May 2023 Dividend Income Update

The school year is almost coming to an end. I am trying to “live my best life” but it’s still very busy. I am time poor because I’m either working, or taking care of the kids, or cleaning the house, or preparing food, or going grocery shopping, or exercising. The 2.5 hour break during preschool a few times a week isn’t enough to take a ‘breather’. Summer is coming and that 2.5 hour break will be gone, oh dear.

We’ve got our kids in some half day summer camps (or at least one of them most of the time) and I have a goal to take them to child-friendly hiking trails. I used to hike the Grouse Grind (this is colloquially called nature’s stair master) a few times a week and I haven’t done that for about 6 years.

Looking back it’s just incredible how much your life changes with kids 🙂

My goal for 2023 is $35,000 annually and that’s the new BC minimum wage as of June 1 (or around $34,840). I’m not sure if I will make it, but the trajectory so far looks promising (but tight).

Here’s my May dividend income update!

May 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 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 April 2023 Dividend Income Update if you want to look at my dividend portfolio from last month.  The forward annual yield at that time was $30,883.

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

My May 2023 Forward Dividend Income is $31,326 and this is a 1.4% increase from last month, or a $443 increase in annual dividend income.

My “hourly rate” is now $3.58 whether I’m eating or sleeping or cleaning my stove.

Or the rate is $15.06/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 (-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 May 2022 forward dividend income was $25,302 and my May 2023 forward dividend income is $31,326 so my YoY increase is around 23.8%.

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 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 that 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 May 2023.

It was a below average dividend payout month.

• Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO)
• Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMUY)
• National Bank of Canada (NA.TO)
• TD Bank (TD.TO)
• Power Corporation of Canada (POW.TO)
• Verizon Communications (V)
• BMO Laddered Preferred Shares (ZPR)
• Riocan Real Estate Investment Trust (REI.UN)
• iShares S&P/TSX Capped REIT (XRE.TO)

DIVIDEND PORTFOLIO CHANGES

Here are some dividend increases. Although the bank earnings results disappointed this quarter, they still announced dividend increases, keeping their investors placated.

• Bank of Montreal increased their annual dividend by 2.8% from $1.43 per quarter to $1.47
• National Bank increased their annual dividend by 5.15% from $0.97 per quarter to $1.02 per quarter. National bank has increased their dividend by over 10% in the past year.
• Telus Corporation increased their dividend by 3.56% from 0.3511 to 0.3636 per quarter
• Sun Life Financial increased their dividend by 4.17% from $0.72 per quarter to $0.75 per quarter

Here’s what I added to the investment portfolio.

• Picked up even more Telus (T.TO)
• Added Vanguard Emerging Market ETF (VEE.TO)
• Added Vanguard ex-Canada ETF (VXC.TO)

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

How did your May investing go?