December 2024 Dividend Income Update

I was hoping for a Santa Claus rally but we didn’t have one. That’s okay, keep calm and invest on. I will continue to try and grow my cash pile and limit my Canadian equities exposure to less than 35% of the portfolio.

If you like to track your dividend income like I do, here’s a free dividend tracker spreadsheet download for you. I find it motivating to keep track of your numbers and continue to see a positive trajectory.

December 2024 Dividend Income Update

My goal for 2024 was to have at least $36,000 annually of dividend income.

Here’s my November 2024 Dividend Income Update if you want to look at my dividend portfolio from last month.  The forward annual yield at that time was $36,650.

A few notes: I leave the US dividends received/ estimated as a 1:1 US and CAD dollar exchange to keep thing simple.

My December 2024 Forward Dividend Income is $36,909 and this is a 0.7% increase from last month, or a $259 increase in annual dividend income.

My “hourly rate” is now $4.21 whether I’m eating or sleeping or cleaning my stove.

Or the rate is $17.75/hour if I was working a 40 hour work week, which means my dividend income covers a minimum wage salary.

On June 1 the minimum wage in BC increased to $17.40/hr.

Way to go passive income!

Here’s my screenshot chart from Wealthica below on my 12 month performance relative to VTI and VEQT as of December 1, 2024. As of December 29, 2024 I am still beating the S&P500 and my 12 month returns are around 27%.

To get to this page, log into Wealthica and click on “add-ons” then click on “Performance Report” in the drop down box. You’ll be able to see how your portfolio compares to the S&P/TSX and the S&P 500 (but it doesn’t include the dividends).

Personally, I think it’s not a bad idea to keep track of how your portfolio compares to the benchmark indices, because if you have 75 different Canadian dividend paying companies and your return over the years is only 4% compounded annually then you might want to think about changing your investment strategy.

Comparing my own portfolio to the benchmark (and being appalled at the measly return) is what prompted me to switch to at least 50% of my portfolio in ETFs a few years ago and since then my portfolio has been doing better total growth-wise.

My December 2024 forward dividend income was $34,279 and my December 2024 forward dividend income is $36,909 so the YoY increase is 7.7%.

Here’s how my forward dividend yield looks like compared to the last few years, it has definitely slowed down recently.

You can read my Wealthica review here if you’re interested in it. It’s not free anymore but it still provides good value for the cost.

I love it as it works especially well with my Questrade accounts because of the API access and the graphing capabilities of Wealthica are much better than what you would just get with Questrade.

Passiv also gives you very detailed information about your dividend income and Passiv Elite is free for Questrade users.You can even see your time-weighted returns for the past 12 months or year to date. It also breaks down exactly how many dividends you received from with companies or ETFs month by month into a pretty colour coded format.

One downside with Passiv is that it always seems to be down at night time (the API and Questrade sync doesn’t seem to work then).

You can sign up for a free Passiv Elite account here to look at your dividends received.

If you prefer your own spreadsheet instead, and you’re interested in getting your own dividend income spreadsheet tracker, sign up for a free download here.

DIVIDENDS RECEIVED

I like tracking upcoming payments and ex-dividend dates using the Dividend Pro App. I just renewed for another year and they increased the price, it’s now $17.50 or so for a year but I think it’s worth it so I can keep myself updated regarding dividend payments and changes.

Wealthica also has a free add-on called “Income Investor Lite” and you can choose to see the Income Calendar, Dividend Holdings, and Upcoming Payments with a subscription of $9.99/year.

You can do a free trial of the upgraded income investor lite (no credit card needed) for seven days.

The upgraded version has an income calendar showing you the upcoming payments.

Also it shows you the dividends paid (in total), and forward yearly dividends expected including the current dividend yield and your yield on cost (in the paid version).

The free version shows you an income chart of the last 12 months of payments and the forward 12 months of payments expected, however the forward 12 months doesn’t seem accurate.

I like it because you don’t have to manually update any holdings when you make changes to the number of shares you own etc. however, I don’t like that you can’t see it on the phone (and it’s just on desktop).

Therefore, I’ll stick to Dividend Pro for now.

Here are the companies and ETFs that paid dividends and distributions in December 2024. It was a below average paying month.

• Fortis (FTS.TO)
• Manulife Financial (MFC.TO) ($524 for cleaning the stove- is what I tell myself when I pretend to pay myself first for cleaning the stove and oven- it’s a reminder to deep clean the stove)
• Suncor (SU.TO)
• Vanguard Total International Stock Market ETF (VXUS)
• Vanguard Emerging Market ETF (VEE.TO)
• Sunlife Financial (SLF.TO)
• iShares S&P/TSX Capped REIT Index ETF (XRE.TO)
• Riocan REIT (REI.UN)

DIVIDEND PORTFOLIO CHANGES

Here are some changes to the portfolio in December, it was busy with Canadian bank earnings:

• National Bank (NA.TO) increased their dividend from $1.10 to $1.14 per quarter, which is a 3.64% increase
• Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO) increased from $1.55 to $1.59 per quarter, which is a 2.58% increase
• TD Bank (TD.TO) increase from $1.02 to $1.05 per quarter, or about 2.94% increase
• I bought more Vanguard Ex-Canada ETF (VXC.TO)
• I updated the Vanguard distributions (trailing 12 month distributions, they are updated quarterly).

Here are some of my favourite five Canadian dividend stocks if you’re interested. One of them has been a triple bagger for me, returning over 340%.

I’ll share next week what my 2025 dividend income goal is, after a lot of deliberation.

Happy investing!