All they ask is 10 years of your life. In return, a select group of dividend growth stocks will provide you with what many investors dream of but probably won't ever find.

Brace yourself for this because it's powerful stuff. If you buy the shares of a dividend grower today, in a decade you could be enjoying a tax-efficient flow of income with a double-digit yield.

Bonds and guaranteed investment certificates offered double-digit yields back in the early 1990s, but it's hard to see that happening again any time soon. Income trusts commonly offered double-digit yields at one time, but mainly the weaker names do today. Anyway, few trusts offer the same level of blue-chip quality as the best dividend growers.

An example is called for at this point and a pretty good one is IGM Financial, the country's largest mutual fund company and a provider of investment advice. Say you bought IGM stock 10 years ago, when the price was $16.60. IGM's dividend back then was 7.5 cents a share, which would have given you a yield of 1.8 per cent. You're yawning, right?

Since then, however, IGM has raised its quarterly cash payout by an average annual rate of 19.9 per cent to a current level of 46 cents a share. On your $16.60 purchase price, that 46 cents now yields a very impressive 11.1 per cent on an annual basis (the math at work here: quarterly dividend multiplied by four, divided by share price and then multiplied by 100).

You've read about the wonders of dividend growth stocks before in the Portfolio Strategy column. Today, we look at how to harness them so you end up with a portfolio providing a double-digit dividend yield. Let's call it the Dividends Deluxe strategy.

This is very much a forward-looking approach where, for example, investors looking ahead to retirement in 10 or 20 years might set up a flow of dividend income that grows over time. There are also some immediate benefits because dividend growth stocks tend to deliver consistent, solid capital gains as well. It's almost as if those regular dividend increases ratchet up the share price a bit.

You can certainly put the Dividend Deluxe strategy to work in a registered retirement plan, where the rising dividend flow will help you accumulate assets over the years. However, it works best in an unregistered account where you can take advantage of the preferential tax rate on dividends. A quick example: An Alberta resident in the top tax bracket would pay $390 in tax on $1,000 in interest income and taxes of $175 on dividend income.

And now for those Dividend Deluxe stocks. We start with a list compiled by Globeinvestor.com analyst Pierre Javad of companies in the S&P/TSX composite index with high compound average annual dividend growth rates over the 10 years to Aug. 31. As the IGM example shows, regular dividend increases will steadily increase the yield on the dividends you receive every year.

The stocks on the list represent a variety of sectors that will enable you to achieve a reasonable level of diversification. Just for the sake of example (of course, you'll do your own research), let's build a Dividend Deluxe portfolio. We'll begin with a couple of financial stocks, which are plentiful in our list of dividend growth standouts. Royal Bank of Canada seems a good choice because it's the big bank with the highest dividend growth in the past decade. We'll complement RBC with Power Financial, which is a financial conglomerate that conveniently packages holdings in IGM and Great-West Lifeco, a big life insurance company.

Note that two of the largest insurers in the country, Manulife Financial and Sun Life Financial, aren't on this list because they haven't been publicly traded for 10 years. Expect them to rank as premium dividend growth stocks in due time.

A couple of years ago, Loblaw Cos. would have been a no-brainer choice for adding a consumer staples stock to the Dividend Deluxe portfolio. Today, the Loblaw dividend is in a holding pattern as the company tries to fix its troubled grocery business. Even so, the company's 10-year average annual dividend growth rate is an impressive 18 per cent.

We're left with two contenders for dividend growth in consumer staples, Metro Inc. and Empire Co., which have near identical records for raising quarterly cash payouts. Let's go with Empire simply because its shares have been less volatile in recent years.

We'll grab a pair of consumer discretionary stocks, the cable television operator Shaw Communications and the women's wear chain Reitmans. Both are unsung dividend growth machines. It happens that Reitmans is struggling with a new division designed to cater to older women, but the company's past record suggests there's enough marketing savvy there to fix things.

Industrial stocks aren't often thought about as a prime hunting ground for dividends, but the reality is that there a couple of good choices in this sector. Let's go with Canadian National Railway, which offers a lesson in how the yield on a dividend growth stock can grow significantly even when it starts at a very low level. CN's current dividend is around 1.5 per cent, but your yield on money invested 10 years ago would be 7.3 per cent.

You can go one of two ways with oil and gas stocks – buy an energy services firm like CHC Helicopter or a producer like EnCana or Imperial Oil. Let's go with both CHC, with its surprisingly strong record for dividend growth, and EnCana, which has a good dividend profile for a resource stock.

Brookfield Properties will cover us off on real estate, and Teck Cominco offers exposure to the materials sector. This gives us 10 dividend growth stocks that would combine to produce a current yield of 13.3 per cent on shares bought 10 years ago, assuming equal amounts invested in each.

As for the next 10 years, there are absolutely no guarantees. Will Shaw, CHC and Reitmans be able to keep up their stellar ranking as dividend growers? Will resource stocks like Teck and EnCana continue to enjoy the high commodity prices that give them the financial slack to raise their payouts, or will they have to trim their dividends if commodities slump? These are all concerns you have to address when setting up a Dividend Deluxe portfolio.

If you're a more conservative investor, you might opt for more banks and fewer cyclical stocks like Teck and EnCana, or you can throw in some of utilities like Fortis and Enbridge. They didn't make our list of top dividend growers, but they're very much the sort of stocks that patient investors with an eye to the long term can use to generate that much-coveted flow of income with a double-digit yield.