Dividend Income: November 2021…

Is the easy money over? It has definitely felt like nothing could have gone wrong over the past 18 months.

The strategy in a market like that is to put some key stocks on your watch list. Easy to say … Well, it means you need to have a strategy to find stocks to put on your watch list. Your neighbor’s uncle is not that strategy …

You could have a look at the Expert Analysts on BNN and what they focus on. For example, Eric Nuttall is bullish on the energy and has done really well over the past 2 years with his picks. Christine Poole covers the markets more broadly and also does well. You can also leverage a screener like the Dividend Snapshot Screener.

Stock Trades

In November I did some swaps between my accounts. I essentially moved my low Canadian dividend yield from my registered account into my TFSA and moved my higher yield stocks into my taxable account.

Instead of having a mixed of high yield and low yield across my accounts, the stocks yielding a good dividend are now in my non-registered account.

I also moved out of CNR in my RRSP in favor of my favorite S&P 500 index ETF, the Vanguard VFV ETF. I also added the XQQ ETF which is the Nasdaq 100 ETF. Why the move, CNR has historically performed similarly to VFV in my portfolio and XQQ usually outperforms both.

Check out my portfolio for the details by accounts.

Portfolio Management

As I think about living from the income of my portfolio, I plan to initially focus on my non-registered account to generate dividend income. I will not hold high yield stocks but solid dividend income stocks with a 4% yield and a decent dividend growth to beat inflation. Think of the banks and the telecoms in general.

The dividend yield in my non-registered account is now 3.74% and my TFSA is at 0.94%. I started investing in more US stocks in my TFSA and I may do more. I now have close to 60% of my portfolio in USD not including my ETFs exposed to USD. In fact, my RRSP account is completely covering the US market.

No rush with the other accounts for now.

Dividend Income

My November 2021 dividend income is $4,188. The biggest month of the quarter. As you can see from the graph below, it’s not equal month to month and that’s really not important either. On a quarterly basis, it’s about $6,300 per quarter.

Pretty much all my holdings have increased their dividends so far this year with the banks finishing the year and Costco reporting this week.