March 2020 Passive Income Report – $1,252.63‬

March 2020 Passive Income Report – $1,252.63‬

Another day of lock down, but the money keeps coming!

Wow what a month.. Things have changed quite a bit since the last update that’s for sure. Cases are increasing every day and things are clearly nothing like the sars epidemic was.

Gas is cheap but we are are barely even leaving our house these days. I just drive by and think to myself wow that’s cheap and then look down at my still full tank of gas…… Me and the wife are both done work for the time being, as we are classified non essential.

It’s great having the wife here though, as it’s not that often the 4 of us are together 24 hours a day……. 7 days a week………………. haha. I think she’s getting sick of us, but she has nowhere to go! =)

At the beginning of the month (Pre lockdown) our son went to Disney for 9 days with the g-parents and 2 our cousins. They had a fantastic time, but we are glad he’s back. Things in the house were a lot quieter though without a 7 year old running around. While he was away we decided to take advantage of the nice weather and head to the zoo. Always great times there – Lions, Tigers and bears oh my kinda stuff.

I’m glad we took advantage of those times because basically a week later Disney closed and things went lock down mode. Now I’m basically playing the switch with the kid, rocking the powerwheels, throwing the frisbee, Got the property all cleaned up and edged, and now I’m just finishing redoing our deck. (Well half) After this is done I plan on fertilizing and mulching the place. Once we are allowed to go back to work things will be really busy.

It’s a great time to hang with the family, get stuff done around the place, go for walks in the bush, play poker online with friends and watch a lot of netflix. We finished tiger king and just watched the platform. The platform was pretty unique. I enjoyed it, the wife not so much. Check it out. Greg told me to watch Ford vs Ferrari but I haven’t watched that yet, soon enough. You watching anything good?

Clearly this month hasn’t been ideal for our finances, but that passive income keeps on coming.

 

Raises or Cuts

In times like these you can only hope you don’t experience a dividend cut, especially in the oil and gas sector. Unfortunately there was 0 raises for our portfolio this month and 1 cut. The one I knew might come after oil got killed…

•  Interpipeline slaughtered their dividend by 72% yesterday. Reducing it from 14.25 cents per month down to 4. I will continue to hold them and even debate adding here. They are sooo cheap and can easily maintain that 5% plus dividend now. The heartland complex will still be huge for them next year. But at the same time, this was a eye opener for me. Do I want to keep investing in oil and gas? Should I just stick to blue chip – wide moat stocks only? We own 204 shares so this cut reduces our yearly dividends by $250.88. Yup a huge hit… Man Down.

Total Added Income from Dividend Raises in 2020 – $90.05

Dividend Cuts Reduced Dividends in 2020 by $250.88

Dividend Income

12 Companies paid us this month.

Stocks	March 2019 Income	March 2020 Income
IBM	28.26 usd	45.36 usd
Russell Metals	17.48	sold
Altagas	2.40	2.40
Sienna Senior	2.45	sold
Highliner Foods	21.75	sold
Johnson & Johnson	0	12.35 usd
3m	0	17.64 usd
Canadian National Railway	33.33	35.65
Canadian Utility's	82.00 (2 Drip's)	87.95 (2 Drips)
Inter Pipeline	27.36 (1 Drip)	29.07 (2 Drip's)
Brookfield Renewable	94.27 (2 Drips)	105.64 (1 Drip)
Brookfield Property Partners	88.65 (3 Drips)	115.20 (9 Drips)
Dream Global Reit	20.40 (1 Drip)	Bought Out
Riocan	28.56 (1 Drip)	30.00 (1 Drip)
Extendicare	17.24 (2 Drips)	18.16 (2 Drips)
Enbridge	157.93 (2 Drip's)	180.63 (3 Drips)
Shaw	31.30 (1 Drip)	sold
Totals	653.38	680.05

7 stocks Dripped in March.

Haha! A positive quarter ending month. It has been along time coming. We sold a bunch of stocks that pay during this period for our 2 new to us cars in the last 1.5 years. It feels great to surpass last years totals, so we can continue moving forward with positive numbers hopefully. Drips were essentially the same other than Brookfield Property, what a difference a crash can make. The stock is essentially half price from where it was a month ago. 9 shares dripped, oh man I love it! Reits have been absolutely killed these days.

We also got our first JNJ payment, very nice. I’m leaning towards just beefing up this position these days, hope that recent pop fades back down. Also got to love seeing both Brookfield Renewable and BPY passing that 100$ mark, always love seeing those milestones getting passed.

If your interested check out our Previous Dividend Income Reports.

Our Drips (Dividend Reinvestment Program) added $30.70 to our yearly forward dividend’s this month.

Trailing 12 Month Return

Ahhhh no point waiting for RBC to tell me this. The portfolio dropped in value about 45k in the last month. I’m sure it’s not good. Long term it will be back, just like Terminator.

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Other Income

Private Investment Payment – $500.00

Nothing new here, just our regular monthly payment. (I don’t even have to edit this part every month) Steady Eddy…….

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Solar Income

In February (We always get paid a month later) our solar panel system generated 252 kWh. Since we bring in a fixed rate of 28.8 cents per kilowatt hour, Hydro One deposited $72.58 into our chequing account this month.

Last February the system generated $76.03, so we are slightly under. Pretty close though!

Total Income for 2020 – $149.76

System Installed January 2018

Total System Cost ——–$32,396.46

Total Income Received ——–$5,119.17

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Amount to Break even —- $-27,277.29

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Total March 2020 Passive Income – $‭ 1,252.63

March 2019 Passive Income – $1395.10

Total Passive Income Increase over last year. – negative

A negative growth rate. Im not too concerned though. Last year we got paid by google adsense and a siteground affiliate. Those 2 bonuses added over 165 bucks, so we are slightly higher overall.

Totals For 2020

Dividends Year To Date Total – $1,569.38
Other Passive Income Year to date – $2,048.68
Total Passive Income for 2020 —– $3,618.06
Year End Goal – $17,200 ——– %21.03

A little behind where we want to be at the moment, but Solar will soon pickup and if this market remains low we should be able to take advantage of it.

 

March 2020 Purchases / Sales

At the start of the month we decided to take advantage of these cheaper prices and added 10 more shares of Disney and started a position in Smart Centers by buying 45 shares here. In total these buys added $100.86. You can read about these 2 purchases here.

A week later the market really dropped and reits got absolutely hammered! We made 2 separate purchases of smart reit here and now have a full position. We added another 113 shares which brings in another $205.66. Smart reit was 50% cheaper than it was 3 weeks ago…

Sale

I Also sold 1 stock this month….. What? why would you sell? Stick to the plan. Don’t Sell. Honestly I kind of regret it, but at the same time I don’t. The market kept tanking and I started thinking what if this is going to be a lot worse than I expected.. What if me and the wife couldn’t work for a couple months instead of a couple weeks?

I decided to sell our position in Emera. A great stock for sure, but it was one I was still up on and Utility’s are our top sector. It also was worth about 5k which is the number I had in my head to sell. I sold this position with a 14% profit and about 2 years of dividends.

I plan on buying it back eventually, but since we don’t keep an emergency fund. The 5k is a nice emergency fund for the time being or could be used to buy deep value stocks if the market continues to plummet.

Goals Update

Read 3 Books I normally Wouldn’t Consider

• I’m continuing to read – Why we sleep by Matthew Walker. I should be reading more these days, but tend to be doing other things vs sitting in a quite room reading.

Go 3 Times and Pick Up Garbage

• Last year picking up garbage was one of my goals. We did it but didn’t go out of our way to drive somewhere. This year I want to make 3 trips to do just that. The ground is covered in snow, so that ain’t happening at the moment.

Charities

•  We continue to make our monthly donation of 75 bucks to The Nature Conservancy of Canada

Increase Dividends by $1,713.42 this year. (bringing our forward income from dividends to $7,500 a year)

• With New Purchases, Drips and Dividend Raises this month we added $337.22 to our dividend Portfolio. But we also got hit with that huge dividend cut, so in total we added $86.34 this month. Total increased so far in 2020 is $482.28. 28.13% of our goal.

Etf Monthly Purchase of $250

• We added 11 more shares of xaw etf this month for roughly 250 bucks in our questrade account. Questrade* is great because it offers free etf trades and cheaper stock trading options than most Canadian brokers. $250.00 a month would kill us if we needed to pay high trading fees.
• * Note the questrade link is a affiliate link and at no additional cost to you, I would get a little payment if you were to sign up. You could get $50 in free trades by using my link though.

180 Pounds

• I have been working out pretty regularly but not seeing a loss on the scale yet. Muscle weighs more than fat, but I’ll be honest staying at home 24/7 makes me snack a whole lot more….

Diet

• As I mentioned above the diet hasn’t been good this month. Dinner’s have been healthier but snacking has not. Definitely room for improvement.

Conclusion

A weird month overall. A growth in the passive income department and even after a huge dividend cut the income grew a bit. Life is different. Clearly once this virus passes, people will be dying to go out and do stuff again. Lock down is hard.. haha. At the same time it does make me question my stance on retirement. I have always said I wouldn’t want to retire early. Now that the family is all here together and I’m doing projects outside, maybe it wouldn’t be sooo bad especially if we could actually go out!

Eventually this will pass and in the future we will look back at this time. Did we make the right moves? What could we have done better? This has been my first real crash we have experienced and I think I’m learning a couple things about it, to improve things going forward.

Wish you all Nothing but the best

Cheers to Heath and Wealth!

How are things for you? Are you working still? Worried? Sticking to the plan? Buying any stocks?

I Always Appreciate Your Comments.

“Sometimes you have to experience what you don’t want in life to come to a full understanding of what you do” – Mandy Hale