May is typically one of the slower months of the year from a dividend perspective. But we still received a total of €556 in dividends for the month. No complaining here! Now that we also sold a lot of our real estate, one of the considerations is to start buying a few more dividend generating shares. Anyhow, here is the May 2023 dividend update.
Dividend Income
No major changes or dividend modification this month. Nice and boring, but again more dividends than the year before! We reached our $1000 threshold again in cash, and bought some BCE (Bell) shares. We like to DRIP our shares to limit costs for buying new shares, and we need a few more BCE shares before that happens.
Add all this up and you get this yearly overview (in Euro’s):
The DRIP’s (Dividend ReInvestment Plan = dividends are reinvested, sometimes with a discount to the share price and no fees for the conversion) keep going well, which should help a lot in continuing the dividend income growth.
History and organic growth
This dividend portfolio is (currently) our self-managed actual pension (all shares are held in Registered Retirement Savings Plans (RRSP’s) in Canada). So, it better improve on a yearly basis otherwise we are screwing future (retired) selves. Albeit we can access this money before age 65, we don’t want to touch this until we have very little Box 1 income.
When you take out the European shares we shortly held back in 2016/2017 (leaving Canadian shares only) and take away the Exchange rate fluctuation, you get this organic growth (only funds added in 2015 – reinvested since):
Want to see more of these pretty graphs, have a look at what Bob did! That’s just pure Dividend porn.
Sector distribution
We have a fairly conservative portfolio with many boring companies. When you plot them in a pie chart, you get this:
We are still happy with this distribution, but there are definitely changes expected in the future. Primarily depending on whether we all get serious with our carbon emissions. It is perhaps not a bad idea to take some profit from the energy sector and increase holdings in the financial sector and diversify more, but we will keep going for now as is. We won’t increase real estate any time soon, due to increasing interest rates and associated risks. Utilities we will likely keep as is.
Dividend Portfolio Details
As noted earlier, our dividend portfolio is held in two tax deferred accounts in Canada (RRSP’s). The current value (before any withholding taxes) and stock overview is provided below:
How’s your dividend portfolio doing?