So close, we came so close! We almost made it to the magic number of an average dividend income of €1.000 / month (before taxes). Almost! But alas, it was not to be this year. Next year I bet you we will make it (if our dividend growth is any indication). Without further delay, here is our 2024 dividend overview!
Dividend Income
We saw pretty much continuous monthly records (ignoring the occasional special dividends) throughout 2024. Which is wonderful and very much motivational. It also means that the reinvesting of dividends is working and that monthly/quarterly dividends are increasing too. We love it when a plan comes together!
When you add all the monthly dividends up, you get the following 2024 overview. Unfortunately, as mention in the introduction, we just missed the €12.000 this year. That would be the magic €1.000/month on average. This was caused by the exchange rates, which has not been moving in our favor in 2024. Unfortunately, we also had one dividend cut this year, which did not help either but even without the cut we would not have made it due to exchange rates. I bet 2025 will be different thou! In other good news, our year-over-year (YOY) dividend payments increased by 10,0%. In it’s original currency (CAD) it even increased by 11,4%! Not bad at all.
See the next section of the YOY growth in CAD, which is even prettier!
History and organic growth
This dividend portfolio is (currently) our self-managed actual pension plan (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 (likely when we are about 60-67). This is due to the withholding and income tax to be paid once we withdraw money from these accounts. With no other income, it is very tax efficient to withdraw from this portfolio.
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 and all dividends were 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 2024 it looked like this:
We shrunk our Real Estate and Consumer Spending parts of the portfolio and increased positions in Energy and the VDY.TO ETF during 2024. Plan is to continue dropping the real estate holdings and redistributing the funds elsewhere. But we would like to see some positive numbers before we do. In the mean time the dividend yields are not too bad. It’s just that these REITs don’t always grow well compared to some other positions we have. Hence the move to the VDY.TO ETF (yes, I’m being lazy here).
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:
Due to some selling and buying, we are now again under 10.000 shares, but that should change again in 2025 (still have a bit of cash to utilize). Not that it really matters, but it just looks cool.
How’s your dividend portfolio doing did you have a good 2024 too?
Close enough! This will be the year