November’20 – My Passive Income Update!

We are almost at the end of 2020 and it had been a heck of a year. Who knew we will see days akin a zombie or pandemic movie showing empty ghost town with people walking in masks and gloves! Below are few pictures I snapped recently on my unavoidable visit to the downtown. It is heartbreaking to see near empty streets, stations and trains at 11AM in the morning. In a normal day at this time, these places will be choked with honking cars and bustling people.

While these scenes are surreal, there will be countless heartbreaking stories from small and big business owners which almost entirely depended on the inflow of people into the downtown. With empty offices and near zero traffic, most of these business are already closed or breathing on government assistance. I know of a place where we use to go after work and recently read that it is closed auctioning off the kitchen equipments and furnitures; felt sorry for so many lives in suffering! Personally for us the only inconvenience was the lockdown and restrictions, which is nothing as compared to hardship faced by numerous others. We consider ourselves quite fortunate and are thankful that our lives remained unimpacted.

While October brought us our highest dividend ever, November is again a special month for us in two ways – we surpassed our annual dividend goal in Nov itself; and our portfolio hit the highest value ever surpassing a special milestone! As usual, our update begins with updating below two areas with the latest data:

• 2025 Goal tracker on homepage
• Dividend Portfolio with latest holdings

Passive Income Pie

Monthly Dividend Earnings

Nov’20 is the second time (after Aug’20) this year that our year-over-year dividend dipped, while last dip was 11% this time it is 16%.. ouch, it surely hurts!! This as I mentioned back in Aug was due to bad purchase choices I made such as VET, CHW, CHR etc where I lost plenty of capital as well as $140 per month in Dividends. Nevertheless this month was still an awesome as we hit our yearly dividend goal a month earlier and we couldn’t be any happier. Key points from this month’s dividend income are:

• We received dividend deposits from total 14 companies (9 Canadian & 5 US), with total value of $214.16
• Dripped 3 additional shares for Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza & Plaza REIT
• Received increased dividends from: General Mills 4.1%, Saratoga Investment: 2.5%, Pizza Pizza – 10%
• As I mentioned last month, A&W announced a special dividend of 0.30 per share on top of their regular 0.10, and it got deposited this month! This special payment compensated for Apr-May-Jun months when they had suspended their dividends.
• Fortis announced a dividend raise of 5.8% while OTEX raised it by staggering 15%, both effective Dec’20

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

As you can see from the tracker, we beat 2020 dividend goal by $77 with a month to spare. All dividends now on will contribute towards 2021 goal of $8500, which is quite steep. Currently our entire portfolio’s projected annual dividend earning is about $7000 meaning we have to fill the gap of about $1500 in dividends by Drips, Raises & More money! I have many quality stocks with rich history of dividend growth and some of this gap will surely be filled by the raises. Also, not to forget all dividends earned are reinvested via drips or occasional buyings, which will again increase the future dividends. Worst case I need to pump in $30000 in new money to increase my annual dividend by $1500 at 5% yield, some of it will be taken care of by RRSP investment at work and for the rest, I may have to rob a bank or Oh yes.. just take a RRSP loan!

My Marketplace

November was also the busiest month in entire year and I literally had to come up with a quick table to show the trades! I ripped off the bandage on my laggard stocks which I was considering selling ever since pandemic hit and they dropped by like 60%-90%. I booked nearly $11000 in losses on just 4 stocks but I am quite happy with the sellouts as I was able to deploy the proceeds (and some additional cash) in much better options which already started showing results. While I opened no new position, I added to my existing ownerships in 7 different companies. I have full faith in all of them except Suncor which I bought to lower my book value a bit. These buyings will boost the annual dividend by about $400 at a healthy yield of 3.7%.

Along with above trades, I kept accumulating CIBC shares as part of my regular contributions in RRSP through my employer.

Rental Earnings

The cash flow from the rental property in which we have 50% ownership remained the same. After deducting mortgage & maintenance fee from the rent, the property gives us about $180 in positive cash flow. The months when we also have to pay the property tax installment, the cash flow dips to negative. Overall we are losing about $100 a month but it is still a good deal when you look at the bigger picture. The price appreciation on this townhouse is already about 20% in less than a year and the longer we keep the better capital gain we’ll see. The other property that we bought is still far from fruition and the patience as well as cash continues to drain! But I have full confidence in the investment.

Lending Interest Earnings

Lending income kept nosediving as compared to previous months as we are paying more interest on various line of credit accounts and hence net earning continue to slide. This aligns with our goal to decrease the interest earnings and continue diverting the funds to real estate or better investment prospects.

Concluding November reporting gives immense satisfaction as we reached our yearly dividend goal and we already started looking at the next years’ planning and implementation. Feel free to subscribe using a widget at the bottom of the page to get an update on our monthly blog, I don’t spam and you will only get an email whenever I post on this website.

Thank you for the read and see you next month and until then… Stay indoor, stay safe and Save-Invest-Repeat. 😊