January 2023 Dividend Income

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

Welcome to my first post in 2023 everyone, I hope your year is off to a great start. For me I would say January was a pretty good month. With work our union finally came to an agreement with our local employer so back pay will be heading my way soon. Not sure whether to invest that money or put it towards what I owe on my car to help pay it off quicker. On the investing side of things I maxed out my Tax Free Savings Account contribution room ($6,500) so I made a bunch of purchases in that account which I will share later. In regards to my RRSP account I actually sold one stock and the one ETF I held. Everything wasn’t all positive unfortunately, earlier in January Algonquin Power & Utilities announced a 40% cut to their dividend.

I received payments from eight stocks and one ETF and received a total of $718.37 this is an increase of 20% compared to last January. Here is the income per account:

• RRSP $404.49
• TFSA $313.88

If you’re new to my site my TFSA has all Canadian stocks and my RRSP is made up of two Canadian stocks and the rest US stocks. That being said the majority of the dividend income in my RRSP is in US dollars. For simplicity of the site I just mark all the income as Canadian.

Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP)

	2022	2023
Altria Group	$127.80	$143.41
Algonquin Power & Utilities	$86.32	$133.41
iShares Core MSCI All Country ex Canada (XAW)	$92.12	$86.60
Merck & Co.	$37.95	$41.07
Total	$344.19	$404.49

Saw a nice increase in income this month this was due to dividend increases and dripping new shares last year. Next year my income will be lower in this account due to the dividend cut announced by Algonquin and another change I made to my portfolio.

Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA)

	2022	2023
BCE	$75.40	$93.38
Telus	$77.27	$86.39
TC Energy	$58.83	$71.76
Go Easy	$20.46	$32.75
Aecon	$22.93	$29.60
Total	$254.89	$313.88

Dividend raises from all of these stocks and dripping new shares helped propel me to over $300 this month let’s see if I can hit $400 next year 🙂

Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRIP)

	# Of Shares	Forward Income
Telus	3.248	$4.56
Altria Group	3.112	$11.70
Aecon	3	$2.10
BCE	1.478	$5.44
TC Energy	1.272	$4.58
Go Easy	0.283	$0.75
Total	12.763	$30.15

Solid start to the year in the DRIP department, I would have had higher numbers but I have decided to stop dripping new shares of Algonquin Power and will just take the cash.

Month to Month Dividends

Dividends Received Per Year

Trying to see if I can hit over $10,000 this year.

2023 Dividend Goal

Dividend goal this year is $10,500

Dividend Increase

Received one raise this month this came from Canadian National Railway. They announced an 8% increase which will increase their quarterly payment to $0.79 per share up from $0.7325

Dividend Cut

Unfortunately I did receive a dividend cut at the start of the year from Algonquin Power & Utilities. The cut was 40% and will lower my dividend income this year by $159.35 Upon hearing this news I decided to stop dripping shares of this company when they paid their dividends and put the the money into a new stock. Looking at my portfolio I have quite a few utilities stocks and will look to sell Algonquin, that being said I don’t plan on selling right away as I think the share price will recover (Up 12% so far this year). So with the Algonquin dividend I decided to add another Canadian bank to the portfolio and that is National Bank. When I make the decision to see Algonquin I will put the money into the bank.

Stock Purchases

Made a lot of purchases this month, here they are:

• Emera 29.206 shares
• Fortis 15 shares
• TC Energy 15 shares
• Telus 26.905 shares
• Equitable Bank 10 shares
• BCE 10 shares
• Bank of Montreal 9.897 shares
• Alimentation Couche-Tard 1 share
• Union Pacific 25 shares
• Walgreens Boots Alliance 20 shares
• Verizon 15 shares
• Texas Instruments 7 shares
• Visa 0.291 of a share
• National Bank 2.361 shares

Stocks Sold

I sold an ETF and one stock this month. The ETF was iShares Core MSCI All Country ex Canada (XAW) there is absolutely nothing wrong with the ETF it holds thousands of stocks from around the world, I just decided that I only wanted to invest in stocks.

The stock I sold was 3M (MMM) this was a big move for me and looking back I should have done it sooner. The stock was been struggling in the last five years the share price is down 52%. The company has some things to work on and I decided I didn’t want to wait for them to improve things. I mostly was hanging around for their dividend which hasn’t increased much lately.

So by selling these I was able to put the money back into other US stocks listed above. I like railroads and I moved all of the 3M proceeds into Union Pacific as I believe they have a brighter future.

Thanks for reading!

Matthew