Before diving into the 2023 Dividend Totals, I’d like to thank all the 25-ish people that showed up during the last FIRE meetup in Leiderdorp! I had a blast, I hope you did too. We even got to the point that the last 6 of us pretty much got kicked out of the La Place as it was about 30min past closing :-). Plan is do do it again, likely around April. Location and date are to be confirmed. Keep you posted!
Anyhow, what did our dividend growth share do in 2023? Here is a quick overview.
Dividend Income
Due to work, time and life limitations I was not able to do an dividend update since May last year. Whoops. But I’m happy to show that our dividends kept on flowing in. Most months beat the totals from the year before (with a few exceptions, including one due to a special dividends in 2022).
Add all this up and you get this yearly overview (in Euro’s). As you can see, we actually received a bit less than the previous year. How come? Exchange rates! As our dividend portfolio consists only of Canadian stocks, and I report in Euro’s, the exchange rate can have a big impact (in two directions). But close to €11k a year in dividends is not bad. Curious when we are going to hit the magic number of €1.000 per month on average!
See the next section of the year of year growth in CAD, which is much better!
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. At the end of 2023 it looked like this:
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? Did you close out 2023 with increases?