Dividend Income – April 2025 Update

Welcome to our latest monthly dividend income update! 

We have been doing these monthly updates since the birth of this blog to track our financial independence progress. It is our way of showing that it is possible to build up a sizable dividend portfolio over time that can generate sufficient dividend income to sustain our annual expenses and support our lifestyle.

This year we are aiming to receive over $60,000 in dividend income, which should cover more than 100% of our core expenses (i.e. necessities only, not including charitable donations, dining out, gifts, vacation, etc). 

I had originally planned to go to Japan and Taiwan for two weeks in April for a work trip but it got postponed to later this year. After March’s two-week work trip in Europe, it was nice to stay at home. The only work trip in April was a quick two-day hop down to San Francisco and San Jose to visit a few customers. While waiting for my flight back home at San Francisco Airport, I checked out Air Canada’s lounge, which was quite nice, probably one of the nicest lounges I have been to.

The longer daylight, drier and warmer weather meant we spent quite a bit of time outside throughout April. I power washed our front and back patio and was completely covered in dirt head to toe. We then filled the gaps with sand to make the patio look nice.

With Cubs and Scouts, we also spent more time outside. We had a great time going canoeing in the river with the Scouts one evening.

One of the Christmas gifts Mrs. T and I gave to the kids was watching Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in concert. Basically we watched the movie with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra playing all the music from the movie. We thoroughly enjoyed this experience and plan to check out more movies in the future.

One of the coolest things I did in April was meeting up with a reader from the UK. This reader emailed me back in 2017 and since then we started a tradition of a yearly wrap up email at the end of each year. It was super neat to finally meet up with this reader and exchanged ideas over dinner. This is why the FIRE community is so great!

Dividend Income – April 2025

Back to dividends. In April, we received dividends from the following companies:

• Alimentation Couche-Tard (ATD.TO)
• BCE (BCE.TO)
• Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS.TO)
• CIBC (CM.TO)
• Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO)
• Capital Power Corp (CPX.TO)
• Granite REIT (GRT.UN)
• Coca-Cola (KO)
• Power Corp (POW.TO)
• South Bow (SOBO.TO)
• SmartCentres REIT (SRU.UN)
• Telus (T.TO)
• TD (TD.TO)
• TC Energy Corp (TRP.TO)
• VICI Properties (VICI)
• Walmart (WMT)

These 16 payments added up to $7,646.60, making this the second-highest dividend income amount for 2025. 

Compared to April 2024, we saw a YoY increase of 22.55%, the highest so far in 2025!

Needless to say, we are very pleased with how well we did in April.

Dividend Hikes

Why are dividend hikes also known as organic dividend growth important? Because when we are living off dividends, it is important for the dividends to keep up with inflation. At that stage, we won’t be reinvesting dividends (i.e. no drip) and probably won’t be investing new cash. Therefore, any dividend growth would have to come from dividend hikes. 

In April, the following companies announced dividend hikes: 

• Procter & Gamble (PG) raised its dividend payout by 5% to $1.0568 per share
• Costco (COST) raised its dividend payout by 12.1% to $1.30 per share
• Alphabet (GOOGL) raised its dividend payout by 5% to $0.21 per share

These dividend hikes increased our forward annual dividend income by $63.70. It’s not a lot of money but a raise is a raise!

Dividend Reinvestment Plans

Since we are not living off dividends yet, we reinvest our dividend income whenever we can. For dividends received in TD and Questrade, we enroll in synthetic DRIPs so that one or more shares are automatically added. For Wealthsimple, we enroll in fractional DRIPs so we can reinvest 100% of the dividend received.

• Sign up for Wealthsimple with my referral code or type in YDC3NA when you sign up. You’ll get a $25 reward for simply signing up.
• Sign up for Questrade with my referral code or enter referral code 826124747428063 when signing up. You’ll get a $50 reward for opening an account.  

In April, we dripped the following shares:

• 19 shares of BCE
• 7.397 shares of Bank of Nova Scotia
• 12.159 shares of CIBC
• 8.889 shares of Canadian Natural Resources
• 3.043 shares of Capital Power Corp
• 0.592 shares of Granite REIT
• 1.808 shares of Coca-Cola
• 5.686 shares of Power Corp
• 3.098 shares of South Bow
• 7 shares of SmartCentres REIT
• 39.724 shares of Telus
• 16.424 shares of TD
• 10.274 shares of TC Energy Corp
• 2.582 shares of VICI
• 0.186 shares of Walmart

In total, 137.862 shares were dripped automatically without us having to lift a finger and $6,418.16 out of the $7,646.60 received in April was invested, resulting in a DRIP ratio of 83.9%.

More importantly, by enrolling in DRIP, both synthetic and fractional, we increased our forward annual dividend by $356.45. At a 4% dividend yield, that’s equivalent to investing almost $9,000 worth of new capital. 

Stock transactions

It seemed ages ago, but the market was extremely volatile in the early part of April due to Trump’s Liberation Day and the resulting tariff policy. Seeing the big drops in the early part of April, we decided to deploy new capital and purchase stocks at discounted prices. We also added a few more stocks throughout April once the market started recovering (i.e. when the tariffs were put on hold for 90 days). 

We added the following stocks throughout April:

• 17 shares of National Bank (NA.TO)
• 95.4332 shares of Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO)
• 30.7909 shares of Brookfield Corporation (BN.TO)
• 34 shares of iShares ex-Canada International ETF (XAW)
• 6 shares of Brookfield Asset Management (BAM.TO)

In total, we deployed slightly over $10,000 of new capital throughout April. To be honest, it was extremely difficult to invest new capital when there were a lot of uncertainties and there was a lot of fear. But after DIY investing for over 15 years, we have experienced such a fearful & uncertain investing environment many times. What I’ve learned over the years is that if we could take advantage of these market drops due to uncertainty and fear, we usually would come out ahead on the other side in the long term. 

These five stock purchases added $347.96 toward our forward annual dividend income. 

It will be interesting to see what happens to the tariffs in the next few months. Perhaps we will continue the yo-yoing market condition for the rest of the year… 

Dividend Scorecard

Here’s our dividend scorecard for April 2025.

Not only did we have the second-highest monthly dividend income for the month, we also added over $750 in forward annual dividend income thanks to a combination of organic dividend growth, DRIP, and stock transactions. 

Overall, a very solid month.

Some thoughts on BCE

Well, after months of speculation, BCE management finally made it official and announced a dividend cut on May 8. The company cut its dividend from $3.99 per share annualized to $1.75 per share annualized. 

This corresponds to a 56.1% reduction.

In addition to the steep dividend cut, BCE announced a partnership with PSP Investments to manage debt. PSP Investment, a pension manager for Government of Canada employees, will pay $1.5B USD to get a 51% equity stake in a newly formed company called Network FiberCo. 

In other words, once the Ziply acquisition closes, a new company called Network FiberCo will be formed with BCE owning 49% of the company and PSP owning 51%. 

By cutting its dividends, BCE can now focus on reducing its debt. This is a positive outlook for the company. By reducing their exposure to Ziply, BCE reduces the debt associated with the Ziply acquisition. 

This is the right step in the direction and should be welcomed by BCE shareholders. And given BCE’s stock price rise post-dividend cut, that appears to be the general sentiment. The market received the dividend cut announcement favourably and the stock price increased by over 5% at the end of trading on May 8. The stock price then increased by another 2% on May 9. It will be interesting to see whether the stock price continues to recover anywhere close to its former price level. 

However, as a shareholder, I am wondering and questioning what the BCE management was thinking about!

• Selling MLSE, an appreciating asset
• Then using that money to buy Ziply. From the outside looking in, I feel expanding into the US fibre market was a terrible idea. But perhaps the management knew more and believed that expanding into the US would provide better future growth. 
• Management continued to state that the dividend was safe despite the super high debt level  

 As a shareholder, I would have preferred BCE cut the dividend earlier (at least a year ago) and getting its balance sheet in order. In my opinion, the purchase of Ziply was a terrible idea and I hope some of the top management will get fired as a result. I certainly wouldn’t be unhappy to see a house cleaning at BCE, similar to what we saw with TD after the money laundering scandal. 

For now, we have no plan to sell any BCE shares. Hopefully the stock price will continue to appreciate and we can make a decision on the BCE position at the end of this year or next year. 

Interestingly enough, the day after BCE’s dividend cut announcement, Telus announced a dividend increase. Clearly BCE and Telus are at different ends of the spectrum when it comes health of their dividednds. 

Summary – Dividend Income April 2025 Update

After four months or one-third of the year, we have received $23,923.31 in dividend income. This also means we are averaging $5,980.83 per month, which is absolutely fantastic and more than sufficient to pay for our monthly expenses. 

To put things in perspective, $23,923.31 after four months is equivalent to:

• $199.36 after 120 days or $8.31 per hour that our dividend portfolio generates, regardless of what we’re doing. 
• $1,329.07 per week or $33.23 per hour wage after 18 working weeks. 

We feel blessed and very appreciative that we started our financial independence journey back in 2011. It feels great to have our money working hard for us so we don’t have to and knowing that we are doing the right thing by sticking with our fundamental strategy no matter the market conditions.

Dear readers, how was your April dividend income?