Dividend Income – August 2025 Update

Hello everyone, welcome to another month of dividend income update.

We have been doing these monthly dividend income updates since the birth of this blog. We do these updates to chronicle our financial independence journey. We also do them to keep ourselves accountable and demonstrate that it is possible to build a sizable dividend portfolio that can produce dividend income greater than our living expenses. 

When you boil it down, our investment strategy is very simple:

1. We maintain a relatively high savings rate
2. We max out TFSAs and RRSPs each year, then invest money in non-registered accounts.
3. We invest in Canadian and US dividend stocks. To avoid the 15% withholding tax on US dividends, we only hold US dividend stocks in our RRSPs.
4. We hold low-cost index ETFs that give us diversification and long-term growth that we may be missing from our dividend stocks

In terms of which dividend stocks to hold, we also maintain a relatively simple strategy – we hold companies that produce products that we use daily (i.e. hedging our consumption). If a product is extremely hard for us to switch, the more we like the company. For example, we bank with TD, so we own TD shares. We hate dealing with cellphone providers, so we own Telus shares (we happen to use Telus as our cell provider). 

It’s that simple. In my humble opinion, there’s really no need to have a complicated investing strategy. You should be able to explain your investment strategy to a five-year-old! If not, you need to revisit your strategy. 

Throughout August, just like July, we spent a lot of time on our patio and in our backyard garden to enjoy the Vancouver summer. Mrs. T also spent a lot of time preparing pottery pieces for her pottery show in September.

I’m proud to declare that I accomplished a personal milestone in August – my 90th blood donation! I first donated blood while in university. Then started donating whole blood regularly in the late 2000s. So yes, it has taken me almost 20 years to get to where I am today. 

Why do I donate blood regularly? When I was a youth, a Scouter of mine used to donate blood regularly to help out others in need. He passed away when I was in university and he had inspired me to donate blood regularly and make a small contribution to the world.

Since Canadian Blood Services allows males to donate blood every 56 days, my goal is to hit donation #100. This will take another 1.5 years if I could optimize my donation appointments, but most likely, I would achieve this major milestone in late 2027. 

As mentioned in my latest Random Thoughts post, I spent 10 days in Japan and Taiwan in late August. It was ridiculously hot during my short visit. It was so hot I may have had heat exhaustion the last half of the trip while in Taiwan – I slept poorly, felt tired and nauseous for days, and had a poor appetite. Fortunately, I quickly recovered once I got back to Vancouver. 

One of the perks of being in Asia for almost two weeks is that I was able to spend the weekend in Tokyo. Since I like to walk aimlessly and explore whenever I travel, I walked all over Tokyo rather than taking trains and subways. As a result, I stumbled upon some really cool spots in Tokyo that I wouldn’t have visited otherwise.

I stayed in Ginza on the weekend while in Tokyo. I knew there were many great restaurants in Ginza, including many Michelin-starred restaurants. While looking up restaurants on Google Maps, I saw Ginza Hachigou and discovered that it used to be a Michelin one-star restaurant (now it’s Michelin Bib Gourmand for six straight years). Since it was close to my hotel, I decided to walk over to check it out around 10:30 AM on Saturday morning. From internet searches, I found that you would have to wait between two to three hours to get a bowl of ramen, as the restaurant only served 30 walk-in guests per day before noon, and from noon until three PM, only reserved guests would be served. 

Somehow, the stars must have aligned for me, as when I walked by Ginza Hachigou as only five people were in line. So I lined up for the fun of it, without knowing how long the actual wait might be. I figured I would wait for 30 minutes, if it was longer, I would leave the line up and move on. Shortly after, I was quickly asked to go in, order, and pay. To my surprise, the ravioli gourmandize chuka soba, which was limited to 30 bowls per day, was still available. Needless to say, I ordered and paid for this limited ramen. Anyway, in total, I waited for about five minutes before I was seated and was served with a bowl of ramen after about five minutes (there were only six seats inside the restaurant).  

How did the ramen taste? It was absolutely amazing! The soup, based on duck, chicken, and scallops, was clear and very rich, resembling Consommé. The truffle and foie gras filled ravioli burst with flavour. The meat and topping were just as amazing and delicious. 

When I was done and walked out of the restaurant, I talked to the waitress outside quickly and was told I was extremely lucky to have waited only five minutes and also able to have the last bowl of ravioli ramen of the day! 

More food pictures from my trip:

Dividend Income – August 2025

Back to dividend income. In August, we received dividends from the following companies:

• Apple (AAPL)
• AbbVie (ABBV)
• Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO)
• Costco (COST)
• Emera (EMA)
• Granite REIT (GRT.UN)
• National Bank (NA.TO)
• Power Corp (POW.TO)
• Procter & Gamble (PG)
• Royal Bank (RY.TO)
• SmartCentre REIT (SRU.UN)
• Waste Connections (WCN.TO)

These 12 payments added up to $3,947.55. Since August is one of the weaker dividend months, I was very pleased to see a number that’s quite close to $4,000.

Compared to August 2024, we saw a YoY growth of 14.42% which is very solid given that we are facing the law of the big numbers. 

Dividend Hikes 

As our dividend income grows and we are getting one step closer to living off dividends, more than ever, we need to rely on dividend hikes to increase our forward-looking dividend income. 

Why, you ask?

Imagine receiving $500 in dividend income. For you to double that amount to $1,000, you’d need to invest $12,500 of new capital, at a 4% yield. Now, if you receive $10,000 in dividend income, to double that amount to $20,000, you’d need to invest $250,000 of new capital, at a 4% yield. For most of us, adding $12,500 of new capital is easier to achieve than adding $250,000 of new capital. 

Furthermore, as we live off dividends, we probably wouldn’t be adding new capital to our dividend portfolio. So when a company announces a dividend payout increase, that’d effectively increase our forward-looking dividend income and ensure inflation doesn’t decrease our dividend income’s purchasing power. 

Dividend hikes aren’t something an investor like you or I can control – the company board decides whether to increase dividend payout or not. Unfortunately, none of the stocks we own declared a dividend hike in August.

Hopefully we’ll have better luck in September.  

Dividend Reinvestment Plans

I mentioned that dividend hikes aren’t something an investor can control. Enrolling in dividend reinvesting plans (DRIP), however, is something an investor can definitely control. 

The idea behind DRIP is easy – you reinvest dividends right away for additional shares. By getting more shares on hand, you also increase your forward annual dividend income slightly. 

In August, we dripped the following shares:

• 0.3555 shares of Apple
• 0.6049 shares of AbbVie
• 3 shares of Bank of Montreal
• 0.0515 shares of Costco
• 1.7827 shares of Emera
• 0.4738 shares of Granite REIT
• 6.4245 shares of National Bank
• 0.6433 shares of Procter & Gamble
• 5.478 shares of Power Corp
• 4.2346 shares of Royal Bank
• 6 shares of SmartCentres REIT
• 0.0847 shares of Waste Connections

In total, $2,980.49 out of the $3,947.55 received was reinvested immediately, resulting in receiving an additional 29.0033 shares. More importantly, we added $114.38 toward our forward annual dividend income.

Stock Transactions 

After a busy month in July on the stock transaction front, we were relatively quiet in terms of stock buying and selling. Since it’s free to buy and sell stocks with both Questrade and Wealthsimple, we used cash sitting in our accounts and added a few shares here and there throughout August when the market was down slightly.

We purchased the following stocks: 

• 10 shares of Telus
• 2 shares of Brookfield Asset Management
• 7 shares of Capital Power
• 10.5611 shares of Canadian Natural Resources

As you can see, nothing really exciting. Just small purchases to ensure we don’t have money sitting idle.

These purchases added $64.32 toward our forward annual dividend income.

Why didn’t we invest more fresh capital in August? Because we are now in savings mode. We are saving money for 2026’s TFSA and RRSP contributions. If my math is correct, the TFSA 2026 contribution limit should be $7,000 per adult. So between Mrs. T and I, we can contribute $14,000. We also want to save up money so that by early March, we can contribute a large sum of money toward our 2026 RRSP contribution room. 

Since we now have some cash saved up sitting on the side, if there happens to be a major market decline, we would not hesitate to deploy that cash and take advantage. It would need to be a MAJOR market decline for us to do that (like 30% or more) but I believe it’s very unlikely to happen… 

Dividend Scorecard

Here’s our dividend scorecard for August.

Interestingly, the dividend mix from TFSA, RRSP, and taxable was roughly a third each. 

Despite not adding any dividends from dividend hikes, we ended up increasing our forward annual dividend income by $178.70. This should be considered a win.

Summary – Dividend Income August 2025 Update

With eight months in the books, we have received $44,183.15 in dividends or an eight-month average of $5,522.89. It’s quite amazing that we have already surpassed our 2022 annual dividend total!  

This is the perfect example of our money working hard for us so we don’t have to. 

To put things in perspective, $44,183.15 after eight months is equivalent to:

• $161.84 per day or $6.74 per hour, regardless of what we’re doing
• $1,227.31 per week or $30.68 per hour after 36 working weeks

Since BC’s minimum wage is $17.85 per hour as of June 1, 2025, this means our dividend portfolio is generating over 1.7 times of minimum wage for us, which is absolutely amazing!

How was your August dividend income?