All investments carry risk, and after the havoc of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, most Americans know all too well how devastating the downside of a belly-up investment can be.

In the years since then, many on Main Street cast their aspersions on Wall Street, blaming greedy bankers and complex financial instruments for the chaos. Angered by the fallout and frightened of another crisis, they’ve lost faith in the stock market. But for long-term investors who can stomach some short-term uncertainty, stocks are still the way to go.

There’s nothing wrong with abhorring risk. If you just want to preserve your capital, sit back and collect a check, Treasuries are fine. But with 10-year Treasury notes yielding just 2.3 percent, you’ll be lucky to keep up with inflation.

Truly growing your nest egg can only happen through taking some risk, and you’d be hard-pressed to find stocks with the risk/reward profiles of these five blue-chip dividend stocks, each of which yields more than 2.3 percent.

Johnson & Johnson (ticker: JNJ). Johnson & Johnson, long an icon in corporate America, remains elite after strong second-quarter results. JNJ beat on both top- and bottom-line expectations, with earnings per share of $1.71 and revenue of $17.8 billion — exceeding calls for $1.67 per share and $17.76 billion, respectively.

The only things that seem to change with regularity are the company’s dividend payments: They’ve been increasing every year like clockwork for the last 52 years, a streak that began when JFK was still strolling the Oval Office.

Jim Wright, chief investment officer of Harvest Financial Partners, a registered investment adviser in Paoli, Pennsylvania, says it’s tough to find the quality and value that Johnson & Johnson stock brings to the table. With AAA-rated debt and a line of consumer brands including Tylenol, Band-Aid and Listerine, its pedigree is hard to match.

“Right now you can buy the stock at a lower multiple than you can for the average of the [Standard & Poor’s 500 index], about 15 times next year’s earnings,” Wright says.

The Coca-Cola Co. (KO). Ignore Coca-Cola stock at your own risk. Its humble beginnings trace back to 1886, when a quirky Georgia pharmacist dreamed up a delicious, sugary beverage that sold about nine servings a day. Today, Coca-Cola serves up an estimated 1.9 billion daily servings around the globe.

About 100 years after its conception, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, BRK.B), laid down a monster bet, wagering that Coca-Cola’s growth wasn’t over yet. Wall Street thought he was nuts, but Buffett’s wager paid off big time and today his 400 million Coca-Cola shares are worth more than 12 times what he paid for them years ago. That’s one reason why Buffett is arguably the greatest investor of all time.

Jack Russo, a senior analyst at Edward Jones, says Coca-Cola stock remains a buy in 2015 because of its “highly visible brands in both noncarbonated and carbonated beverages, its global reach with 80 percent of revenues coming from overseas and its healthy dividend yield of 3.3 percent.”

Chevron Corp. (CVX). Chevron is another mainstay of the American economy, with roots in the 19th century and ties to John D. Rockefeller’s sprawling oil empire — before its predecessor Standard Oil became literally too dominant for the Supreme Court to tolerate.

No one alive today remembers that 1911 antitrust decision. But you can bet your bottom monocle investors know about the recent and precipitous slide in oil prices. Trading at around $100 a barrel just a year ago, black gold trades for about half that sum today.

Chevron, an integrated oil and gas behemoth, has felt that pain, and shares are down about 30 percent in that time. So why would any investor want to catch this falling knife? It all comes back to embracing a longer time horizon, says Brian M. Youngberg, a senior analyst at Edward Jones.

“Patient investors should be rewarded in the longer term, and in the meantime will get a dividend yielding more than twice the market rate,” he says. Chevron’s 5 percent dividend yield is the highest of any stock in the Dow Jones industrial average.

Youngberg also notes that Chevron’s growth opportunities didn’t die with the robber barons. “Growth in coming years should come from three areas: liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Australia and elsewhere, offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, and shale in the United States.”

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT). A highflier in the 1990s, Microsoft stock has suffered through decidedly ho-hum performances in recent memory. Its most recent earnings report didn’t do much to change that trend, as fresh-faced CEO Satya Nadella announced a $7.5 billion impairment charge related to 2014’s $7.2 billion Nokia acquisition.

But don’t blame Nadella for the Nokia blunder; outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer was the brains behind that deal. In fact, since taking the helm in February 2014, much of Nadella’s job has been to fix Ballmer’s missteps and prepare the company for success in the 21st century.

Charles Sizemore, chief investment officer at Sizemore Capital Management and a portfolio manager on Covestor, says Nadella is steering the ship the right way. “Buying Microsoft today is buying one of the world’s premier technology companies as it transitions into something very different than the Microsoft we grew up with,” he says.

As the company turns its focus to the cloud — with increasing success, Sizemore adds — Microsoft’s competitive 2.7 percent dividend and consistently shrinking share count make this an attractive play.

Cisco Systems (CSCO). Another go-go tech stock from the 1990s that’s since cooled its jets, Cisco Systems is now a dividend dynamo. Briefly the world’s most valuable company at the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, Cisco didn’t fizzle and evaporate with the likes of Pets.com and GeoCities.

That’s because Cisco chose to become the go-to hardware provider for the entire information technology industry, manufacturing the networking equipment that makes nebulous entities like GeoCities possible.

In a nutshell, Cisco’s core business is selling the plumbing supplies that make the Internet go.

Martin Leclerc, chief investment advisor at Barrack Yard Advisors in Gainesville, Florida, touts Cisco’s 3 percent (and growing) dividend, as well as the “tremendous financial strength” it boasts with its $30 billion in cash and investments. Citing Cisco’s value — shares trade for 16 times trailing earnings — he calls Cisco a “dominant blue chip with a reasonable valuation.”

Leclerc says Cisco has no shortage of unique qualitative strengths to boot. The Internet of Things, its analytics business and its cloud division are each promising growth avenues in their own right, he says.

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Take Calculated Risks to Profit From These 5 Dividend Stocks originally appeared on usnews.com