Throughout these updates we will go over the previous month’s dividend income, as well as our rolling 12 month projected dividend income and our progress towards our goal of having $50,000 in annual passive income. (More on our goals and the tax advantages of Canadian dividends in future posts). For reference, I received my first ever dividend payment in December 2017, and I immediately realized that they needed to be a prominent part of my any investment strategy.
What a month! June was an incredibly successful dividend month for us as we managed to take home $715.92 in cold hard cash. Now obviously the March, June, September, December months are our strongest but even still that’s a 299% gain over June 2018. I had an interesting thought while writing this just now, and that’s that I couldn’t even tell you if my account was up or down for the month of June off hand and that’s coming from someone who checks their accounts nearly daily – I guess that’s why I chose dividend investing, as long as I get my paychecks all month the surrounding noise doesn’t really matter.
Much like May was ahead leaps and bounds from 2018’s May, in June this $715.92 dwarfed the $179.32 from June 2018 and I sure hope this will be a sign of things to come.
Let’s have a look at how these funds were broken down by account type:
While these numbers won’t retire us by any means, it is interesting to think that these dividends would cover the following bills for this month: 2 Cell phones, Heat/Electricity, Water, Cable/Wifi and we’d even have some left over to fuel up our cars. The best part? Neither one of us had to do a single thing to earn this income.
On a forward looking basis we are oh so close to the next milestone of $500 per month in passive income. We like to chop it down into 100’s so that it’s a large enough value to be meaningful but we’re also able to hit these milestones regularly enough to keep us positive and motivated. It’s working:
The main goal for the remainder of 2019 is to get this total projected income to about the $10,000 mark. While that would be great, we also don’t want to get caught up with the goal too intently, as it would likely lead us to chase high yields unnecessarily and lose some of the qualities that have made our portfolios successful to date. While we do love buying a dip and locking in a nice high yield we don’t want to be chasing MLP’s and REIT’s for instance if they lack the fundamentals that we look for but have say an 8% dividend yield. And we also don’t want to forego opportunities like we felt buying into Apple was at $180 even though the yield was only in the upper 1%’s at the time (but growing).
Here’s a look at what we’ve done year-to-date vs 2018:
Something that readers may immediately notice is that our pay isn’t exactly equal across all months and we have been asked previously if this is an issue to us. Simply put- no. And the reason for this is simple, we pay attention to our portfolios as well as our spending and I don’t see any point in time where it will actually make a difference to us if we get paid evenly or have to plan ahead and save some funds when we get a large lump sum in one month that has to be stretched to the next months expenses. We even know some retirees who take a single payment out of their portfolio January of every year and live the entire year off of that one lump sum so we know that it’s doable as long as you’re aware of your situation.
Thanks for the read, hope you found this post helpful and as always if you have any questions or comments please feel free to drop them below and we’ll be sure to get back to you. You can also look to contact us on our Instagram page: FindependenceCanada, we’re always looking to interact with fellow investors or those looking to begin investing!