Welcome to another monthly dividend income update.
The market was somewhat volatile in November. The S&P 500, NASDAQ, and TSX all started November relatively strong, then ran into AI bubble concerns in mid-November. This caused the stock market indices to drop around 5% before recovering slightly by the end of the month.
This is why you need to ignore the day-to-day market volatility and noise and focus on the long term!
I mentioned in the October dividend income update that we spent the entire month in Denmark. It was great to spend time with our Danish relatives and expose both kids to Danish culture. We left Denmark in November and stopped in Iceland for five days before returning to Vancouver.
Last June, we spent 8 days in Iceland. We really enjoyed Iceland, so we thought it would be a fun and different experience to spend some time in this beautiful country in the winter.
Before our arrival, I was a bit worried about the weather as we were staying in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, about 2.5 hours away from Keflavík International Airport and about 2 hours north of Reykjavík. Any winter storms or poor weather would mean longer driving times.
Fortunately, we had very good weather while in Iceland. We had five days of clear weather with temperatures around 2 degrees Celsius! (Before our arrival, it snowed a ton in Reykjavík and shortly after our departure, the weather changed, with the temperatures dropping to below -5 degrees Celsius)
Here are some pictures from our stop in Iceland. I plan to write a trip report later with more details about our trip.
Arriving in Iceland
Enjoying Blue Lagoon
The cabin we stayed in…with a sauna! We utilized the sauna the entire stay…going in multiple times a day.
Driving around, beautiful views everywhere
Exploring the area by Selvallafoss
Exploring the Cave Vidgelmir… a lava cave deep in the ground
Dividend Income – November 2025
In November, we received dividends 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)
- Procter & Gamble (PG)
- Royal Bank (RY.TO)
- SmartCentre REIT (SRU.UN)
- Waste Connections (WCN.TO)
In total, we received $3,685.96 from 11 companies. After a fantastic October, we saw a smaller dividend income for November. This is expected, though, since November is one of the weaker months for us in terms of dividend income.
Compared to November 2024, we saw a YoY growth of 6.74%. This was one of the weaker growth months, unfortunately. It would be nice to boost the dividend income level for these weaker months – February, May, August, and November. However, I don’t want to buy more stocks simply based on when they pay dividends. Such a selection method may create several potential problems, including overpaying for certain stocks, limiting the available stocks to choose from, and missing out on other buying opportunities.
I believe investors should expect and be OK with having some variation in the monthly dividend income. The important part is the annual dividend total, not the fluctuation of the monthly dividend income value.
Dividend Hikes
In November, the following companies announced dividend hikes:
- Fortis increased its dividend payout by 4.1% to $0.64 per share
- Telus increased its dividend payout by 0.5% to $0.4184 per share
- Granite REIT increased its dividend payout by 4.41% to $0.2958 per share
- Alimentation Couche-Tard increased its dividend payout by 10.3% to $0.215 per share
These four dividend hikes increased our forward annual dividend by $109.43.
Dividend Reinvestment Plans
Since 2011, we have enrolled in dividend reinvestment plans (DRIP) whenever we are eligible. Initially, we only enrolled stocks for which we received enough dividends to cover one or more shares. To make life easier, we eventually told the brokers to enroll in DRIP for all the accounts. If we didn’t receive sufficient dividends to cover one share, the money would get deposited in our accounts.
Questrade has made enrolling in DRIP much easier nowadays, as you can enable and disable DRIP under your account management directly. You can also enable and disable DRIPS for individual holdings. TD, on the other hand, requires you to contact them directly to set DRIP up (i.e. calling). This process is highly inefficient and time-consuming. I wish TD would get into the 21st century soon…
Wealthsimple allows fractional DRIP so you can invest all the dividends received into full and fractional shares. This is a great way to take advantage of the power of compounding. However, unlike Questrade, you can only enable or disable fractional DRIP for the entire account, not individual holdings. This is a feature I really wish Wealthsimple could enable in the near future.
Not only does DRIP allow you to take advantage of the power of compounding, it also allows you to dollar cost average – when the stock price is high, you drip fewer shares or not drip at all (only applicable when you do synthetic drips and buy full shares), when the stock price is low, you can drip more shares.
In November, we dripped the following shares:
- 0.3031 shares of Apple
- 0.5386 shares of AbbVie
- 3 shares of Bank of Montreal
- 0.0547 shares of Costco
- 1.7903 shares of Emera
- 0.4925 shares of Granite REIT
- 2.2202 shares of National Bank
- 4.0343 shares of Royal Bank
- 6 shares of SmartCentres REIT
- 0.1026 shares of Waste Connections
In total, $2,341.81 out of the $3,685.96 was invested right away, resulting in 18.5363 additional shares in our dividend portfolio. More importantly, we increased our forward annual dividend by $77.45 via DRIP, which is equivalent to a 3.31% yield.
Stock Transactions
It was relatively quiet on the stock transaction front in November. We simply used residual dividends in our accounts to buy more shares.
- 12.7053 shares of Capital Power Corp (CPX.TO)
- 6 shares of iShares ex-Canada international ETF (XAW.TO)
- 5 shares of Brookfield Corporation (BN.TO)
- 0.1 shares of Invesco Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQM)
All these transactions added roughly $41.59 toward our forward annual dividend income.
Dividend Scorecard
Here’s our dividend scorecard for November:
It was a lower and weaker dividend income for November than in other months, but we did great in terms of increasing our forward annual dividend income. Adding $228.47 in forward annual dividend income, at a 4% yield, that’s like adding $5,711.75. I would be very happy to add around $200 in forward annual dividend income every month because that would equate to adding $2,400 for the entire year!
I get a lot of the same questions from readers, so I figured it would be worthwhile to answer some of them here.
Here are two common questions I have received from readers lately:
Question #1: What is your portfolio value?
Answer #1:
Man, this is probably the number 1 question I get ALL THE TIME. People look at our monthly dividend income and always wonder what our portfolio value is.
When I started this blog, I made two specific rules for myself. The first one is that I will never disclose our actual net worth. The second rule is that I will never disclose our actual portfolio value.
Why? Because of privacy reasons. Although I started blogging anonymously, I have been using the name Tawcan. Tawcan is a word I invented since I started using the internet in the late 90s. Therefore, it doesn’t take much effort to link my actual name to Tawcan. When I eventually revealed my identity with the MoneySense article, it was more important than ever not to disclose these numbers.
I do not have any plans to deviate from my rules.
Having said that, it’s really not that hard to get a ballpark of our portfolio value.
If you look at our dividend income above, we should end 2025 with about $64,000 in dividend income. You can easily work backwards by using an estimated portfolio yield rate. If you look at our dividend portfolio, you’ll see that we don’t own any of those high-yield covered call “crappy” ETFs or super high-yield leverage covered call dumper fire YieldMax ETFs (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Therefore, it’s reasonable to use a portfolio yield between 3 to 4% to estimate our portfolio value.
If you do that, it would give you a range of $1.6 million to $2.13 million.
Yes, I realized that’s a wide range of $530,000 between $1.6 million and $2.13 million.But I will never give you a smaller range than that!
In case you’re wondering, based on the same calculation, our portfolio value over the years would have been like this:
YearDividend IncomePortoflio value at 3%Portfolio value at 4%2011$675.21$22,507.00$16,880.252012$2,484.37$82,812.33$62,109.252013$5,456.20$181,873.33$136,405.002014$8,362.30$278,743.33$209,057.502015$10,318.02$343,934.00$257,950.502016$12,559.74$418,658.00$313,993.502017$14,834.38$494,479.33$370,859.502018$18,734.29$624,476.33$468,357.252019$23,049.16$768,305.33$576,229.002020$26,975.01$899,167.00$674,375.252021$30,912.20$1,030,406.67$772,805.002022$42,305.81$1,410,193.67$1,057,645.252023$50,189.07$1,672,969.00$1,254,726.752024$57,412.72$1,913,757.33$1,435,318.002025$64,000.00$2,133,333.33$1,600,000.00
Based on the estimated numbers above, the portfolio value has grown significantly since 2021.
Question 2: What do you think about Telus? Are you worried about the dividend cut just like BCE did earlier this year?
Answer #2:
Telus’ share price has been on a steady decline since 2011. It was hovering between $22 and $20 for a while until it took a nosedive after J.P. Morgan downgraded the stock in mid-November.
At a price of below $19, Telus’ dividend yield is north of 9%. I believe such a high yield is simply unsustainable.
Telus has a lot of debt. Based on the latest financial data, Telus has short-term debt of around $4.2 billion and long-term debt of around $25.7 billion, or total debt of ~$29.9 billion. In comparison, BCE has total debt of $40.5 billion with short-term debt of around $7.7 billion and long-term debt of around $32.8 billion.
Here are more comparisons between Telus and other North American telecommunication companies:
CompanyShort-term debtLong-term debtTotal debtLeverage RatioTelus$4.2B$25.7B$29.9B3.9x (Dec 2024)BCE$7.7B$32.8B$40.5B3.81x (Dec 2024)Rogers$7.2B$41.2B$48.5B4.5x (Dec 2024)Verizon$27B$144.6B$171.7B3xAT&T$5.1B$118.4B$123.5B2.7xT-Mobile US$5.3B$79B$84.3B2.6x
Surprisingly, Telus isn’t all that bad compared to its peers.
As you can see from below, telecom stocks have struggled in the last little while. AT&T has been the outlier. Its stock price started trending up after its 46% dividend reduction in 2022 and the strategic refocus on core telecom and fibre business momentum.
There are many similarities between Telus and BCE. As a shareholder of both companies, I do have a little bit more faith in Telus management than BCE simply due to BCE’s recent decisions to sell its minority stake in MSLE (an appreciating asset) and shortly after acquiring Ziply Fiber in the US (a challenging market).
Unlike BCE, Telus doesn’t have any media businesses, so Telus focuses mostly on its core telecommunication business. I believe this is a major positive for Telus over BCE.
Do we plan to continue to hold Telus? Yes, we plan to continue to hold Telus, but we do not plan to actively purchase more shares. For now, we are dripping more shares every quarter, but I may selectively turn off Telus DRIPs with Questrade accounts and continue to drip with TD and Wealthsimple. I may sell some Telus shares before the end of the year for tax harvest reasons, but more calculations are required before making that decision.
The million dollar question is whether Telus will cut its dividends or not. As mentioned, I don’t believe the 9% dividend yield is sustainable. I was a bit disappointed that Telus decided to raise its dividend payout by 0.5% in November. I believe that Telus would have been better off not raising its dividend payout and using the money to clean up its books. It has some valuable assets that it could potentially sell to create cash flow and pay off debt, like the real estate portfolio (~$3 billion), the copper infrastructure (~$500 million), and TELUS Health. Whether the company sells off these assets will remain to be seen.
Considering all the variables, I believe Telus should stop raising its dividend payout and trim its dividends by 25% to 40%. At the current price, I believe the market has priced in the eventual dividend cut. Selling Telus shares at such a low point simply makes no sense (unless you can use the loss to offset capital gains in a non-registered account). Therefore, we plan to continue to hold and see how things unfold.
Note: On Dec 3rd, Telus announced it would halt dividend increases. This was seen by investors as a step in the right direction. The announcement came a few weeks after the 0.5% dividend payout increase so it makes me wonder why Telus even made the payout increase in the first place. Is this the first step towards cutting dividends in 2026? My 8-ball is fuzzy but when BCE didn’t do the same step before cutting its dividend payout. Therefore, as investors we can only wait and see what happens.
Summary – Dividend Income November 2025 Update
With one more month left for 2025, we have received a total of $59,997.71 in dividend income. Wow, only $2.29 away from our goal of $60,000!
Looking at the December 2024 dividend income, I believe we will end up with around $64,000 in dividend income. This means we would be ahead of our dividend income projection by one year, which is fantastic!
To put things in perspective. At $59,997.71, that is equivalent to:
- $179.63 per day or $7.48 per hour that our dividend portfolio is generating for us
- $1,249.95 per week or $31.25 per hour wage after 48 working weeks
We can’t wait to finish 2025 with a strong December.
How was your November dividend income?
