, not variable. The attractiveness of certain stocks and securities becomes less obvious if dividends are cut or, worse, eliminated. Think of high dividend payouts as potential yield traps. To find red flags among high-payers, CNBC Pro searched the S&P 1500 Index, which includes the S&P 500, Midcap 400 and Smallcap 600 indexes. Then we presented FactSet through December 22 only for stocks with a market value above $1 billion, yielding dividends of at least 5%, a debt-to-equity ratio of more than 100% and a cash dividend coverage ratio of below 3. Finally, we limited our search to companies where analysts expect free cash flow to decline in 2023, and stocks that fell by at least 20 % in 2022. The result is five stocks with dividends up to 15.2%, but not lower than 5.5%. Two Harbors Investment clocks in with the highest current yield, at 15.2%. Home mortgage real estate investment trusts are down more than 30% in 2022, and expected free cash flow is expected by analysts to drop 57% next year. But optimistically, a dividend coverage ratio of 2.0 is reasonable. KKR Real Estate Finance Trust, another REIT, provides structured loans secured by commercial real estate and yields 12.3%. While the dividend coverage ratio is only 1.3, KREF also showed the smallest decline (-3.4%) in estimated free cash flow among the five stocks. Scotts Miracle-Gro has the lowest yield in the group (5.5%), but the highest level of debt as a percentage of assets. Perhaps this is why Scotts shares have shown the biggest decline in years, about 70%. Scotts and Medical Properties Trust (10.4% yield), a REIT that invests in healthcare facilities, has the lowest dividend coverage on the screen, at 1.2. Equitrans Midstream, a natural gas pipeline company based in western Pennsylvania, yields about 9.0% but also has the highest dividend coverage ratio, at 2.5.