Before reviewing the Q3 2024 Dividend Update, quick reminder that there will be another FIRE meetup on October 20th in Leiderdorp. Hope to see you all there of course!
It’s been an entertaining 6 months since the last dividend update. I had actually been keeping track, but could find the time to make a post about it. There has been two attempts to un-fire ourselves in the mean time. One in Paris, and one in France and 5 neighboring countries. But both failed. I became a public servant, which is entertaining to say the least. One major take-away there, a 4-day work week with the Wednesday off is bloody fantastic. Highly recommended to anyone who can afford it.
Anyhow, while we were hard at work and having fun, our dividend shares kept working very hard for us too!
Dividend Income
We saw continuous monthly records (ignoring the occasional special dividends) the past 6 months. Which is a good sign, as that means that the reinvesting of dividends is working and that monthly/quarterly dividends are increasing too. So the plan is still working 🙂
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. However, the exchange rate has not been moving in our favor the last few months. Curious to see if we are going to make it.
See the next section of the year of year growth in CAD, which is prettier 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 (funds were only 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 Q3 2024 it looked like this:
Since Q1 2024 we lost some relative position in energy and gained in Financial Services and Utilities. The remainder was maintained 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:
One cool thing to note, is that we actually surpassed 10.000 shares in the portfolio! We are actually rapidly going towards 11.000. But it’s not entirely fair, as we had a stock-split (CNQ) which added well over 500 shares.
How’s your dividend portfolio doing?