Is it just me or did this year fly by very quickly? I think this is the first year that things feel.. normal again…at least in the sense of seeing the COVID-19 pandemic behind us. Not normal in terms of high housing prices, inflation, ongoing war and unrest outside of Canada though.
As usual, at the end of the year I go through how things went for the year in terms of money goals, and how things went in terms of other goals (with the latter goals being much more difficult to change, habits-wise in my opinion).
Here are my 2023 personal finance resolutions.
MAX OUT TFSA
Completed.
The 2023 contribution room was $6500 for a toal of $88,000 if you were ‘of age’ when the TFSA was introduced in 2009. It was easy to achieve as it involved transferring money from my non-registered account into my Questrade TFSA in January 2023.
Here’s the total TFSA contribution room as of 2024 if you were of minimum age (age 18) when the TFSA started in 2009. $95,000 is the total contribution room if you had never contributed to your TFSA and are were at least 18 when the TFSA was introduced.
Can you believe that in 2025, there will be over six figures of contribution room available?
| Year | TFSA Contribution Room |
| 2009 | $5000 |
| 2010 | $5000 |
| 2011 | $5000 |
| 2012 | $5000 |
| 2013 | $5500 |
| 2014 | $5500 |
| 2015 | $10,000 |
| 2016 | $5500 |
| 2017 | $5500 |
| 2018 | $5500 |
| 2019 | $6000 |
| 2020 | $6000 |
| 2021 | $6000 |
| 2022 | $6000 |
| 2023 | $6500 |
| 2024 | $7000 |
| 2025 | $7000 |
| 2026 | $7000 |
| Total | $109,000 |
MAX OUT RRSP
Completed.
I ended up contributing US cash instead of transferring in-kind to my RRSP in tranches.
My RRSP contribution room is on the lower side (typically it is 18% of earned income from the previous year) because of my defined benefit pension adjustment.
INCREASE DIVIDEND INCOME TO $35,000/YEAR
Not completed.
Last year in 2022, my goal was to increase my dividend income to $25,000 per year. To my pleasant surprise, I ended 2022 with just over $28,790 in passive dividend income annually.
Therefore, in 2023, my goal was to increase the dividend income from $28,700 per year to $35,000 (forward annual yield).
This did not occur though I did end the year with $33,361 (and up… there are a few more trading days left in 2023) in forward annual yield. Not too shabby still.
Work On My 1 Year Goal
Completed.
My one year goal was to have 7 figures in my investment portfolio.
Assuming a 7% annualized return, my target for the end of the year December 2023 was around $1,000,000 and this includes contributions to the portfolio which are similar in numbers to the above dividend income goal with reinvested dividends.
This exciting event occurred earlier than expected, sometime in February 2023 and then the balance dipped down below that but recovered back to the double comma area since May 2023.
To help me try and keep on track, my favourite free compound interest calculator is from The Calculator Site.
Passiv recently added a Goals feature to help you achieve this and keep track of your goals- it is pretty much a compound interest calculator broken down by month. You can see what the goals feature looks like here.
One downside is that it only looks at your Questrade accounts and if you have other accounts it doesn’t include it.
Passiv Elite is free if you use Questrade.
READ 5 INVESTING/ PERSONAL FINANCE BOOKS
I enjoy reading non-fiction personal finance and investing books, and I usually pick five investing or personal finance books per year and and write book reviews about them.
The book reviews I write help me remember what I learned from the books, even if they’re not very popular articles on this blog.
Here are the 5 investing and personal finance books that I read and then wrote about in 2023, if you click on the link you’ll be able to read my review on it.
- Investment Biker by Jim Rogers (I liked Adventure Capitalist so much that I want to read his first round the world trip)
- Retirement Income for Life: Getting More Without Saving More by Fred Vettesse
- Beat The Bank: The Canadian Guide to Simply Successful Investing By Larry Bates
- Too Rich to Be Stressed by Dividend John (Dividend John on Twitter is quite the fan of Canadian banks, amassing over $70,000 in annual dividend income from a concentrated Canadian heavy portfolio)
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert C. Cialdini
All the books were good, I think Investment Biker and Influence were probably my favourites.
Charlie Munger liked Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion so much that he gifted the author, Robert Cialdini, a Berkshire Hathaway class A share. It was one of the books that Charlie Munger gave as a gift the most. That Berksharei Hathaway Class A share is worth over $500,000 today.
Here are other personal finance books and dividend investing books I recommend.
2023 NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS
The actual new years resolutions, now this is where the difficulty lies…! These habits are much more difficult to change for me.
- Meditation daily for 10 minutes. FAIL. Still too tired and instead of
meditatingnapping in the afternoons when I’m not working and my youngest is in preschool, I now go for a run! I hope that once my youngest is in elementary school I will have some time (and energy) to actually sit up and meditate on a cushion instead of falling asleep for 10 minutes. - Continue physical activity 20 minutes four times a week and get some weights. CONSISTENT. I was pretty good with this, I exercise on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. I started a running program “Run with Hal” app and added Monday too! I only am doing weights once a week.
- Time management– SORT OF OKAY. Limit Twitter to maximum 45 minutes per day throughout the day. I decreased my Twitter time but added Instagram time, haha! I am still over 2 hours a day on my phone most days but that does include using Google Maps to get me to where I need to go sometimes.
- Sleep before 12am– FAIL. It’s been pretty bad. I usually go to bed by 12:30am though, but I haven’t been consistent about sleeping before midnight. Again, I am hopeful this will improve once I have more time to myself. I have a case of the revenge bedtime procrastination, where people stay up late to regain the freedom and lack of control over their time during the day. Oftentimes, I’m still not productive at night and just end up spending 2 hours looking up which Toys R Us toys to buy for future kids birthday party invites for the year.
How did you do with your 2023 resolutions?
GYM is a 40 something millennial writing about personal finance since 2009 and interested in achieving financial freedom through disciplined saving, dividend and ETF investing, and living a minimalist lifestyle. Before you go, check out my recommendations page of financial tools I use to save and invest money. Don’t forget to subscribe for a free dividend yield spreadsheet and the free Young Money Bootcamp PDF.
Hi there,
Does anyone have any CONCERNS or insight into Telus earnings and dividend payouts?
Telus Corporation present Payout Ratio is 257.0000…
What’s happening?
Anyone?
@Carolyn- You can check out Tawcan’s recent look at Telus: https://www.tawcan.com/dividend-stocks-were-considering-for-2024-tfsa