Welcome to another month of dividend income report. Despite some market volatility in May, the bull market trend continues. It’s getting a bit nutty whenever I check our portfolio value and more importantly, our net worth. Will this bull run continue for many years to come? Or will the AI bubble burst, the ugly bear enter, and make everyone cry?
I guess we’ll find out, will we?
The thing I like about dividend growth investing is that we get a constant cash flow regardless of how the market is doing. If the market is up, great, we collect dividends and enjoy the good times; if the market is down, great, we collect dividends and wait for the market to recover. It really removes the psychological and mental aspect of investing and keeps investing way simpler.
For those of you who are new to this blog, a reminder of what we hold in our dividend portfolio:
- US and Canadian individual dividend stocks for income and growth.
- Low-cost equity ETFs for geographical and asset diversification
It’s very simple and doesn’t require us to spend too much time tracking our portfolio. Best of all, this simple approach allows us to sleep well at night.
In May, just like April, we spent a lot of time working in our backyard garden. After cleaning up the side pathway of the house and making it look nicer, we had to torch the pathway regularly to kill weeds growing out of the gravel.
We spent a few days in Whistler to enjoy the great outdoors and celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. Since it was shoulder season in Whistler, many restaurants had set menus, making meals a bit cheaper than usual.
I had a quick four-day work trip to Rochester and Minneapolis. Since there was no direct flight to Rochester and any connections required me to wait at the connecting airport for at least three hours, I flew to Toronto and then drove to Rochester. The three-hour drive was relatively easy. On the way back to Toronto, I was able to make a quick stop in Niagara Falls and had an excellent lunch & chat with my blog editor, who has been graciously proofreading blog articles for several years. After Toronto/Rochester, I went for a 22-hour stopover in Minneapolis for a work meeting.
The day after I got back from my work trip, I was off to a weekend camping trip in Cultus Lake with Scouts and Cubs. Along with seven Scouters, we were responsible for 28 youths. Overall, it was great time camping and everyone had a lot of fun.
Dividend Income – May 2026 Update
In May, we received dividend paycheques from the following companies:
- Apple (AAPL)
- AbbVie (ABBV)
- Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO)
- Costco (COST)
- Emera (EMA.TO)
- Granite REIT (GRT.UN)
- National Bank (NA.TO)
- Power Corp (POW.TO)
- Royal Bank (RY.TO)
- SmartCentres REIT (SRU.UN)
- Waste Connections (WCN.TO)
- Walmart (WMT)
These 12 dividend paycheques added up to $4,637.21.
Since February, May, August, and November are among the low dividend income months, I was pleased to see an increase in dividend income between February and May. In fact, we increased by $549.79 or 13.5%.
Compared to May 2025, we saw a 31.62% YoY growth!!! Holy moly, that’s incredible! This is the highest YoY growth we have seen so far this year.
What contributed to such an impressive increase? Looking back, I believe it was due to the following reasons:
- Dividend payout increases from the likes of National Bank (3.5% in May, 5.1% in Dec), Royal Bank (4% in May 2025 and 6% in Dec 2025), and Bank of Montreal (5% in Dec 2025).
- In the second half of last year and earlier this year, we purchased more Royal Bank and Power Corp.
Dividend Hikes
We received many dividend hikes throughout May, making it quite a solid month when it comes to that.
- Apple (AAPL) increased its dividend payout by 4% to $0.27 per share.
- Hydro One (H.TO) increased its dividend payout by 6% to $0.3531 per share
- Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS.TO) increased its dividend payout by 3.6% to $1.14 per share
- Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO) increased its dividend payout by 2.4% to $1.71 per share
- National Bank (NA.TO) increased its dividend payout by 6.5% to $1.32 per share
- Royal Bank (RY.TO) increased its dividend payout by 7.3% to $1.76 per share
- TD (TD.TO) increased its dividend payout by 3.7% to $1.12 per share
These seven dividend hikes increased our forward annual dividend by $1,169.80. A fantastic month!
Dividend Reinvestment Plans
For months, I have been hinting that we would stop reinvesting dividends in our RRSPs and taxable accounts at some point.
Keeping true to my word, this is exactly what happened in late April – I decided to turn DRIP off in our RRSPs and taxable account, but kept DRIP on for our TFSAs. For our RRSPs and taxable accounts, we are going to start accumulating cash and build up our cash reserve as we prepare for early retirement in the near future.
Since we hold US dividend stocks and a US ETF (i.e. QQQM) and it doesn’t make much sense to convert a small amount of USD to CAD regularly, for now, we are reinvesting USD dividends by adding more QQQM whenever we receive dividends in USD.
With that in mind, we dripped the following shares in May:
- 1.2443 shares of BMO.TO
- 0.5143 shares of EMA.TO
- 0.4426 shares of GRT.UN
- 1.1952 shares of NA.TO
- 4.387 shares of POW.TO
- 6.7101 shares of SRU.UN
By continuing to drip in TSFAs, we were able to add $42.03 toward our forward annual dividend income. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s better than nothing. I expect DRIP not to contribute as much to our forward annual dividend income in the future.
You may be wondering what we plan to do with the CAD sitting in our taxable accounts and RRSPs. Here’s what we are doing:
- For taxable, we are moving money into the Wealthsimple chequing accounts to earn 2.25% interest.
- For RRSPs, since we can’t move money out of them, we are investing in CBIL, Global X 0-3 Months T-Bill ETF and earning a small amount of interest.
Stock Transactions
As mentioned in the April dividend income report, although we’re not dripping in RRSPs and taxable accounts, we do not have to stop buying more shares with our regular savings. This is so we can build up a cash reserve while still increasing our future cash flow.
We kept ourselves quite busy on the stock transactions front. First, we decided to close out two positions – VICI Properties and Walmart. We closed VICI Properties due to concerns with the Las Vegas tourism industry.
VICI owns many real estate properties in Las Vegas and the deteriorating tourism in that city has hurt the company. We closed VICI slightly positively.
We owned Walmart for many years and the stock has done tremendously well – a five-bagger almost. But since this is a relatively small position and we have been trying to reduce the number of holdings in our dividend portfolio, we decided to close out Walmart and reinvest that money elsewhere.
The money from VICI and Walmart was not used to purchase any dividend stocks. Instead, we decided to use it for buying non-dividend-paying stocks as we look for total returns.
With some money saved aside in May, we purchased the following stocks:
- 74.3162 shares of Brookfield Asset Management (BAM.TO) – I continue to like this asset-light company from Brookfield.
- 34.526 shares of Capital Power Corp (CPX.TO) – a way to dollar cost average with our CPX position
- 24.213 shares of XAW – I plan to add more in June as the semi-annual distribution is coming up at the end of June
These stock transactions reduced our forward annual dividend income by approximately $170.
With the closing of VICI and WMT, we own 35 individual dividend stocks and 2 low-cost index ETFs at the time of writing.
Dividend Scorecard
Here’s our dividend scorecard for May:
As mentioned, we saw a decrease in dividends from stock transactions. Although we never want to see a decrease, I’m not too worried. The plan is to reinvest the USD money later on.
I was very pleased to see a jump of over $1,000 from dividend hikes. Hopefully, we’ll get more dividend hikes for the remainder of the year.
Summary – Dividend Income May 2026 Update
After five months, we have received $32,200.99 in dividend income. That is an average of $6,440.20 per month. It’s pretty incredible since in 2021, we received just under $31,000 in dividend income for the entire year. We are able to exceed the 2021 annual amount in five months’ time. That’s the power of patience and sticking with your investment strategy over time.
Dividend income is really compounding for us and the dividend snowball is getting bigger and faster every day.
To put things into perspective, $32,200.99 after five months is equivalent to:
- $213.25 per day or $8.88 per hour that our dividend portfolio is generating for us
- $1,463.68 per week or $36.59 per hour working wage after 22 working weeks.
We should be able to exceed our dividend income goal of $72,000. The real question will be, how much do we exceed by. Since we are only dripping in TFSAs, our dividend income growth from drip will slow down dramatically, so we’ll see…
I believe it’s important for me to chronicle our dividend growth investing journey and share the ups and downs that we face along the way. Our story is real and I know it is possible to build up a sizable portfolio that one can eventually live off of. I have seen other investors who did exactly that and we’re simply following their footsteps.
I hope you enjoyed reading this dividend income report. How much dividend income did you receive in May? Do you track dividend income? If you don’t, why not?
