July 2023 Dividend Income Update

Gardening is very similar to dividend investing, you get excited about the yield even though it is small at first. You have to build your portfolio (more area or space for your garden) to see a larger crop. You have to be picky about what goes in your portfolio or garden. You can’t just cram everything in there (e.g. you can’t just have an investment portfolio of 75 dividend companies without regard to asset allocation or sector allocation) otherwise things won’t grow well.

This year I stuck to the easy stuff.

Swiss chard, zucchini (this is the first zucchini of the season…I recently found out you can eat zucchini raw! In fact I think I like it better than eating it cooked), beets, peas (most of the pea seeds got eaten up by pests), and green beans.

The first zucchini that I excitedly waited to grow got eaten up by a pest (the dividend got chomped on).

Our raspberry bush didn’t disappoint this year but the blueberry bushes didn’t have much of a yield. The garlic I planted last year seemed to disappear into the soil.

Just like with gardening you have to evaluate your dividend portfolio to look at what’s working and what isn’t working and rebalance or adjust.

Here’s my July dividend income update!

Just like July can be a big month for backyard farmers harvesting their fruits and vegetables, July was a big month for my dividend portfolio.

July 2023 Dividend Income Update

My goal for 2023 is at least $35,000 annually of dividend income (definitely not a big deal if I don’t get this, my main goal was a 7 figure portfolio), or about a $1,000,000 dividend/ investment portfolio with a conservative 3.5% dividend yield.

It’s looking a bit more like this $35,000 per year goal won’t be attainable but at least I’ll be in the ballpark range area.

Here’s my June 2023 Dividend Income Update if you want to look at my dividend portfolio from last month.  The forward annual yield at that time was $31,586.

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

My July 2023 Forward Dividend Income is $31,908 and this is a 1% increase from last month, or a $322 increase in annual dividend income.

My “hourly rate” is now $3.64 whether I’m eating or sleeping or cleaning my stove.

Or the rate is $15.34/hour if I was working a 40 hour work week. I have a bit more to go to make minimum wage in passive dividend income since the minimum wage got increased to $16.75/hr on June 1.

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 (7.98% over 12 months compared to the S&P500 which is over 16% and the S&P/TSX which is 3.66%).

I’m not beating the S&P500 anymore, but am still beating the S&P/TSX. This is why you shouldn’t have 100% in Canadian equities.

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 July 2022 forward dividend income was $25,869 and my July 2023 forward dividend income is $31,908 so my YoY increase is around 23%.

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.

This month there was a bit of a glitch in the Dividend Pro App where they didn’t update $VXC’s July distribution (which is my largest holding). So I emailed and they quickly replied back and updated the app.

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.

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

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

It was an above average dividend payout month (over $4000!)

• Telus Corporation (T.TO)
• Vanguard REIT ETF (VNQ)
• Altria (MO)
• BMO Laddered Preferred Shares (ZPR)
• Riocan Real Estate Investment Trust (REI.UN)
• iShares S&P/TSX Capped REIT (XRE.TO)
• TD Bank (TD.TO)
• Vanguard ex-Canada ETF (VXC.TO)

DIVIDEND PORTFOLIO CHANGES

Here is what I added to the portfolio in July:

• 25 shares of Toronto Dominion Bank (TD.TO)
• 200 shares of Telus Corporation (T.TO)
• 10 shares of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy ADR (LVMUY)
• Added Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI)

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

How did your July investing go?