Dividend income growth... 16 months in review.

If you follow any of my previous posts, you know I am a believer in dividend growth investing.  We've consistently been able to achieve an increase of our portfolio's annual dividend income since we started using this strategy with the lowest annual portfolio dividend income increase of approximately 5%.  We grow our dividend income through dividend reinvestment, new monies added to the pot, and from dividend increases.  This year and a half has been a bit of a special case from past years because we have added NO NEW MONIES to our investment pot.  Therefor the increases over the past 16 months are solely from the pooling of dividends and then reinvesting them, and from dividend increases which have been plentiful this year.   I've also incorporated some covered call writing in our RRSPs to add a little extra cash-flow but those are really small potatoes compared to effect of the reinvestment and increases of the existing dividends.  From July1 2013 to October 30 of 2014 we have increased our dividend income by a compounded rate of 17.5% over those 16 months.. or just over 1% per month.  Our portfolio currently yields about 4.5%, so over the 16 months about 6% of the growth came from reinvestment and the remaining 11.5% is from dividend increases.  This represents an annual dividend growth rate of about 8.6%. Not too shabby.

The following chart shows the increase to our annual dividend income for each month, which includes both reinvestment and dividend increases.

Note that every month there was an increase in our total dividend income.  Every month had some form of increase and there were no decreases.  In order to give this chart a bit more meaning, lets assume that July 1st 2013, we made $10000 a year in dividend income.  The monthly increases to that amount would look like this:

... to the point where $10000 in dividend income turns into $11749, 16 months later.

If you've been watching the stock market over any period of time, you know that we always see increases and decreases in stock prices, usually by the second during market hours sometimes with big swings to the upside and the downside.  This watching of the market go up an down can rattle some people as they watch their portfolio value increase or decrease by up to double digit swings within short periods of time.  The above chart is the kind of chart I like.  Our dividend income continues to rise month after month.  Some months we had dividend increases and other months we deployed some of the dividend monies that had built up and bought some more stock.. usually ones that we thought were depressed. on sale, or were due for a sustainable dividend hike in the future.