Dividend Income – April 2026 Update

Hey everyone, welcome to another monthly dividend income update. Since creating this blog, I have posted these monthly dividend income updates to chronicle our journey toward financial independence through dividend investing. If you look at our dividend history, you’ll see that we have come a long way! Back in 2011, we earned a total of $675.21 in dividend income. 

Fast forward 15 years and we are easily crashing this amount in less than a week! 

In the world of dividend growth investing, patience is the virtue! 

When it comes to our dividend portfolio, we keep it relatively simple by holding the following:

• 37 individual US & Canadian dividend stocks, for income and growth
• 2 low cost index ETFs, for extra diversification

We would like to reduce the number of individual stocks to about 30, but it has been hard to decide which position to close. If we can trim down even further to 25 stocks in the near future, that would be ideal.

In April, Mrs. T and the kids made chocolates for Easter. Both kids made their own Easter eggs by colouring the egg shields, tempering dark chocolate, and putting the chocolate on the shields. I was very impressed by their work.

With the weather getting better, we spent A LOT of time cleaning out our backyard. The side pathway of our house has long been ignored, with a lot of weeds growing and stuff accumulating over the years. So Mrs. T and I spent a lot of time cleaning up the pathway. We purchased over 80 bags of medium rocks and made the pathway look a lot nicer. 

Unfortunately, our backyard garden had turned into a wild jungle. So after the pathway cleanup, we moved on to cleaning the backyard garden. We managed to get about 40% done, so more work will be needed. 

Dividend Income – April 2026 Update

Enough yard work update, let’s get back to dividends. 

In April, we received pay cheques from the following companies:

• Alimentation Couche-Tard (ATD.TO)
• BCE Inc (BCE.TO)
• Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS.TO)
• CIBC (CM.TO)
• Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO)
• Capital Power Corp (CPX.TO)
• Granite REIT (GRT.UN)
• Coca-Cola (KO)
• SmartCentres REIT (SRU.UN)
• Telus (T.TO)
• TD (TD.TO)
• TC Energy Corp (TRP.TO)
• VICI Properties (VICI)
• Walmart (WMT)

These 15 pay cheques added to $8,463.23, making April the second highest dividend income in 2026 so far. 

Compared to April 2025, we saw a YoY growth of 10.68%. Surprisingly, this is the lowest growth rate so far in 2026. 

Month	2025	2026	YoY%
Jan	$8,287.55	$9,472.81	14.30%
Feb	$3,365.95	$4,087.42	21.43%
Mar	$4,623.21	$5,540.32	19.84%
Apr	$7,646.60	$8,463.23	10.68%

Why was the YoY growth the lowest? It’s probably because April 2025 dividend income was very solid and we haven’t really added shares that paid dividends in April. 

Despite that over 10% YoY is still quite solid, so I’m not too worried about it. The important parameter is that our average YoY growth rate is at 16.56%, still above 15% that I hope to maintain.

Dividend Hikes

Just like March, April was a very quiet month when it comes to dividend hikes. Only two companies announced dividend hikes.

• Costco (COST) increased its dividend payout by 13.1% to $1.47 per share
• Alphabet (GOOGL) increased its dividend payout by 4.8% to $0.22 per share

Because we don’t own that many shares of Costco and Alphabet, these two dividend hikes only increased our forward annual dividend income by $62.04. 

Dividend Reinvestment Plans

In the past, when fractional DRIPs weren’t available, we tried to enroll in DRIP whenever we were eligible. With fractional DRIPs available at Wealthsimple and TD (and some securities for Questrade), we tried to enroll in DRIPs to reinvest as much dividend income as possible. 

Per the Early Retirement Planning – Steps We’re Taking in 2026 post, one of the things we are considering is turning off dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs). 

In late April, we did exactly that. We decided to turn off DRIPs for RRSPs and taxable accounts. For now, we will leave DRIPs on for our TFSAs.

With that in mind, we dripped the following shares in April:

• 5.1234 shares of BCE.TO
• 2 shares of BNS.TO
• 3.271 shares of CM.TO
• 11.4187 shares of CNQ.TO
• 2.8626 shares of CPX.TO
• 0.4333 shares of GRT.UN
• 1.8097 shares of KO
• 6 shares of SRU.UN
• 2.1576 shares of T.TO
• 8.1407 shares of TD.TO
• 8.036 shares of TRP.TO
• 3.1976 shares of VICI
• 0.1315 shares of WMT

In total, 54.5821 shares were dripped automatically. By enrolling in DRIPs, we increased our forward annual dividend income by $156.45.

Because we turned off DRIPs in late April, we only reinvested $4,235.11 out of the $8,463.23 received or a 50% drip ratio.

I anticipate the drip ratio to be quite low moving forward as we start accumulating cash in RRSPs and taxable accounts.

I’ll be honest, having dripped for over 15 years, it felt weird not seeing dividend income reinvested right away and having a large dollar amount of cash sitting in our RRSPs and taxable accounts (before fractional DRIPs, it would usually take a couple of months to get about $1k). Since I don’t like cash sitting around doing absolutely nothing, we need to put that money to work. 

A few “safe” options I am considering:

• Move cash in taxable accounts into the Wealthsimple chequing accounts to earn 2.25% interest.
• Since I’m not withdrawing money from RRSP yet, we’d invest in an HISA or cash alternative ETF like CASH, CBIL, ZMMK, or HSAV. 

If you have other suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

Stock Transactions

Perhaps this is a bit counterintuitive for some… despite stopping DRIPs in RRSPs and taxable accounts, we do not plan to stop buying more shares with our regular savings from working pay cheques.

Why? 

The way I see it, since we’re still generating income from my full-time employment and our side hustles, we want to continue to use savings to buy more dividend paying stocks and index ETFs. This way we can grow future cash flow while accumulating our cash reserves at the same time. To phrase it differently, we want to continue “fattening” our golden goose (aka dividend portfolio), rather than not doing anything with our savings. 

With that in mind, we were VERY busy on the buying front and added the following throughout April to take advantage of the volatile market due to the US-Iran war.

• 124.1181 shares of Brookfield Corporation (BN.TO) 
• 235.5717 shares of Manulife (MFC.TO)
• 331.0343 shares of Brookfield Asset Management (BAM.TO) 
• 26.8997 shares of Emera (EMA.TO)
• 128.8603 shares of iShares Core MSCI AC World ex Canada Index ETF (XAW.TO)

These purchases added our forward annual dividend by around $1,325. 

Dividend Scorecard – April 2026

Here’s our dividend scorecard for April 2026.

April was a very solid month, especially in terms of adding forward dividend income from stock transactions. As mentioned, we anticipate dividends added from DRIP to decrease significantly moving forward due to turning off DRIPs for our RRSPs and taxable accounts.

Random thoughts on the market 

Considering there are two active wars going on, Russia-Ukraine and US-Iran, it’s quite mind-boggling that the market hasn’t tanked more. Both wars have caused resources like natural gas, crude oil, gasoline and jet fuel, coal, wheat, corn, barley, fertilizers, and industrial metals prices to spike. With these resources getting more expensive, inflation should shoot up, increasing the probability of a recession. For the most part, central banks around the world have been in wait-and-see mode. Rather than cutting rates to stimulate the economy, the central banks have been holding interest rates steady and indicating potential rate increases.

Oddly enough, if we look at the TSX and S&P 500, both are up year to date by about 5%. For the most part, it seems that the market has forgotten about the Russia-Ukraine war. The market volatilities lately all seemed to have been related to the US-Iran war.

The ongoing upward market trend seems to be driven mostly by the AI/tech boom and earnings from big international companies have risen during the wars, rather than falling. Let’s not forget that although the market can be rather emotional in the short term (i.e. reactive to headlines), long term, the market is forward looking. I suppose investors believe that the wars will both be resolved at some point and things will normalize.

This begs the question, what do we do as long term investors? 

Well, first of all, I’m a true believer that market timing doesn’t work. I believe that time in the market trumps everything long term. 

So in the simplest term, as long term investors, we are simply doing what we have been doing since our financial epiphany, regardless of which way the market is pointing. 

• Spend less than we earn
• Save money whenever we can
• Use the savings to purchase appreciating assets like individual stocks or low cost index ETFs
• Invest regularly to take advantage of dollar cost averaging
• Rinse and repeat

In the last little while, we have been regularly adding new shares roughly every two weeks (i.e. whenever I get my full time employment pay cheque). If the market is up, we buy. If the market is down, we buy. Perhaps we could have done better if we had waited for the purchases on market down days. But I believe that it is far better to invest regularly and have our money working hard for us right away rather than trying to squeeze an extra few cents on the initial purchase price. In short, we have taken out emotions and market timing out of the equation.

Sure, we are not green on every single purchase this year, but for the most part, we are up. Looking back on our purchases from 2023, 2024, and 2025, we are up over 60%, 40%, and 20%, respectively (it shouldn’t come to anyone’s surprise that I keep a spreadsheet to track all of our stock transactions). So I believe this strategy has worked well for us. 

The same strategy might not work for you. If you sleep better at night only when you purchase when stocks are on sale, then perhaps you should try to time your purchases only when the market is red. But this strategy may be flawed because you have no idea when the market will be red.

For us, since we can’t control which way the market is pointing, we don’t bother with that. We focus on what we can control – our earnings, our spending, our savings, and our investing. 

Summary – Dividend Income April 2026 Update

With four months in the books, we have earned a total of $27,563.78 in dividend income. It blows my mind that we have already exceeded the annual dividend income from 2020! It’s a fantastic feeling to know that our money is working hard for us.

To put things into perspective, at $27,563.78 after four months is equivalent to:

• $299.70 per day or $9.57 per hour, our dividend portfolio is generating for us regardless of what we are doing 
• $1,531.32 per week or $38.28 per hour working wage after 18 working weeks.

Mrs. T and I are very grateful for what we have accomplished together so far and are looking forward to what’s ahead of us. At the same time, we remind ourselves that we are very fortunate financially and we continue to provide a helping hand to those in need in our community via volunteering and charitable donations. If you are in a similar position as us, I’d love to see you do the same. After all, having a strong, supportive community will benefit all of us.

How was your April dividend income?