It’s October and that means we are now officially in the final quarter of 2018! Where did the time go? In late September the weather started to turn in Vancouver. We started having a number of VERY rainy days where it just poured. One day, we woke up noticing that part of our gutter was plugged. Water was just pouring down from the gutter onto our patio. I had to go outside to take out the debris in the gutter to prevent a major flooding in our yard. In less than 5 minutes, I was completely soaked.
Fortunately, we also had a few very nice warm sunny days. I’m hopeful that we will continue to get some crisp, cold, sunny fall days in October weather. I love these sunny fall days.
When it comes to our garden, Mrs. T has been busy cleaning up all the different plants and getting ready for next year. She moved the strawberry plants to another section of the garden (you’re supposed to rotate the plants every 2nd year) and removed some of the kale plants. I’m sure the both of us and the kids will be spending quite a bit of time planting in the spring.
September Dividend Income
In September we received dividends from the following companies:
- Brookfield Renewable (BEP.UN)
- Canadian National Railway (CNR.TO)
- ConocoPhillips (COP)
- Costco (COST)
- Canadian Tire (CTC.A)
- Canadian Utilities (CU.TO)
- Chevron (CVX)
- Dream Office REIT (D.UN)
- Dream Global REIT (DRG.UN)
- Dream Industrial REIT (DIR.UN)
- Enbridge (ENB.TO)
- Enbridge Income Trust (ENF.TO)
- Evertz Technologies (ET.TO)
- Fortis (FTS.TO)
- Hydro One (H.TO)
- High Liner Foods( HLF.TO)
- H&R REIT (HR.UN)
- Intact Financial (IFC.TO)
- Intel (INTC)
- Inter Pipeline (IPL.TO)
- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)
- KEG Income Trust (KEG.UN)
- Magellan Aerospace Corp (MAL.TO)
- McDonald’s (MCD)
- Manulife Financial (MFC.TO)
- Magna International (MG.TO)
- MCAN Mortgage Corp (MKP.TO)
- Metro (MRU.TO)
- Prairiesky Royalty (PSK.TO)
- Qualcomm (QCOM)
- RioCan (REI.UN)
- Saputo (SAP.TO)
- SmartCentres REIT (SRU.UN)
- Suncor (SU.TO)
- Target (TGT)
- Unilever plc (UL)
- Visa (V)
- WestJet (WJA.TO)
- Waste Management (WM)
- Wal-Mart (WMT)
- Exco Technologies (XTC.TO)
Phew, that’s quite a list! It’s hard to believe that we received 41 paycheques in September. What’s even harder to believe is the 41 paycheques totalled up to $1,696.94!
Yup, a new all-time monthly dividend income record! I love seeing the chart and seeing the candlestick going higher and higher! However, it’s too bad we were only $3.06 away from the $1,700 milestone. Oh well, maybe we’ll break this milestone in December?
Out of the $1,696.94 received, $326.05 was in USD and $1370.89 was in CAD. Or about a 20-80 split. If you are a long time reader to our monthly dividend income reports, you know that we use a 1 to 1 currency rate approach. We do not convert dividends received in USD to CAD. We are ignoring the exchange rate to keep the math simple. This is our way to avoid fluctuations in dividend income over time due to changes in the exchange rate.
The top 5 dividend payouts in Sept 2018 came from Manulife, Intact Financial, Enbridge, Suncor, and Chevron (not in order). Dividend payouts from these 5 companies accounted for 44.23% of our Sept dividend income, or $750.59.
Given that we received 41 paycheques, I was a little bit surprised that these 5 companies accounted for such a high percentage of our Sept dividend income. Perhaps we aren’t as income diversified as I thought we are?
Dividend Income Breakdown
We hold our dividend stocks in taxable accounts, RRSPs, and TFSAs. Every year, we maximize tax-advantaged accounts first before investing in taxable accounts.
For the Sept 2018 dividend income, here’s the breakdown of the different accounts:
- Taxable: $481.73 or 28.4%
- RRSPs: $679.88 or 40.1%
- TFSAs: $535.33 or 31.5%
We only hold Canadian eligible dividend stocks in our taxable accounts so we can get the maximum amount of dividend tax credit.
Dividend Growth
Compared to Sept 2017, we saw a respectable YOY growth of 24.41%! That’s the second highest YOY growth number so far in 2018. Very impressive! In 2017 we only received over $1,300 in monthly dividend income once. This year, $1,300 in monthly dividend income is considered as an “off-month.” We have crossed the $1,400, $1,500, and $1,600 marks all in the same year. It is amazing to look back and see how far we have come.
After 9 months, we are now sitting at an average of 19.5% YOY compared to 2017. If we continue to hold this average, that means we’d end up with $17,727.08 in dividend income for 2018. Not a shabby number at all.
Dividend Increases
In Sept a number of stocks that we hold in our dividend portfolio announced dividend payout increase:
- Verizon raised its dividend by 2.12% to $0.6025 per share.
- McDonald’s raised its dividend by 14.85% to $1.16 per share.
All these dividend increases meant an overall annual dividend increase of $28.35. It’s not a big number but every $1 of organic dividend increase means we don’t have to add $33.34 of fresh capital (at 3% yield). In other words, every single dollar counts!
Dividend Stock Transactions
In September we made a minor dividend stock transaction. We purchased 110 shares of Canadian Utilities. This was mostly to average down our cost basis. The entire Canadian utility sector has faced headwind in 2018. Since we all need electricities and natural gas to live in Canada, it made sense to me to add some more shares of CU while the price is down.
This purchase added $173.05 in our forward annual dividend income.
Conclusion
So far in 2018, we have received a total of $13,709.16 in dividend income. At $40 per hour ($83,200 annual salary), that means we have saved ourselves 342.7 hours worth of work, or 42.8 days, or almost 9 weeks. That’s 17.3% of the year!
For the most part, we aren’t paying too much attention to our dividend portfolio on a daily basis. We are leaving it on auto-pilot by DRIPing when we can and purchasing more shares on existing positions. We do, however, review our dividend portfolio and run through our dividend scorecard to see whether we need to make any changes. Mrs. T and I are thankful that our dividend portfolio is working hard and generating passive income for us, so we can spend time on something else.
Dear readers, how was your September dividend income?
Love your garden and the fact that the kidoes will work with you in it, great family bonding! Great job on the dividends, hopefully you’ll hit the $1700 mark shortly! Glad I found ya!
Thank you Jim. 🙂
Impressive number:) Love to see the progress.
I almost reached $10K YTD this month and should end the year at $13K. It doesn’t include my group RRSP where a large chunk of my money resides (all in target fund for now).
Cheers
Hi Caroline,
That’s a very impressive number considering you aren’t including RRSP portion. Congrats.
I am endlessly blown away by your dividend reports Bob. You have worked extremely hard at this and hopefully soon you will be at a point of Financial Independence that you can make the working decisions you feel best suit your family and your heart. I am already impatient for the post you write in January 2019 recapping all of 2018’s performance.
Haha Chris, you’ll have to wait for a few more months for a 2018 recap. 🙂
Hi,
I was wondering if you might divulge the size of your portfolios, and how much you have in registered vs non-registered accounts?
Thanks!
Hi Richard,
That’s a good question but we don’t share our portfolio size and the specific breakdowns. Want to keep it that way for privacy reasons.
haha thats just awesome Bob!
congrats on the new record and “tiny” buy lol.
100 cu stocks is still a sweet buy! Always nice seeing your top 5 dividend payers each month from a canadian perspective
keep it up
cheers
Haha good one on the “tiny” buy. I guess it’s tiny from our point of view. 🙂
There are a number of impressive accomplishments—setting new records, overall consistency on a month to month basis, monthly growth in 2018 compared to prior year, and a great number of companies paying you this month.
I had a record in September as well when including my index fund dividends, but my portfolio of DGI stocks still has a long way to go.
Hi DivvyDad,
Thank you. 2018 has been a great year for us when it comes to dividend income growth. Very pleased with our progress. Congrats on having a record in September. 🙂
Hey Bob! I really like your dividend growth! Still growing at an average 20% per year. That’s hard to do with your portfolio size! Cheers to #RoadTo2K
Thank you Dividend Income Stocks. We’ve been adding quite a bit of new capital so far this year, and that really shows in the dividend growth.
Dang Bob, 41 paychecks! That’s just plain awesome, almost as awesome as that garden of yours 🙂
Thanks Mr. Robot.
The growth in height of the green 2018 candlesticks are impressive. The income that you’re earning from the dividends is impressive. And I’m also impressed by your backyard garden too!!!
Thank you Dr. McFrugal, we are surprising ourselves with the 2018 growth too. 🙂
Bob – it seems like I’m constantly reading the phrase “All time high” when I read your articles each month. I love coming and reading about your progress and growth. It is impressive how consistent your dividend income is from month to month. You have seemed to avoid the peaks and valleys that many of us face since most companies payout in the later portion of the quarter. You continue to inspire me each month. It has been a little since I have commented, I know. But I’m looking forward to changing that. Congrats again!!
Bert
Haha Bert, breaking all-time high seems to be the trend for this year. Somehow our monthly dividend income variance is pretty smooth, not sure what exactly happened. I guess we have a good mix of companies with monthly payments and quarterly payments.
Amazing 4-digit month Tawcan! I love quarter ending months! I am getting closer to cracking the 4-digit mark for a month, perhaps in December it will happen. Anyways, keep up the amazing work! Very impressive! 🙂
That’s great you’re getting closer to cracking the 4-digit mark for a month. Keep it up!
How impressive – it’ll look all the more smarter with the possibility of a slow economy in a year or two. Congrats on the new record. I averaged a miserly $320 this year.
Thank you gofi. Don’t feel too bad about $320, we were like that only a few years ago.
Awesome job for the month of September. It’s always amazing to see so many small individual checks total to such an impressive amount. Keep up the good work and inspiring us all.
Thank you DivHut, we are very happy with our September dividend income. So amazing that our money is working hard for us so we don’t have to.
Nice work! The compounding effect of reinvesting your dividends along with new capital each year is quite astounding. Looks like you’re on pace to double last year’s total in the next 3-4 years?! Crazy.
Thank you, it would be awesome if we can double our dividend income in the next 3-4 years. 🙂
Love the way you converted total dividends received to date into hours of work. What a great way to look at investing and highlighting the power of dividends. Bravo, my friend.
Thank you Mr. Groovy. I like the quantitative breakdown myself too.
i never get calculate ours from month to month but we were near 8k for 9 months. i estimated dividends on our index funds (they don’t show up as payouts in the statements and must be rolled into the share prices) and we would be around 18k for the year if you count those. you gotta love those 14% raises like mcdonald’s! you’re getting it rolling now, bob.
Thank you freddy smidlap. It’s pretty impressive that you guys would be around $18k for the year if you count index fund distributions, that’s a lot of money, that’s for sure!
Fantastic stuff! Nearly $14k so far this year and just shy of $1,700 for the month. What’s really cool to see is that sometime in October you’ll have surpassed your 2017 total. That’s 2+ months ahead of schedule.
Thank you JC. Yup, it’s been pretty impressive to look at our dividend income history and see how far we have come over the years. Hopefully we’ll crack $18k for 2018.
Nice dividend growth Bob! I really wish I was seeing 20% growth these days. Our September dividend income broke $10k but the growth rate on that is well under 10% these days.
Thank you Mr. Tako. As we talked many times before, it’s certainly harder and harder to have high growth rate once you have a sizable dividend income like you. $10k a month would be a great number to hit for us. 🙂
You guys are killing it with the dividend income. Congrats! The growth is incredible.
Our dividend income stagnated in recent years. I haven’t added new money lately. 🙁
I’ve been adding to real estate crowdfunding instead. I’ll get back to dividend stocks next year.
Thank you Joe. We haven’t done any real estate crowdfunding, I’m not sure if it’s even possible here in Canada. Maybe that’s something to look into.
Looking forward to you getting back to dividend stocks next year.
Well done, I am still trying to crack $500 a month.
Thank you John. Keep it up with your dividend income, I’m sure you’ll crack $500 a month soon.
Another month like clockwork for you eh? Love seeing those graphs, they just keep going up! Isn’t that pure magic….. I mean dedication!
It is like black magic lol! 🙂
Awesome Bob, great to see a new all time high. The snowball is growing and doing its job.
Thank you Wealthy Content, the snowball is definitely getting bigger and bigger. 🙂