March 2023 Dividend Income Update

This is kind of an exciting update as I reached another ‘threshold’ of $30,000 in annual dividend income last month.

I know there’s a whole bunch of investors who think dividend investing is ridiculous (namely devout indexers) but I personally really find comfort in knowing that some of my expenses are paid for without having to worry about timing the market when selling shares.

Then there are devout dividend investors who have over 75 dividend paying companies (sorry I personally think that’s too much) in their portfolio and only look at yield but growth is lagging.

It’s like Goldilocks and the Three bears. Maybe the best option is hybrid investing, do a little bit of both. I have about 50/50 in ETFs and individual stocks.

This porridge is too hot!

This porridge is too cold…

Ahhh, this porridge is just right!

I trimmed my portfolio a few years ago and consolidated, thanks to my husband who wisely told me that I had too many holdings.

He said if you have $2500 here and $1000 invested there, even if you have a 50% capital gain, that’s really still $1250 and $500. Which isn’t much in the grand scheme of things. Now if you had $25,000 invested with a 50% capital gain, that’s $12,500 which is more meaningful.

That’s similar to Warren Buffett’s quote:

“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.”

He says, “Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”

The beauty with index investing is that you don’t have to worry too much about the 20 slots.

I like the best of both worlds 🙂 though I definitely could still benefit from making my portfolio more lean.

Mark from My Own Advisor, a fellow hybrid investor, explains why his goal to live off dividends is alive and well.

Here’s my March dividend income update!

March 2023 Dividend Income Update

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 February 2023 Dividend Income Update if you want to look at my dividend portfolio from last month.  The forward annual yield at that time was $29,606.

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

My March 2023 Forward Dividend Income is $30,550 and this is a 3.2% increase from last month, or a big $944 increase in annual dividend income.

My “hourly rate” is now $3.49 whether I’m eating or sleeping or cleaning my stove.

Or the rate is $14.69/hour if I was working a 40 hour work week. I’m almost at BC’s minimum wage of $15.65 per hour but now I have a bit more to go since the minimum wage got increased to $16.65/hr on April 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 (-2.09 % 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 am still negative.

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 March 2022 forward dividend income was $24,403 and my March 2023 forward dividend income is $30,550 so my YoY increase is around 25.2%.

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.

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 March 2023.

It was a pretty average dividend payout month.

• Fortis Inc (FTS.TO)
• BMO Laddered Preferred Shares (ZPR)
• Riocan Real Estate Investment Trust (REI.UN)
• Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA)
• Manulife Financial (MFC.TO) It was a reminder to clean my stove. I begrudgingly did it about 10 days after the dividend payment. I ‘paid’ myself around $450 to clean that stove.
• Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund ETF (VXUS)
• Suncor Energy Inc. (SU.TO)
• Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI)
• Vanguard Emerging Market ETF (VEE)
• Vanguard REIT ETF (VNQ)
• Sunlife Financial Incorporated (SLF.TO)
• iShares Core S&P/TSX Capped ETF (XIC.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 March.

Dividend increases:

• Power Corporation (POW.TO) quietly increased the dividend by 6.06% from 0.495 per quarter to 0.525 per quarter. My husband exited out of this investment for our joint accounts but I still have it as a deluxe bond 😉
• Also every quarter Vanguard updates their distribution for the ETFs using my Dividend Pro app. I updated VXC, VNQ, VTI, XIC, VEE, and VXUS. It kind of ebbs and flows throughout the year but this update was a positive increase of a few hundred dollars. I average the last 12 months of distributions when I calculate my forward yield from the ETFs .

Here’s what I added to the investment portfolio.

• Dripped one share of Sunlife Financial (SLF.TO)
• Bought 15 more shares of National Bank (NA.TO)
• Picked up 50 more shares of Toronto Dominion Bank (TD.TO)
• Picked up more Vanguard ex-Canada ETF (VXC.TO)
• Added more iShares S&P/TSX Capped REIT (XRE.TO

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 a one bagger for me (this means it is up over 100% of your investment).

I’m also proud to say that I have the equivalent non-realized capital gains of what I paid for my Louis Vuitton wallet, lol. Up 45% yeehaw in about one year! This is one I should have bought more of just like I mentioned above- it’s my smallest holding. Then I could have bought a purse as well hah.

This is image from the free P/L Timeline in Wealthica.

Their pricing power and ability to just increase Louis Vuitton merchandise prices seemingly on the whim (like price increases of over 10%) was just so interesting. And people just keep buying.

Did you pick up more Canadian financials like I did?

How did your March investments go?