March 2015 Dividend Income / Monthly Highlights

Welcome to another dividend income update.  Here is my March 2015 dividend income report.  Well I can’t believe that  we are already 3 months into 2015!  Time is sure flying by.  The first half of the year is always pretty busy for me as I try to save as much as I can to max out our registered accounts and the kids’ RESP account.

While we’re making some progress, we’re just not saving as much money this year because of some renovations on our home.  These renovations were the subject of a past post and involved adding some insulation in the attic and buying new windows for the house.  Insulation is relatively cheap, the new windows not so much.  On top of it all, my wife and I are expecting our second child this month!  Which means she won’t be working for a few months. So it will be a bit of a challenge to meet our savings goals this year and that makes cutting household expenses and maximizing tax efficiencies all the more important.

On the whole, moving to our final home was a very expensive ordeal.  But life’s not just about financial calculations, it’s also about enjoyment and in that regard my family couldn’t be happier with the new home.  We finally have the space we need to grow as a family, the kids have a nice play area, and…this is a big one in the GTA…a YARD to play in!

To all of my readers out there, I want to thank you for reading this blog and I hope that my articles have given some food for thought.  I want you all to know that I recently renewed my website so stay tuned everyone because My Road to Wealth and Freedom will be around for at least another year! LOL.  It’s hard to believe that this blog has been around for an entire year already.  Time sure flies.  I must say that it’s great to be a part of the personal finance blogging community and I want to thank all of the other bloggers out there for writing great material and generating some really interesting discussions about saving, investing and personal finance in general.

In case you missed it, I also became an associate member of the Div-Net which stands for the dividend investing and value network.  I encourage everyone to check out that website because there’s a lot of great material there.  You can find dividend stock analyses, information about investing styles etc.  There’s tons of great articles on dividend and value investing written by some really talented people.

Monthly Investing Activity

With my income tax return money, I bought 63 more shares in Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS).  The shares have had a rough 2015 so far so I’ve been buying them up.  Since December I’ve purchased over 400 BNS shares which will increase my annual dividend income by nearly $1100!  It gets even better because these shares are held in our TFSAs.  What could be better than earning passive dividend income?  Dividend income that is completely tax free!

As I mentioned before, my wife just opened her self-directed tax-free savings account (TFSA) in December and since that time I’ve wanted to move some stock over so I can shelter the dividend income.  Although dividends are taxed more favorably than most other types of income, the way I see it, why pay tax on that income when you don’t have to.  So I transferred 287 Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS) shares into my wife’s TFSA.  This move will shelter $780.64 in passive dividend income.

With my recent pay raise, I increased my automatic monthly contributions into my share purchase plans for BNS and BMO.  This move continues my plan to make automatic monthly and quarterly share purchases in my dividend reinvestment accounts (DRIPs).  I bought more shares in Fortis (FTS), Suncor (SU), Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS) and Bank of Montreal (BMO) this past month.  As I’ve said before, in these accounts there is no point in trying to time the market – I contribute small amounts on a regular basis, regardless of what is happening in the market and I let compounding and dollar-cost averaging do their work.  I also continued with my TD e-Series Funds automatic investment plan.

Monthly Passive Dividend Income

March has been a good month with regard to dividend income.  Here are the numbers:

Stocks:

Bank of America (BAC) – $1.54

Canadian National Railway (CNR) – $31.25

Enbridge (ENB) – $4.77

Fortis (FTS) – $18.87

Manulife Financial (MFC) – $26.72

RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust (REI) – $3.96

Suncor Energy (SU) – $66.70

Sun Life Financial (SLF) – $13.70

Mutual Funds and ETFs:

iShares S&P/TSX Canadian Preferred Share Index ETF (CPD) – $51.39

iShares S&P/TSX Capped REIT Index ETF (XRE) – $37.40

Canadian Short-Term Corporate Bond Index ETF (VSC) – $15.05

Canadian Short-Term Bond Index ETF (VSB) – $11.13

TD International Index Fund – e (TDB911) – $72.04

TOTAL = $354.52

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