Before reviewing the Q1 2024 Dividend Update, quick reminder that there will be a FIRE meetup on April 20th near Utrecht. Hope to see you all there of course!
Life has been eventful lately, and the money pit is very much improving at the moment. Albeit we are doing really well, it doesn’t look like we will be completely finished before I attempt life as a public servant. Fortunately, the new employer has a good work life balance scheme 🙂 So, I’m fairly confident that we will be able to finish the remaining works before the next winter season (works primarily include isolation and glass placement, and some preparations for the AirBnB rentals this summer, more to follow in this).
Anyhow, while we were hard at work, our dividend shares worked very hard for us too! Which is great, a quick overview.
Dividend Income
Q1 2024 was off to a very good start. We started off with an all-time high monthly dividend. Only to beat that again in March due to a double dividend payment of VDY. I could not find out quickly what was behind the two payments in March, but it looks great on paper!

When you add all the monthly dividends up, you get the following YTD overview. Based on current progress, we might actually hit €12.000 this year! That would be the magic €1.000/month on average. Curious to see if we are going to make this (as it is also heavily dependent on the exchange rate).

See the next section of the year of year growth in CAD, which is even 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 Q1 2024 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:

One cool thing to note, is that we are rapidly heading to 10.000 total shares in the portfolio!
How’s your dividend portfolio doing?