Dividend Income – January 2026 Update

Welcome to the first dividend income report of 2026! 

Since the creation of this blog back in July 2014, I have been sharing our monthly dividend income. 

Why do I continue to share our dividend income every month? 

Simple. First of all, I want to demonstrate that it is possible to build up a sizable dividend portfolio over time that can generate sufficient dividend income to live off one day. Second, I want to keep myself accountable and show readers that there’s no magic behind our dividend income. Finally, posting these monthly dividend updates allows me to go back and get a snapshot of what I was thinking and helps me to learn from past mistakes.

For those of you who are new to the blog, a quick summary of our investing philosophy and how we usually operate:

• We invest in both individual dividend stocks and index ETFs. This is our way to have the “best” of both worlds. Individual dividend stocks allow me to sharpen my brain as a DIY investor and learn more about the different companies. These individual dividend stocks also provide a predictable and regular income stream. On the other hand, index ETFs allow us to diversify across different segments and geographically at a low cost. Index ETFs also allow us to track the performance of the different indices.
• We max out both RRSPs and TFSAs every year. Once we max out these tax-advantaged accounts, we then invest in our taxable accounts.
• We invest US dividend paying stocks and US index ETFs in RRSPs to avoid the 15% withholding tax.
• We hold REITs and income trusts inside RRSPs and TFSAs to avoid tax complications with trusts.
• We invest in index ETFs in all three accounts, RRSPs, TFSAs, and taxable accounts. 
• For tax efficiency reasons, we invest in Canadian dividend paying stocks in our taxable accounts
• We invest regularly via new contributions and take advantage of dollar cost averaging
• We currently reinvest 100% of dividends received 

Although we had a cold snap in January, we didn’t get any snow at all. This is very different from the rest of Canada where a lot of snow was on the ground. Hopefully we will get more snow before spring comes because there’s not much of it up in the mountains at all.

Because work now has unlimited vacation days, I took one Friday off to go snowshoeing in January. Originally, we were planning to go skiing. After looking at the lift ticket price and the poor snow conditions on the North Shore mountains, however, we decided to snowshoe instead because it was free. 

Although I have snowshoed the Dog Mountain trail many times, it was always at night. So it was the first time for me to do this trail in daylight and it was neat. As expected, there wasn’t a lot of snow on the trail. A few times we had to cross creeks and parts of the trail had exposed tree roots. 

Dividend Income – January 2026

In January, we received dividends from the following companies:

• 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)
• Power Corp (POW.TO)
• SmartCentres REIT (SRU.UN)
• Telus (T.TO)
• TD (TD.TO)
• TC Energy Corp (TRP.TO)
• VICI Properties (VICI)
• Walmart (WMT)
• iShares Core MSCI All Country World ex Canada Index ETF (XAW.TO)

These 14 dividend pay cheques added up to $9,472.81. 

Woohoo, a new monthly record! 

What a great way to start the new year. Amazingly, we were less than $550 away from breaking the $10,000 monthly dividend income milestone. Hopefully soon (maybe next January?) we can hit that $10k level.

Compared to January 2025, we saw a YoY growth of 14.3%. 

Dividend Hikes 

As our dividend income gets larger and larger, we need to rely more on organic dividend growth to increase our annual dividend income. Therefore, it was very nice to see a few dividend hikes in January. 

In January, the following companies announced dividend hikes:

• Brookfield Renewable Energy Corp increased its dividend payout by 5.09% to $0.392 per share
• BlackRock increased its dividend payout by 9.98% to $5.73 per share
• Canadian National Railway increased its dividend payout by 3.1% to $0.915 per share

With these three dividend hikes, we increased our forward annual dividend income by $97.14. It’s not a huge number, but an increase is better than no increase at all. 

Dividend Reinvestment Plans 

We are currently reinvesting 100% of our dividend income. We are doing this in two ways. The first is by enrolling in dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs) whenever we are eligible. Since Wealthsimple and TD both support fractional DRIPs, 100% of the dividends received is immediately reinvested by purchasing additional shares. Questrade doesn’t support fractional DRIPs yet, so only full shares can be dripped. We then let the remaining dividends accumulate and manually purchase more shares.  

• Sign up for Wealthsimple using my referral code and get a $25 referral bonus. 
• Sign up for Questrade using my referral code and get a referral bonus up to $250. 

In January, we dripped the following shares:

• 4.9662 shares of BCE.TO
• 7.2028 shares of BNS.TO
• 8.96251 shares of CM.TO
• 14.99322 shares of CNQ.TO
• 10.5449 shares of CPX.TO
• 0.4428 shares of GRT.UN
• 5.6568 shares of POW.TO
• 6 shares of SRU.UN
• 23.69971 shares of T.TO
• 13.12514 shares of TD.TO
• 9.2941 shares of TRP.TO
• 3.15 shares of VICI
• 0.1387 shares of WMT
• 20.35409 shares of XAW.TO

In total, 128.53074 shares were dripped and $7,959.23 out of the $9,472.81 was reinvested right away for a drip ratio of 84%. 

By dripping 128.53074 shares in January, we increased our forward annual dividend by $362.28.

Stock Transactions  

If you remember from our December 2025 dividend income report, we deployed over $86k to our dividend portfolio and increased our dividend income by $2,086.74. The reasons for being able to deploy so much cash in one month were:

• I sold all the vested company RSUs (Restricted Stock Units) and transferred the money to my taxable account
• I sold 449 Telus shares for capital loss harvesting to offset some of the capital gains from selling my company’s vested RSUs 
• I initiated a transfer of my work’s RRSP from Sunlife to Wealthsimple

As it turned out, I didn’t use all the money transferred to my accounts. So with the residual money and new TFSA contributions for 2026, we went on another shopping spree and purchased the following:

• 604.8145 shares of Brookfield Asset Management (BAM.TO)
• 28.2245 shares of Brookfield Corporation (BN.TO)
• 149.655 shares of Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO)
• 51.1401 shares of Canadian National Railway (CNR.TO)
• 309.7823 shares of Capital Power Corp (CPX.TO)
• 150.875 shares of Emera (EMA.TO)
• 84.6273 shares of Royal Bank (RY.TO)
• 56 shares of TD (TD.TO)

Here are my reasons for these purchases:

BAM & BN: I continue to like Brookfield Asset Management and Brookfield Corporation for their strong financial performance, strong growth, and exposure to high growth sectors like AI-related data centres, digital infrastructure, and renewable energy. Furthermore, the way BAM and BN are structured means they would benefit from the other arms of the Brookfield empire (like Brookfield Infrastructure). 

CNQ: CNQ is a big player in the Canadian energy sector. The share price, at the current valuation, the dividend yield, and historical dividend growth rate are all very attractive. Of course, CNQ’s share price is tied to the crude oil price, so it can be cyclical.   

CNR: Let’s be frank, Canadian National Railway has struggled the past year and more and will probably continue to struggle. In some ways, CNR has been challenged due to US politics but I believe it will outlive the current US administration and long term, it will do just fine. Because we continue to rely on rails for transporting goods in North America as by every price metric, it’s the cheapest method, CNR, long-term will be just fine.

CPX: The share price has pulled back from the 52-week high. At a over 4.5% dividend yield, I believe the share price is quite attractive for long term dividend growth investors. 

EMA: Emera is one of those slow and steady utility stocks. Adding more to increase its weighting in our dividend portfolio. At ~4% yield, I also like the steady dividend income.

RY & TD: It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we like Canadian banks. Royal Bank and TD are the two biggest banks in Canada and should continue to generate billions of dollars in revenue every quarter. Furthermore, both Royal Bank and TD should continue to grow their revenues and net income via wealth management, capital markets, and personal/commercial banking. These growths should then allow both banks to continue to raise their respective dividend payouts. In fact, both TD and RY showed solid medium targets in their 2025 investor day presentation. 

At the time of writing, the share price for most of these stocks that we purchased are lower than our purchase price. Since the market has been somewhat volatile so far in 2026 and we are investing for the long term, I’m not too concerned with the short term market volatility. Long term, I believe all of these stocks will appreciate and provide us with solid returns. We can collect dividends in the meanwhile and wait for the share price to appreciate. There’s no rush and that’s the beauty of dividend growth investing. 

In total, around $114k was deployed and increased our forward annual dividend income by $3,853.36.

I realize that deploying almost $200k worth of cash in two months is not something everyone can do. It was a freak event for me due to the amount of my work’s RRSP transfer from Sunlife to Wealthsimple was much higher than anticipated. Somehow Sunlife liquidated both the employer and employee portions instead of only the employee portion. Combined with the sale of my vested RSUs and the new TFSA contributions, we were very fortunate to have a large amount of money at our disposal for investing.

Dividend Scorecard – January 2026

Here’s our dividend scorecard for January 2026.

We not only had the best month in terms of monthly dividend income, we also had an excellent month in increasing our forward annual dividend. This is a good step toward achieving our goal of $72,000 in dividend income this year. 

Summary – Dividend Income January 2026 Update

It was a fantastic way to start the year – receiving $9,472.81 in dividends! As you can see from the chart below, January is typically our highest dividend income for the year due to the semi-annual distribution of XAW. It would be nice if we could buck this trend and see an even higher monthly dividend income in April or July, but that will be a big challenge! 

At $9,472.81 in dividend income, this is equivalent to:

• $305.57 per week or $12.73 per hour that our dividend portfolio is generating for us, regardless of what we are doing
• $1,894.56 after 5 working weeks or $47.36 per hour

Since February is one of the weaker dividend income months, I anticipate these hourly rates to decrease next month, but that’s totally OK.

Thanks everyone for following along on our FI journey. How was your January dividend income?