I've been using the dividend growth investing strategy for a decade. And it's performed magic. Despite growing up on welfare, not having a college degree, and never having a high-paying job, I retired in my early 30s.

How'd I do it? I took the savings from my very regular car dealership day job and invested it into high-quality dividend stocks. These are stocks that represent equity in world-class businesses. And these stocks pay safe, growing dividends.

It's these safe, growing dividends that I now live off of. But it's not just dividends. Dividend investing sometimes gets a bad rap, as if these stocks are boring and don't grow. Well, that's just not true.

Many high-quality dividend growth stocks grow at incredible rates and beat the market. That shouldn't be surprising. Most of the S&P 500's long-term total return comes from the compounding of reinvested dividends. And today, I'm going to show you five dividend growth stocks that turned a $1,000 investment in each into more than $1 million after 30 years.

Let me set the stage here.

I'm talking about investing just $1,000 into each of these five dividend growth stocks from March 1991 to March 2021. You reinvested dividends along the way but otherwise didn't invest new money. All you had to do after that point was let these five businesses go to work for you and compound your wealth and passive dividend income. Also, I'm not cheating here by starting this time period before these stocks were paying out growing dividends.

Each one of these stocks were sporting measurable dividend growth track records at the time. So this isn't getting in before the growing dividends start rolling in and supposedly slow things down.

And I'm going to show you just how much growth is possible with some of these stocks.

First up, Target (TGT).

This stock turned a single $1,000 investment into slightly over $204,000 between March 1991 and March 2021. Yeah, there's some growth there. The annualized total return is almost 20%.

Next up is Parker-Hannifin (PH).

It turned $1,000 into over $104,000 between March 1991 and March 2021. The annualized total return is over 16%. That's the best kind of boring I've ever seen.

The next dividend growth stock I want to tell you about Sherwin-Williams (SHW).

This high-quality dividend growth stock turned a $1,000 investment into just under $118,000 between March 1991 and March 2021. The annualized total return comes in at over 17%.

The next stock is American States Water (AWR).

This dividend growth stock turned a $1,000 investment into slightly over $300,000 over the last 30 years. We're talking an annualized total return of over 20%. Water has never looked more like money than it does right now.

The final stock is S&P Global (SPGI).

It turned a $1,000 investment in March 1991 into just over $404,000 by March 2021. This is an incredible annualized total return of over 22%.

So we've taken $1,000 invested into each stock in March 1991 and turned that into a final tally of... drumroll, please... $1,131,684.29.

We overshot our millionaire goal here. This investor is already well on their way to $2 million.

This massive sum of money was built from only $5,000. If that doesn't show the power of long-term compounding from high-quality dividend growth stocks, I don't know what will.

Video Length: 00:08:38