I hope everyone’s enjoying their summer. After a wet and cold June, it was nice to have a warmer and sunnier month.
Before we get into dividend income for July, let’s me continue the typical summer trend – showing off our backyard garden!
Thanks to all the sun in July, our backyard garden exploded!
Throughout July, we were busy tending the garden and harvesting vegetables, berries, and herbs from our backyard. Nothing beats freshly picked potatoes, cauliflower, and zucchini.
As you’d expect, many of our meals consisted of produce from the garden which has kept our grocery expenses down and not having to worry too much about the high grocery cost due to inflation.
In my Q2 goals and resolutions update, I pointed out that I’ve been nursing an abdominal and back injury since mid-April. After months of resting and taking it easy, I finally felt well enough to start working out with a kettlebell and pushing myself more.
Let’s hope the nice weather continues in August and we can enjoy produce from our backyard garden. It’s amazing how much you can grow when you have a small plot of land. I think more people should grow produced in their garden instead of having a green luscious lawn.
Dividend Income – July 2022
Alright, enough life update, back to dividend income update should we? In July we received dividends from the following companies:
- Algonquin Power & Utilities (AQN.TO)
- BCE Inc (BCE.TO)
- Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS.TO)
- CIBC (CM.TO)
- Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO)
- Capital Power (CPX.TO)
- Dream Industrial REIT (DIR.UN)
- European Residential REIT (ERE.UN)
- Granite REIT (GRT.UN)
- Coca-Cola (KO)
- Power Corp (POW.TO)
- Rogers (RCI.B)
- RioCan REIT (REI.UN)
- SmartCentres REIT (SRU.UN)
- Telus (T.TO)
- TD (TD.TO)
- TC Energy Corp (TRP.TO)
- VIC Properties (VICI)
These 18 dividend paycheques added to $4,528.69. Woohoo, we have a new monthly dividend record! It’s amazing to hit the $4,500 monthly dividend milestone knowing that we crossed the $4,400 milestone back in January.
Compared to dividend income from July 2021, we saw a YoY increase of 38.49%. I’m amazed at our YoY growth rate so far this year and I’m grateful that we were able to add around $207,000 worth of dividend stocks throughout 2021.
Out of the $4,528.69 dividend income received, $273.92 was in USD and $4,254.77 was in CAD or about a 5-95 split. July’s dividend income was very CAD heavy. Please note, we do not convert USD to CAD when reporting our dividend income. We are doing this to keep the math easy and to avoid fluctuations in our monthly dividend income caused by changes in the exchange rate. Over the last while, we haven’t been converting CAD to USD. Instead, we usually would collect USD dividends, wait for the money to accumulate, and purchase more US dividend paying stocks. Maybe we need to consider exchanging a large sum of CAD to USD when the exchange rate is good by using the Norbert’s Gambit?
In July, the top five dividend payers were Algonquin Power & Utilities, BCE, Bank of Nova Scotia, CM, and TD (not in order). These payments accounted for $2,931.82 or 64.7% of our July dividend income.
Dividend Stock Transactions
The market remained volatile throughout July so we took advantage of it and purchased the following stocks.
- 194 shares of Manulife Financial
- 4 shares of BlackRock
About $7,000 was deployed for these two transactions. This also meant that since the beginning of 2022 we have purchased over $90,000 worth of dividend paying stocks.
These two purchases added $334.16 toward our annual dividend income.
Like other years, I anticipate our dividend stock purchases to slow down in the second half of 2022. This is mostly due to us setting money aside to prepare for next year’s TFSA contribution room. Given the high inflation rate, it’s a given that next year’s TFSA contribution room will be $6,500. I do wonder if it’s possible that we’ll see the contribution room increase to $7,000 due to the higher than expected inflation rate. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Dividend Reinvestment Plans (DRIP)
Recently AlexDividend asked the following question on Twitter
That logic makes a lot of sense to me but it definitely takes up more time and effort. For us, we set up all of our accounts to enroll in synthetic DRIP (buying full shares) whenever we’re eligible. It takes out any manual work involved. We drip additional shares whenever we’re eligible and get dividends deposited in our accounts when we’re ineligible to DRIP. It’s simple and works well for us. But since personal finance is personal, this approach may not work for everyone.
In July, we were able to drip the following stocks:
- 29 shares of AQN.TO
- 4 shares of BCE.TO
- 7 shares of BNS.TO
- 6 shares of CM.TO
- 1 share of CNQ.TO
- 1 share of CPX.TO
- 1 share of ERE.UN
- 1 share of KO
- 5 shares of POW.TO
- 1 share of RCI.B
- 2 shares of REI.UN
- 5 shares of SRU.UN
- 8 shares of T.TO
- 7 shares of TD.TO
- 3 shares of TRP.TO
- 1 share of VICI
By enrolling in DRIP, we accumulated 82 additional shares in July and reinvested $3,267.61 of our July dividend income. In other words, we were able to reinvest 72.2% of our July dividend income.
Thanks to DRIP we added $169.06 toward our annual dividend income.
Summary
With seven months down, we have received a total of $25,173.82 in dividend income. That’s an average of almost $3,600 per month! This is really amazing considering we averaged a little under $3,400 in our core expenses so far in 2022. We’re definitely on our way to eventually living off dividends in the near future.
Please note that core expenses do not include things like eating out, donations, vacations, or big purchases.
In 2021, after the same time period, we received $18,333.39 in dividend income. This means we’ve managed to increase our dividend income by $6,840.43 in a year’s time, or an increase of 37.3%!
To put the income received into perspective:
- Over half (58.6%) of the $25,173.82 is either tax-free or tax-deferred.
- After 212 days, our dividend portfolio generated $4.95 per hour or $118.74 per day.
- Assuming 31 work weeks, our dividend portfolio generated an equivalent of $20.30 per hour working rate. It’s nice to see that our portfolio is generating more than BC’s minimum wage of $15.65 per hour. Best of all, our dividend income is more tax efficient than working income.
With five months to go, I am pretty confident that we’ll crush our $36,000 dividend goal for 2022. There’s a pretty good chance we’ll end up with over $40,000 in dividends. Considering we received only $675.21 for the entire year of 2011, we have come a LONG way in the last 11 years.
Dear readers, how was your July dividend income?
Great month, Bob. Impressive. My dividend income of August came in at about 1,200 USD, but September will be better with approx. 2,400 USD. My current portfolio value is at about 600,000 USD. I keep buying stocks recently, but the total value does not go higher than 600k ♂️.. Anyways, always love your content and read every post. Cheers from Singapore, Noah
From Willy
I have been a DIY Canadian dividend drip investor since 2007. Mostly from TSX top 20. Dividends as of the end of July total $33,805. Portfolio 1.5M. Started at zero.
I very much enjoy your website but your garden puts me to shame!
That’s amazing. It’s always nice to hear from people ahead of us in terms of progress.
Thanks for your sharing, Bob.
If you have fresh capital of $100k, how would u allocate between the Cdn. vs. US stocks, 60/40;
70/30 …….
Secondly, which stocks preference would you put into your TFSA now: MSFT, Goog, ATD, or others
Thanks as usual!
To be honest we probably have been buying too much Canadian stocks lately. But since there’s only a limited amount of RRSP room, we kind of have to buy Canadian stocks (in non registered) as a result.
You can certainly buy us dividend stocks in tfsa just you can’t recover the withholding tax on dividends.
For TFSA I prefer Canadian stocks.
Tawcan you are rocking it of late! It really does help when you can dump 200k in a year. Your portfolio will explode to 4 million in no time.
My TFSA income in July is approaching $1300. I was expecting it to cross that line but it fell short. I did expect to have a few more dividend increases by this time. Hopefully by october ill smash the $1300 mark for my TFSA.
What I really appreciate about your investing style is your balance. It’s not all about how much income or how big of a nest egg you can create. You focus on having a good life now AND in the future.
Thank you.
We have to thank our relatively high savings rate. Certainly won’t be able to save over $100k every year.
Really jealous of the garden. It’s looking fantastic!
Jealous of the dividends too because that’s a very impressive haul for just one month. And some really impressive year over year growth considering the base you were already working off of.
We had strong July by our standards and crossed over $1k across all of our accounts which is great to see. Can’t wait to get the middle month of each quarter up over $1k though too so that every month whether we invest from savings or not we can invest $1k across the accounts. The snowball really feels like it’s starting to gain some momentum.
Thanks JC. Very appreciative and lucky we can save and invest regularly.
great garden and fantastic dividends.
I agree we should all be growing some of our own food.
tastes better for sure
cheers
Thank Rob.
Wow, you bought:
“194 shares of Manulife Financial
4 shares of BlackRock”
“About $7,000 was deployed for these two transactions. This also meant that since the beginning of 2022 we have purchased over $90,000 worth of dividend paying stocks.”
That’s A LOT of income to buy those – incredible.
Mark
Thanks Mark. We’ve been busy saving.
Hello Bob, pretty sure that kettlebell kept you sore afterwards!
Impressive progress but also curious as to why you chose to buy just BLK and MFC? Did you buy BlackRock given their recent partnership with Coinbase or were there any particular reasons?
We bought MFC and BLK a while ago. Definitely didn’t buy BLK due to the Cpinbase partnership.
Congrats on a great month and a fabulous dividend income Bob! You’re really growing it quickly!
Life gets a lot easier once the “basics” are taken care of with passive income! It’s been almost 7 years now, and I’m so glad we don’t have to keep running on the treadmill anymore!
Thanks Mr. Tako. Agreed that life gets easier once the basics are taken care of.
Starting waaay late (just turned 40) but better late then never $150 this month. Did a rebalancing of both my RRSP and my TFSA as I think between them I only owned like 4 dividend paying stocks. I now have around 15 with some REIT’s mixed in and turned on my DRIP which I had cancelled when I first started. Didn’t know about stop loss orders when I first started either so am in the hole big time on a few stocks but lots of lessons learned. Just opened a TFSA for my wife now too, only 10k and it’s a mix of DIR-UN, GOOGL, ABNB, GWO and RNW. It’s not all dividend stocks, but will be heavily weighted that way as I continue on. Enjoy reading your updates, Thanks
Nice better late than never right?
Hi Bob, I seem to remember that you have shared all the stock symbols you own in your portfolios but not sure where I saw that. Your dividend journey looks very impressive. I also want to understand if you can comment on the capital appreciation including the dividend income.
TIA
You can see our portfolio here
https://www.tawcan.com/dividends/
In terms of capital growth you can see here
https://www.tawcan.com/dividend-portfolio-beating-the-tsx/
Thanks Bob, its really appreciated!!
Hi Bod, always encouraging. Congrats on a record dividend month!
Thank you MK.
If you don’t mind saying, what is the portfolio value that brought you $4500 dividends this month?
Sorry we don’t share the exact value of the portfolio but at this point it’s well over 7 figures.
Oh those raspberries look so good! I like how your garden is flourishing. Its great that you can enjoy the produce and keep your food expenses down.
Your dividend income is flourishing as well. Congrats on a record dividend month! 😀
Thank you!