Dividend Income – September 2026 Update

Wow, it’s hard to believe 2026 is down to the final quarter. It felt like yesterday that I posted the 2026 Looking Ahead post. Where did the time go?

Per the Looking Ahead post, so far in 2026, we continue doing what we have been doing since we started our financial independence journey:

• Continue the earn-save-invest strategy
  • Increase our household income whenever possible
  • See if we can increase our savings gap further
  • Continue building our dividend portfolio by adding new capital regularly 
• Grow our cash wedge and build up some savings buffers 
• Enjoy life while we can – spend time with my family, travel, and explore the world when the opportunities arise
• Enjoy what’s available in our local community
• Continue setting annual goals and resolutions for myself – and monitoring them

To be perfectly honest, once you get a system going, the FI journey can get pretty boring, because you’re doing the same thing over and over again and waiting for your net worth and investment portfolio to compound and grow.

But when it comes to personal finance and investing, I believe the more boring they are, the better. That way I can sleep well at night. I’d happily sleep well at night over being a complete mess mentally and physically caused by market volatility. 

September was a BUSY travel month for me. First, I spent two weeks in Japan and Taiwan. Before my flight to Tokyo, I had the pleasure of visiting the newish Plaza Premium First lounge at Vancouver Airport. I was quite impressed with both the ambiance and the service. Best of all, the à la carte dishes were very delicious.

My Japan itinerary was jam-packed, visiting customers all over Japan. I probably covered over 1,000 km of train rides in my short seven-day visit. For example, one day we took the Shinkansen (bullet train) for about three hours to Oshu in northern Japan. After the meeting, we drove further north to fly from Hanamaki to Osaka. (Interesting fact: The baseball superstore Shohei Ohtani’s hometown is Oshu). 

I have always enjoyed visiting Japan, mostly because of the food. You simply can’t go wrong with food in Japan. So, not surprisingly, I had some delicious food while there. 

I spent the weekend in Tokyo and had all day Saturday to walk all over Tokyo. On that Saturday I took close to 38,000 steps and my feet – not surprisingly – were a bit sore by the end of the day…

I woke up early Sunday morning to take a flight from Tokyo to Taipei. I managed to set up a dinner with my cousin that Sunday. We had a great time chatting and catching up. 

My five-day stay in Taiwan was just as busy, with many customer visits and business meals. All the good food didn’t help with my goal of hitting 15.5% body fat, ha!

After a quick two-day “pit stop” back at home, I went on another four-day work trip to Anaheim for a trade show. While on the road, two other work trips to the US popped up for October. Fortunately, my manager and another colleague can attend these meetings so I can stay on the ground for a little while…

Dividend Income – September 2026

Back to dividend income. In September, we received dividends from the following companies:

• Alimentation Couche-Tard (ATD.TO)
• Brookfield Asset Management (BAM.TO)
• Brookfield Renewable Corp (BEPC.TO)
• 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)
• Intact Financial (IFC.TO)
• McDonald’s (MCD)
• Manulife Financial (MFC.TO)
• Invesco NASDAQ 100 (QQQM)
• SmartCentres REIT (SRU.UN)
• Visa (V)
• Waste Management (WM)

The 17 payments added to $6,327.99. A solid month with more than $6k in dividend income.

Compared to September 2025, we saw a YoY growth of 36.38%, making September the highest monthly year-over-year growth so far this year. I was a bit surprised to see such a big YoY percentage. 

Comparing the numbers from 2025 and 2026, I could see that the increase was mostly due to us owning more Brookfield Asset Management shares (we bought quite a bit late last year and throughout this year). Dividend payout increases from Enbridge, Manulife, and Fortis also helped.

Dividend Hikes 

Just as in the previous few months, it was very quiet on the dividend hikes front. In September, with only McDonald’s announcing a dividend hike raising the payout by 3.76%. This resulted in an increase of $13.21 in our forward annual dividend income.

A very small increase, but it’s better than nothing, right?

Dividend Reinvestment Plans 

A quick reminder, we stopped dripping in our RRSPs and non-registered accounts and are only dripping in our TFSAs. We are doing this to build up our cash wedge to prepare for our eventual early retirement.

As a result, we don’t drip as many shares as before.

We dripped the following shares in September:

• 0.8379 shares of ATD.TO
• 4.0978 shares of BAM.TO
• 1.8649 shares of BEPC.TO
• 0.6879 shares of CNR.TO
• 2.4681 shares of FTS.TO
• 0.4902 shares of GRT.UN
• 5.552 shares of MFC.TO
• 7.2324 shares of SRU.UN

By enrolling in DRIP, we automatically added 23.2312 shares. More importantly, we were able to add $120.74 toward our forward annual dividend income. 

Stock Transactions

I have shared many numbers on this blog since its creation back in July 2014. These numbers are all very personal, which means I’ve shared a lot of private personal information on the internet.

Stock transactions are something I have shared consistently. I have been doing that to be honest and transparent to readers. 

As much as I like to do that, I have been debating whether to continue or not for the past few months.

Why?

A few reasons:

• More and more friends and colleagues are reading this blog. Sharing too much information means a bit of a privacy invasion
• The biggest reason is that there have been increasingly more trolls attacking me on the internet. I filter and block many attacking comments, but some do leak through. Furthermore, I have been getting more and more annoying and absurd DMs and emails from trolls. 

As a result, I have decided not to share stock transactions moving forward. Sorry if this is a deal-breaker for some readers, but I hope you can understand my concerns and reservations with continuing to share our stock transactions openly on this blog.

Note: I might consider having separate “Recent Buys” posts where I disclose stocks we purchased but not share how many shares we purchased. Maybe this could be an OK compromise.

Dividend Scorecard – September 2026

Below is our dividend scorecard for September 2026:

As you can see, I removed the dividend added from transaction row.  

The drip ratio is much lower than earlier this year because we turned off drip in non-registered and RRSP accounts. 

Overall, we are pleased with how we did in September.

Summary – Dividend Income September 2026 Update

With nine months wrapped up, we have received $59,578.49 in dividend income. It’s quite amazing that we have already exceeded the total annual dividend income from 2024.

Looking back further, $6,327.99 in September exceeded the total 2013 dividend income. Quite mind-blowing if you think about it. 

With three months to go, if I just add the $16,015.44 from Q4 2025, we’d end 2026 at $75,593.93. In other words, we should accomplish our $72k dividend income goal with a bit of buffer. 

To put things in perspective, $59,578.49 after nine months is equivalent to:

• $218.24 per day or $9.09 per hour that our dividend portfolio is generating for us
• $1,489.46 per week or $37.24 per hour working wage after 40 weeks

I’d love to hear your thoughts on our decision not to disclose stock transactions moving forward. How was your September dividend income?