September 2023 Dividend Income Update

This month, our laneway house tenant notified us that their ceiling was leaking. We weren’t sure if it was the roof or the laundry machine, but we deduced that it was the laundry machine.

I looked at it during the precious 1.5 hour of free time that I get between school drop off and pick up and I ended up in a whirlwind of anxiety for the day. Would it be covered under the 2/5/10 year warranty? What if the drywall is damaged? How much would this cost? Is this going to be over $10,000?

We either have to get a new washer (because it was leaking from the front) or hire someone to fix the appliance. Our contractor told us to buy a new washer and that replacing parts will take weeks. One will cost at least $900 to buy a new washer and the other will be probably at least $200 to try and repair it.

There goes some of the monthly rent “profits”.

Not to mention the time it took to try and contact someone and organize them coming by to fix the washer.

I know some people love real estate investing and adding to the “doors” in their portfolio but I don’t think I’m one of them. It’s just a lot of hassle- I can’t control how roughly the tenants use their appliances or when they report issues (maybe it was a small leak for a while but they only told us after the ceiling started dripping water).

Passive dividend investing is where it’s at, I don’t have to worry about derailing my free time (and the free time of the days following to organize the handy-person to come and help) and energy towards fixing things.

Here’s my September 2023 Dividend Income Update, TGID!

Thank Goodness it’s Dividends.

September 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.

Don’t think I will hit the $35,000 per year goal with two months left but at least I’ll be in the ballpark range area.

Here’s my August 2023 Dividend Income Update if you want to look at my dividend portfolio from last month.  The forward annual yield at that time was $32,176.

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

My September 2023 Forward Dividend Income is $32,492 and this is a 0.98% increase from last month, or a $316 increase in annual dividend income.

My “hourly rate” is now $3.71 whether I’m eating or sleeping or cleaning my stove.

Or the rate is $15.62/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 (14.76% over 12 months compared to the S&P500 which is 18.67% and the S&P/TSX which is 8.04%).

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

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 September 2022 forward dividend income was $27,099 and my September 2023 forward dividend income is $32,492 so my YoY increase is less this month, only 19.9% (usually it’s 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.

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 desk top).

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

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

It was an average dividend payout month.

• Fortis (FTS.TO)
• Walgreens (WBA)
• Manulife Financial (MFC.TO) I have yet to deep clean my stove and oven, it’s on my to-do list this month! I arbitrarily remind myself to do this painful chore by telling myself I’m being paid $450 in dividends for cleaning the stove.
• Suncor (SU.TO)
• Vanguard Emerging Market ETF (VEE.TO)
• Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VIT)
• Sunlife (SLF.TO)
•  iShares Core S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index ETF (XIC.TO)
•  Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund ETF (VXUS)
• BMO Laddered Preferred Shares (ZPR.TO)
• Riocan Real Estate Investment Trust (REI.UN)
• iShares S&P/TSX Capped REIT (XRE.TO)

DIVIDEND PORTFOLIO CHANGES

I made some big changes in September (I had mentioned that I wanted to trim the portfolio a little bit), also the distributions posted for the Vanguard funds so I updated those with the 12 month trailing yield.

• Added more Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI)
• Added more Vanguard ex-Canada ETF (VXC.TO)
• Added to Telus (T.TO)
• Added to TD Bank (TD.TO)
• Sold all my shares of  iShares Core S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index ETF (XIC.TO)
• Sold all the shares of BMO Laddered Preferred Shares (ZPR)
• Added more of Fortis (FTS.TO)
• Bought more National Bank (NA.TO)
• Bought more Altria (MO)
• Bought more Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMUY)
• Verizon Wireless (VZ) increased their dividend by a paltry 1.92%
• Fortis (FTS.TO) increased their annual dividend by 4.4% making this 50 years of consecutive increases, dividend king status

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

How did your September investing go?