Welcome to my favourite post to write – the monthly dividend income update! Why do I enjoy writing these monthly income updates so much? Because they demonstrate that it is possible to build up a dividend portfolio that can generate a sizable dividend income. All it takes is time and patience.
For those of you who want to see our complete dividend history, check out the dedicated page with a nice chart and tables.
A quick reminder, we got serious with dividend growth investing in 2011 and so have been building our dividend portfolio for over 15 years. The goals are to achieve financial independence via dividend growth investing and to live off dividends in the near future.
Unlike some dividend growth investors, we invest in both Canadian and US dividend stocks as well as low cost index ETFs for extra diversification. At the time of writing, we own 37 individual stocks and 2 index ETFs in our dividend portfolio.
In March, we went to Japan for almost three weeks as a surprise trip for Kid 2.0’s 10th birthday. Mrs. T and I have been secretly planning this trip for a very long time. We booked the airfare in June and booked all the accommodations in August. We kept everything a secret and didn’t tell anyone (believe me, it was hard to do!).
Originally, we planned to tell the kids on the day of departure (i.e. at the airport). Since this was a multi-week overseas trip, we decided to tell the kids two days before so they could pack accordingly.
We gave Kid 2.0 a coded message. After decoding, she was surprised that we were going to Japan. But we didn’t tell the kids all the plans… We kept some stuff secret to surprise them.
Where did we go in Japan?
We went to Lake Yamanakako in the Fuji Lakes area, Nagano, and Tokyo. We visited a lot of different sights and had excellent food.
Here are some pictures from the trip.
I’ll have to write a detailed trip report later!
Dividend Income – March 2026 Update
Back to dividend income. In March, we received dividends from the following companies:
- Brookfield Asset Management (BAM.TO)
- Brookfield Renewable Corp (BEPC.TO)
- BlackRock (BLK)
- Brookfield Corporation (BN.TO)
- Canadian National Railway (CNR.TO)
- Enbridge (ENB.TO)
- Fortis (FTS.TO)
- Alphabet (GOOGL)
- Granite REIT (GRT.UN)
- Hydro One (H.TO)
- Intac Financial (IFC.TO)
- McDonald’s (MCD)
- Manulife Financial (MFC.TO)
- Invesco NASDAQ 100 Index (QQQM)
- SmartCentres REIT (SRU.UN)
- Visa (V)
- Waste Connections (WCN.TO)
- Waste Management (WM)
In total, these 18 dividend payments added up to $5,540.32. A very solid month, considering that for almost two-thirds of the month, we were relaxing in Japan, not thinking about our portfolio or dividend income at all.
This is exactly the beauty of dividend growth investing! You let your money work hard for you.
Compared to March 2015, we saw a YoY growth of 19.84%. I’m very pleased to see a number above 15%.
Dividend Hikes
When it comes to dividend hikes, March was a relatively quiet month with only two dividend hike announcements.
- Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO) increased its dividend payout by 6.4% to $0.625 per share
- Power Corp (POW.TO) increased its dividend payout by 9% to $0.6675 per share
Since we own a large amount of CNQ and POW, these two dividend hikes increased our forward annual dividend income by $335.99.
Dividend Reinvestment Plans
We are currently enrolled in DRIP in all of our accounts. Thanks to fractional DRIP at Wealthsimple and TD, we are able to add fractional shares at each dividend payout. Questrade isn’t supporting fractional DRIP yet, so only full shares are dripped. We then let the remaining dividends accumulate and purchase more shares at a later date with our Questrade accounts.
- Sign up for Wealthsimple using my referral code and get a $25 referral bonus.
- Sign up for Questrade using my referral code and get a referral bonus up to $250.
In case you’re wondering, we plan to stop dripping in our RRSPs and taxable accounts to start building up some cash reserve sometime this year. For now, it’s full dripping ahead!
In March, we dripped the following shares:
- 8.1099 shares of BAM.TO
- 3.9109 shares of BEPC.TO
- 0.0847 shares of BLK
- 1.07335 shares of BN.TO
- 1.82329 shares of CNR.TO
- 35.69073 shares of ENB.TO
- 3 shares of FTS.TO
- 0.061 shares of GOOGL
- 0.4551 shares of GRT.UN
- 0.2652 shares of MCD
- 10.2986 shares of MFC.TO
- 0.2467 shares of QQQM
- 6 shares of SRU.UN
- 0.0699 shares of V
- 0.25139 shares of WCN.TO
- 0.1905 shares of WM
In total 71.53126 shares were dripped and $4,945.8 out of the $5,540.32 was reinvested right away.
By enrolling in DRIP, we were able to increase our forward annual dividend income by $213.71.
Stock Transactions
We had been extremely busy on the buy front in January and February. To be completely transparent, we added over $120k worth of dividend stocks and index ETFs in these two months. Please note that not all the money is new capital, since the majority of it was money transferred from my work RRSP to my self-directed RRSP.
Because we were on vacation for two-thirds of the month and we were 16 hours ahead while in Japan, I paid almost no attention to the stock market. The market would open at 10:30 PM Japan time and by that time, I was either getting ready for bed or enjoying a relaxing evening. In other words, I simply didn’t want to think about the stock market while on vacation. When we woke up in the morning, the US and Canadian stock exchanges would be closed.
Even though the market was down quite a bit in the early parts of March, I did think about transferring some money to buy stocks as I was preoccupied with other stuff.
As a result, we didn’t buy anything until we got back to Vancouver in late March.
With that in mind, these are the purchases we made in March:
- 51.313 shares of XAW
- 32.5516 shares of BAM
- 4 shares of BN
We bought more XAW to increase our international diversification. With BAM and BN around $60 and below $55 respectively, we thought both stocks were undervalued. We bought more BAM and BN shares because we wanted to take advantage of the depressed prices.
These three purchases added roughly $105 toward our forward annual dividend income.
Dividend Scorecard – March 2026
Here’s our dividend scorecard for March 2026.
I was pleased to see a monthly dividend income above $5,000. I also liked that we were able to add over $600 toward our forward dividend income, with the majority of the increase coming from DRIP and organic dividend growth.
Summary – Dividend Income March 2026
After three months in 2026, we have collected $19,100.55 in dividend income. That’s very solid progress after one quarter. If we extrapolate to the full year simply multiplying by four, we would be over $76k. Note, this may be a very simplistic view, since XAW only pays distribution semi-annually. Regardless, it’s looking like we might have a good chance of overachieving our goal of $72,000 dividend income.
At $19,100.55 in dividend income after three months, this is equivalent to:
- $212.23 per day or $8.84our dividend portfolio is generating for us
- $1,364.32 per working week or $34.11 per hour working wage after 14 working weeks.
A solid way to wrap up the first quarter of 2026 and I can’t wait to see dividends coming in for the remainder of the year.
Thanks for reading and I hope you had a great March dividend income too!
