February 2023 Dividend Income Update

Let’s see what happened this month?

It was a busy month, full of play dates, birthday dinners, and our monthly date night, we splurged on a three course meal for Dine Out Vancouver and called it our Valentine’s dinner, hah. For our actual Valentine’s Day I made my husband a steak with our air fryer and he didn’t realize I made him a steak for Valentine’s on purpose, haha. We are very romantic as you can see.

We went to a kids birthday party that had alcohol (beer and mixed cooler drinks), that made the party so much fun, hah. Of course the kids had fun too.

My kids and I went to Granville Island to walk around and pick up a Too Good To Go surprise package from Lee’s Donuts. If you haven’t heard of Too Good To Go it’s a food waste app in Canada. It was a lot of donuts (I think a dozen?), so I had to freeze some of the un-iced ones.

The market pulled back since the beginning of February but that’s okay I’m heading in the right direction. I’m going to keep saying positive affirmations for my portfolio.

Speaking of affirmations, there is a new song that I have been LOVING.

Did you know Snoop Dogg does children’s songs!? Love the message.

Here are some of the lyrics:

Here’s my February dividend income update!

February 2023 DIVIDEND INCOME UPDATE

If you’re curious about my liquid net worth, subscribe and you’ll get the report with net worth numbers this week. I’ll likely stop oversharing once I hit my investment portfolio goal.

My one year target goal is at least $35,000 annually of dividend income (definitely not a big deal if I don’t get this, my main goal is a 7 figure portfolio), or about a $1,000,000 dividend/ investment portfolio with a conservative 3.5% dividend yield.

For one of my 2023 personal finance resolutions, I am aiming for $35,000 in dividend income.

Here’s my January 2023 Dividend Income Update if you want to look at my dividend portfolio from last month.  The forward annual yield at that time was $29,054.

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

My February 2023 Forward Dividend Income is $29,606 and this is a 1.8% increase from last month, or $552 increase in annual dividend income.

My “hourly rate” is now $3.38 whether I’m eating or sleeping or cleaning my stove.

Or the rate is $14.23/hour if I was working a 40 hour work week. I’m almost at BC’s minimum wage of $15.65 per hour.

Talk about passive income!

Here’s my screenshot chart from Wealthica below on my 12 month performance relative to the S&P/TSX and S&P500 (positive 0.23% over 12 months).

I am beating the market (both the S&P500 and S&P/TSX) but it’s not anything to be proud of since I still have paper losses haha.

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).

My February 2022 forward dividend income was $24,001 and my February 2023 forward dividend income is $29,606 so my YoY increase is around 23.3%.

Here’s how my forward dividend yield looks like compared to the last few years. The snowball is rolling rolling rolling.

You can read my Wealthica review here if you’re interested in it– it’s free to sign up for!

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.

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 $15.50 or so for a year but I think it’s worth it so I can keep myself updated regarding dividend payments and changes.

I like how you can use it on the app.

Wealthica recently added 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.

It shows you an income chart of the last 12 months of payments and the forward 12 months of payments expected.

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 desk top). I’ll stick to Dividend Pro for now.

Here are the companies and ETFs that paid dividends in February 2023.

It was a below average dividend payout month.

• National Bank (NA.TO)
• Power Corporation of Canada (POW.TO)
• Verizon Communications (V)
• BMO Laddered Preferred Shares (ZPR)
• Riocan Real Estate Investment Trust (REI.UN)
• Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO)
• iShares S&P/TSX Capped REIT (XRE.TO) almost at $100 monthly distribution for this one

DIVIDEND PORTFOLIO CHANGES

I added quite a bit in February and there were some dividend increases.

Dividend increases:

• Manulife Financial (MFC.TO) increased their dividend by 11% from 1.32 to 1.46 paid out annually.
• Riocan Real Estate Investment Trust (REI.UN) increased their monthly distribution by 6% to $0.09 per month, or $1.08 annually. The distribution has not recovered from the original 50% slash of distribution when the pandemic began.

Here’s what I added to the investment portfolio.

• Bought 25 more shares of National Bank (NA.TO)
• Bought more Vanguard Emerging Market ETF (VEE.TO)
• Picked up 100 more shares of Vanguard ex-Canada ETF (VXC.TO)
• Picked up 10 more shares of Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF
• Added Vanguard Real Estate REIT ETF (VNQ)

Here are some of my favourite five Canadian dividend stocks if you’re interested.

The companies you select in your portfolio can’t all be winners, but Fairfax Financial (FFH.TO) has done very well for my portfolio so far and is officially a one bagger (this means it is up over 100% of your investment).

How did your February 2023 go?