Dividend Income – October 2025 Update » Tawcan

Hello everyone, welcome to another monthly dividend income update. Can you believe that we’re now in the final stretch of 2025? I feel like 2025 has flown by in the blink of an eye. Who would have predicted the stock market would continue to climb despite all the economic and political uncertainties and turmoil? 

I certainly didn’t! 

For example, did anyone predict that the stock market would recover and continue to go up so quickly after the ~3% drop on October 10?

Although I had no doubt the market would recover over the long term, I certainly didn’t know which way the market would go in the short term after October 10. 

There’s a reason why I am not a stock analyst! At best, I can only predict what the market will do in the short term with 49.9% accuracy. This is why I strongly believe in time in the market and not timing the market.

On the personal front, we spent the entire month of October in Denmark, visiting relatives and friends. We were originally planning to visit Denmark over Christmas and the New Year. However, due to various major birthday milestones in October, we changed our plan.

Kid 1.0 & Kid 2.0 are seasoned travellers nowadays

Walking around in Nyhavn in Copenhagen

Nice view of Copenhagen from a waterbus

Checking out the Copenhagen Zoo

We came across a few Bubble Tea shops while in Copenhagen.

Celebrations in Denmark are always a blast and usually last many hours. The birthday celebrations we went to either started in the midmorning and lasted till before dinner or started around lunch time, continued with afternoon coffee hygge, then dinner, and finally wrapped around 9 PM. Needless to say, these celebrations are very hyggelig and lots of food and drinks were consumed.

Birthday lunch celebration in the Copenhagen Zoo restaurant. It was neat because we could see the panda walking around while enjoying our food

Fancy smørrebrød (open-faced sandwich) for a birthday celebration

Kagekone (Cake Woman) for a birthday

Celebrating another birthday, at the same location as our Danish wedding

Party food – desserts

Another birthday celebration

Although I wasn’t off work the entire time while in Denmark, I was fortunate enough to be able to work remotely from Denmark. While working remotely is great, dealing with different time zones meant I had many late evening meetings. 

Since we spent most of our time in a small town in Western Denmark, whenever I was not working or not celebrating birthdays, Mrs. T, the kids, and I were able to enjoy the slower things that countryside Denmark had to offer.

Kid 1.0 roasting an apple over fire

Roasting bread over fire

Apple picking

Nice sunrise

Helping out with the potato harvest

Dividend Income – October 2025

Back to dividend income, shall we? 

In October, we received dividend paycheques from the following companies:

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

Despite only receiving 14 dividend paycheques, the total amount was quite significant – $7,487.30! This marked the third largest monthly dividend amount so far in 2025. 

A solid way to start Q4!

Compared to October 2024, we saw a YoY increase of 16.27%. I was very pleased to see a number above 15%. This means that after 10 months, our average YoY dividend growth rate is at 13.79%. It would be nice to end the year with a rate above 15% but I doubt we can achieve that with only two months left for the year.

Dividend Hikes

It was nice to see a couple more dividend hikes announced in October compared to September. In October, the following companies announced dividend hikes:

• Waste Connections increased dividend payout by 11% to $0.35 per share.
• McDonald’s increased dividend payout by 5% to $1.86 per share
• Visa increased dividend payout by 13.6% to $0.67 per share
• AbbVie increased dividend payout by 5.5% to $1.73 per share

These four dividend hikes increased our forward annual dividend income by $71.46. While it’s not a lot, I’ll take a small dividend increase over no increase at all. 

Dividend Reinvestment Plans

We have been reinvesting 100% of our dividends since we started our dividend growth investing journey. To put dividends to use as quickly and efficiently as possible, we have enrolled in dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPs) so that whenever we received dividends, the money would get reinvested right away to get a full share or more.

Getting a full share or more worked quite well, but it meant that some stocks, due to lower yield – higher price or us not owning enough shares, the dividend amount wasn’t enough to drip one full share.

So we’d have money left sitting in our account. For us to purchase more shares of any stock or ETF, we had to pay trading commissions, $9.99 for TD Waterhouse and $4.95 for Questrade.

Because Wealthsimple supports fractional DRIPs, earlier this year, I transferred my RRSP and TFSA from Questrade to Wealthsimple and started a non-registered account with them too. This way, we could fully reinvest dividends received immediately.

Since we transferred our RRSP and TFSA to Wealthsimple, Questrade started offering free commission trading. This key feature allowed us to save on trading commissions when we invest dividends left over in our accounts. Introducing this feature meant we weren’t in a big rush to transfer Mrs. T’s accounts from Questrade to Wealthsimple. 

Some of you might ask why we haven’t moved my non-registered account from TD to Wealthsimple yet. There are three main reasons:

1. TD honours DRIP discounts from companies (and just started fractional DRIP shares)
2. I didn’t want to transfer the non-registered account and potentially mess up with tax reporting (should be a minimum risk but still…)
3. Our family RESP is with TD (we applied for BCTESG to get $1,200 tax-free money per kid) and TD charges a maintenance fee per quarter. We kept my non-registered account with TD to avoid this hefty fee.

Anyway, in October we dripped the following shares:

• 11.9225 shares of BCE.TO
• 7.5092 shares of BNS.TO
• 7.3912 shares of CIBC.TO
• 11.0486 shares of CNQ.TO
• 2.6874 shares of CPX.TO
• 0.4868 shares of GRT.UN
• 1.9676 shares of KO
• 4.6015 shares of POW.TO
• 6 shares of SRU.UN
• 39 shares of T.TO
• 12.2509 shares of TD.TO
• 10.3421 shares of TRP.TO
• 2.832 shares of VICI

At some point next year, we will likely turn off drips for our non-registered and RRSPs so we can start accumulating cash and build up cash reserves before we start living off dividends. But more on that in the future… 

Thanks to DRIP, we added $300.67 toward our forward annual dividend income. 

Stock Transactions

After months of consideration, we finally closed out our position in Procter & Gamble. 

PG has faced some tariff headwinds and the share price has staggered this year. Rather than waiting for the share price to recover, we decided to sell everything and invest the money elsewhere. 

With the proceeds from PG and some money saved up, we made the following purchases throughout October. 

• 148.5812 shares of Capital Power (CPX.TO): Capital Power has done well over the past year. With the increase in demand for AI and some companies establishing more AI data centres in Canada, I believe this bodes well for Capital Power.
• 24.5982 shares of Brookfield Corporation (BN.TO): We bought some Brookfield Corporation shares before the 3:2 share split but decided to add more when the share price dropped by over 4% on October 10. Long term I strongly believe the BN share price will continue to go up and provide solid total returns.
• 6.2808 shares of Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO): slowly adding more CNQ whenever we have a small amount of leftover cash after dividend reinvestment. 
• 29 shares of iShares ex-Canada all world ETF (XAW): continue adding XAW whenever it makes sense to increase our diversification. 

All the transactions increased our forward annual dividend income by $49.00. 

Note: We also used a portion of the proceeds from PG to buy Amazon before its quarterly announcement (an educated bet on our part, which has worked well so far).

Dividend Scorecard

Here’s our dividend scorecard for October:

Overall, I’m quite pleased with our results in October, especially knowing that we added $421.13 toward our forward annual dividend income.

Looking ahead

For the remainder of the year, it’s all about saving money and preparing for next year’s TFSA contribution room (I assume it’ll be $7,000 per person again). If it makes sense, I may close out more positions and use the proceeds to buy more shares of existing stocks we own. 

One of the stocks I have considered closing out is VICI Properties. Although VICI has a very high yield of over 6% and has raised its dividend payout in the past few years, the share price performance has been somewhat flat. I am also a bit concerned about Las Vegas’ economy. From the news I have read, it seems that not as many tourists are visiting Las Vegas and this may negatively impact VICI Properties. Furthermore, Chipotle recently reported flat same-store sales and traffic drops, indicating that consumers aren’t eating out as much and are really watching where they’re spending their money. 

Are these early signs of a potential recession/bear market? I don’t know but perhaps it might be wise to close out VICI, take a hit on the dividend income front, and invest the money elsewhere? 

When it comes to it, we plan to continue executing our boring strategy that we have been doing since we started our financial independence journey: 

1. Earn income
2. Live below our means
3. Increase our savings gap whenever possible
4. Invest money toward stocks and index ETFs
5. Reinvest 100% dividends 
6. Rinse and repeat

Summary – Dividend Income October 2025 Update

After ten months in 2025, we have received $56,310.41 in dividends. Looking at our 2024 total, it means we are only $1,102.31 away from beating that number. By the time this post goes live, I’m sure we will have received enough dividends to exceed our 2024 dividend income amount!

It’s pretty amazing how quickly we have amassed such a sizable dividend portfolio that works hard for us, so we don’t have to. The growth of our dividend income has been quite astonishing. At this point, I’m pretty sure we’d end the year with over $60,000 in dividends.  If you asked me 10 years ago in 2015 whether I believed our dividend income would exceed $60,000 in 10 years, I probably would have told you that was a far-fetched fantasy. 

By increasing our savings gap, being dedicated to investing in stocks over the long term, keeping out the daily noises, and staying invested over time, we have made tremendous progress.

To put things in perspective, $56,310.41 after 304 days or 44 working weeks, it is equivalent to:

• $185.23 per day or $7.72 per hour that we are making, thanks to our dividend portfolio, regardless of what we’re doing
• $1,279.78 per working week or  $31.99 per hour 

We are very thankful that we started our financial independence journey 14 years ago and that we are getting closer and closer to our goal of living off dividends!