Welcome to our Findependence Portfolio update. This is the most important part of our entire journey as its these very funds that will unlike financial independence and allow us to retire earlier than we ever thought possible!
As you look through the holdings you will notice that there are two distinct holding types here:
1) Canadian dividend growth stocks
2) Low cost commission free ETF’s
The goal with these accounts is simple, we want to be able to live our best life using nothing but our investment income. In order to accomplish this there are a couple very simple ideologies we follow:
1) The first is that we believe in order to preserve our nest egg as best we can, we need to take advantage of the Canadian Tax benefits associated with investing in Canadian dividend payers. In case you’re unaware, Canadian dividends in specific are paid out after the company has been taxed on these earnings and, therefore; the end receiver of said dividend will have to pay very little (in a lot of cases 0%) taxes on the dividends received. If you’re like me I had to read, and re-read what I was seeing online before I actually became convinced this was a real thing!
2) The second is that we believe you must be diversified both between sectors in the market but also by country, and we would love to have at least a 10% position in global equities. Now due to the fact that it is hard to remain on top of all markets world wide, we will be casting a wide net and using low cost ETF’s to gain exposure to Europe as well as Emerging Markets.
New Purchases!
Only a few new purchases to report since our last update and those are as follows:
Buys in His TFSA:
Bought 24 shares CIBC (CM) @ $103.85/share
Bought 78 shares Interpipeline (IPL) @ $20.38/share
Bought 85 shares Artis Reit (AX.UN) @ $11.81/share
Bought 20 shares CIBC (CM) @ $99.32/share
Buys in His RRSP:
Bought 40 shares Brookfield Property Partners (BPY.UN) @ $24.81/share
Bought 59 shares AT&T (T) @ $32.43/share
Bought 90 shares NFI group (NFI) @ $37.81/share
Bought 78 shares Bell (BCE) @ $59.88/share
Bought 97 shares Legget & Platt (LEG) @ $38.37/share
Buys in Her RRSP:
Bought 230 shares Choice Properties (CHP.UN) @ $13.89/share
All numbers in the tables below are accurate as of August 17, 2019
For this update, we’ll be converting both the “his” and “her” portfolios over to the spreadsheet template as we fill this gives a lot more insight into our portfolios than just some names of companies we own.
For starters here’s a combination of the “his” RRSP and TFSA accounts:
As you can see there’s $101,577.74 sitting in these accounts – which is no small sum of money, but the real progress we’re tracking isn’t in the value of the shares so much as it is in that bright green column titled “Annual Income”. The annual income is where this portfolio is going to unlock our financial freedom. As you can see these accounts are over 5k right now and yielding 5.09% (5.17% yield on cost – or our dollars invested). These values are up from 4.76% and 4.90% that they were at respectively in our June update of the portfolios.
The next shows Mrs.FIC’s portfolio, she has not been investing for nearly as long and is still very much in the learning stages (as we all are really) but she is still making tremendous progress and it’s been awesome seeing how excited she gets to make new deposits, purchase more shares and track her own dividend progress.
She’s up to $16,619.39 in her combined accounts with a yield of 5.05% and an amazing yield on cost of 5.34%!
While these yields may seem a little high to some who deem themselves dividend “growth” investors, this is true. Most of these companies have great histories of dividend growth but we do sprinkle in some high yielders – mainly in the REIT sector to bring our overall portfolio yield up to our target of ~5%.
And there you have it, the updated version of our Findependence Portfolios. We’re always looking to hear people’s opinions on stocks, portfolio diversification and all things investing and personal finance related so if you have any questions or feedback leave it below!
Thanks,
FIC.