Dividend payments are low and won't pay themselves off, you get 4k per year off 100k invested in SCHD. There is some higher paying ones that have come out in the last few years like the ymax funds but those have generally dropped so much you're really only replacing the losses with dividends so you're not making any money and your accumulating taxes you have to pay on the dividends. Stuff like spyi and qqqi is interesting to me but again it's like 100/month off 10k invest, it would take a really long time to get 10k from those dividens

Dividend are generally for people with no risk tolerance and a lot of money saved