Dividend Income – November 2016 Update

Can you believe it was only last month when Donald Trump won the US presidential election? For some reason, I feel like the presidential result happened years ago. Weird eh? Since the presidential election, we have seen worldwide stock exchanges rallying. Will we have another 4 years of bull market? I guess we will have to wait and see.

To be honest, I don’t like to speculate or predict how the stock market would perform. In fact, I have rarely kept up with financial news. The other day my brother asked me about OPEC’s recent meeting decision over oil production and I simply replied “I think OPEC decided to cut oil production…but I could be wrong.” Rather than keeping up with all the daily news and market noises, I just keep executing our investing strategy – adding dividend paying stocks when they are on sale and collecting dividend income each month. My keep-it-simple investing strategy reminded me a debate that Mark from My Own Advisor and I had with another blogger on the merits of dividend stock investment at the 2016 Canadian Personal Finance Conference after party. Although all three of us believed in passive index ETFs investing and agreed that index ETFs offered more diversification (especially when it comes to international stocks), we had different views on dividend investing. Mark and I both liked the idea of relying on dividend income as the main source of retirement income rather than selling stocks. When you selling stock in retirement, you’re at the mercy of the market. Imagine if you retired in 2001 during the internet bubble or 2008 during the financial crisis and you were forced to sell part of your portfolio to sustain your expenses. That would have been tough to have to sell despite your portfolio value dropping 40% or more! Therefore, I will take secured dividend income over the need to sell stocks at a not-so-desirable price. Relying on dividend income doesn’t necessary mean we will never sell our dividend stocks. It simply means we can delay this process by using dividend income first.

Anyway, let’s take a look at our November 2016 dividend income.

November Dividend Income

In November we received dividend income from the following companies:

Apple (AAPL)
Pure Industrial REIT (AAR.UN)
Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO)
Corus Entertainment (CJR.B)
Dream Office REIT (D.UN)
Dream Global REIT (DRG.UN)
Dream Industrial REIT (DIR.UN)
Emera (EMA.TO)
General Mills (GIS)
H&R REIT (HR.UN)
Inter Pipeline (IPL.TO)
KEG Income Trust (KEG.UN)
Kinder Morgan (KMI)
National Bank (NA.TO)
Omega Healthcare (OHI)
Procter & Gamble (PG)
Potash (POT.TO)
Prairiesky Royalty (PSK.TO)
RioCan REIT (REI.UN)
Royal Bank (RY.TO)
AT&T (T)
Verizon (VZ)

In total we received $1,077.06 in dividend income in November 2016 from 22 different companies. We received a total of $271.61 in USD and $805.45 in CDN. It’s nice to see that we have received more dividend income in US currency than last month. Please note, we use a 1 to 1 currency rate approach, so we do not convert the dividends received in US dollar into Canadian currency. Reason for doing this is to keep the math simple and avoid fluctuations in dividend income over time due to changes in the exchange rate.

The top 5 payouts were Royal Bank, National Bank, Bank of Montreal, Omega Healthcare, and Procter & Gamble. The top 5 payouts correspond to 62.6% of our November dividend income.

dividend-income-nov-2016-table

Dividend Income Growth

Compared to November 2015, we saw a 16.7% YOY increase. Certainly not one of the best YOY performance months in 2016 but still quite respectable growth considering we received over $900 in dividend income last November.

dividend-growth-yoy-breakdown

If you are wondering, our dividend growth is contributed by three things – investing fresh capital, purchasing of additional shares through dividend reinvesting plan (DRIP), and individual dividend stock’s organic dividend growth each year. We believe in utilizing the power of all three of these factor to grow our dividend income exponentially.

As you can see from the table above, our YOY increase average dropped from 23.19% to 22.61%. At above 22% YOY average is still quite reputable, given we received an average of over $850 in dividend income each month in 2015. Considering our December 2015 dividend income was almost $1,000 and we haven’t made any purchases in a few months, I am guesstimating that our YOY percentage growth for December to be around 15% range. This would put us on a ~21% YOY increase for the entire year of 2016.

Looking at the chart below it’s comforting to see how much progress we have made in the last 3 years. In 2016, we have more than doubled our monthly dividend income compared to 2013 monthly dividend income. I would be very pleased if we can double our dividend income in another 3 years (it is pushing it to double again in 2 years? We’ll see!).

dividend-income-nov-2016-chart

Dividend Increases

In November a number of companies that we own in our dividend portfolio announced dividend increases:

  • Starbucks Corp (SBUX) raised its dividend by 25% to $0.25 per share
  • Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ) raised its dividend by 8.7% to $0.25 per share

I am very happy with these dividend increases because it means we will get paid $14.96 more moving forward. Getting a raise without having to go through a performance review? Sign me up!

Conclusion & Moving Forward

So far in 2016 we have received $11,373.84 in dividend income. To put this to perspective, it means at a $20 per hour wage ($41.6k per year), we have saved ourselves over 71 working days, or 14 weeks. Even at $100k annual salary ($48.08 per hour), we have saved ourselves almost 30 working days, or 6 weeks. Either way, our dividend portfolio has been working hard for us instead us having to physically work to generate income. I will always say yes to any forms of passive income.

Dear readers, how was your November dividend income?

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40 thoughts on “Dividend Income – November 2016 Update”

  1. Awesome blog buddy, I aim to reach 1k a month dividends as quick as possible, at $330 per month right now. It’s great to see how much growth you get year over year, makes the slow process of growing dividends seem a little faster.
    Good Luck

    Reply
  2. You have truly cemented a $1k a month income Tawcan, good job to you and your family by making this happen!

    I agree with your reasoning over ETFs, that’s how we will be approaching it – but we’re a long way off yet.

    Double digit growth is wonderful considering how big your portfolio already is, nice job 🙂

    Tristan

    Reply
  3. Hey Tawcan.
    Another awesome month of dividend income! keep that up!
    my november was nice too. I earned 1600 euro in combined income through the stock exchange, but only 120€ or something like that were dividends.

    thanks for sharing!
    best regards
    Chri

    Reply
  4. Tawcan –

    Just sick I tell you! Awesome 16%+ growth, nothing to be down about, that is huge! I didn’t hit double digit growth this month, but we’ll see if I can make magic happen here in December, I am expecting a big one on my end for sure. And it looks like you’ll also have a nice dividend party as well. Keep it going my friend, keep playing.

    -Lanny

    Reply
  5. Hi Tawcan,

    over 1000 USD per month is just amazing. I am currently averaging about 60 USD per month. So still a long way to go for me. But your progress is very motivational :).

    Cheers

    Reply
  6. great month! I am not quite there yet but I am starting to steamroll a bit. Your totals are great and the YOY is fantastic. Congrats on another solid month!
    -Brian

    Reply
  7. Awesome month!! I love the graph you have showing the last 6 years or so broken down monthly. It’s amazing that last year you didn’t cross the 1k point once but this year you have hammered across it all but twice. Impressive!!

    Reply
  8. I love that dividend income graph and hope that mine will look similar after 5 years (not those high values though!) It must be a fantastic feeling knowing that you’ll be bringing in £1k every month next year! Well done!

    Reply
  9. Tawcan, you crushed it once again. Congrats!

    I imagine your YoY growth will become harder and harder to maintain. Anything over ~20 and you really get into the benefits of exponential growth, as I’m sure you are aware. And I’m impressed by your six years of data. I can’t wait to have that much to report/analyze on my blog. Final point – if you can double again in two years, I think we all need to start giving you our money to invest ;). Take care,

    Reply
    • You’re right about the YOY growth. I stated a few times that the YOY growth rate will start to decrease as our dividend income becomes larger.

      It’s very cool to see the six year data and see how much far we’ve come.

      Reply
  10. I share your investing philosophy Tawcan. I just focus on cash flow and tend to ignore current stock prices but you need to pay attention to your portfolio in case things change and there could be a potential dividend cut like at Potash. You have to just love those Canadian banks they are just like the government but instead of increasing taxes they just raise service charges.

    Reply
  11. The “keep-it-simple investing strategy” is my way of thinking too. Tuning out the daily financial noise is really important if you plan on being a long term investor. Awesome total for the month of November coupled with a very healthy year over year growth rate. Look forward to seeing the final 2016 total. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  12. I like your way of looking at incoming dividends as days of work saved. That approach is very motivating. Excellent job on your investments!

    Reply
  13. Awesome work, Tawcan! Looks like the diverse collection of dividend payers is netting fairly consistent monthly dividends, which is great. I bet next year you’ll be well over $1000 for each month. I hope to get there someday.

    Scott

    Reply
  14. Hi Tawcan,

    Excellent work! It must be so gratifying to see your dividend income increase at such a fantastic rate! Though I’d like to know how much of that is contributed to additional money that you’ve placed in vs. the actual increase in dividend. Care to share?

    Reply

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