Say goodbye to the morning rush — the school holidays are finally here.
For parents, this is your moment to step off the treadmill.
Switch off the alarm and settle in for a movie marathon with your family.
Or pack the kids off to the beach and let them catch a bit of sun building sandcastles.
Of course, a little extra cash in your pocket makes those moments sweeter.
Luckily, May is one of the best months of the year for dividends.
DBS Group (SGX: D05), for one, paid out S$0.81 per share last month — S$0.66 in ordinary dividends, plus a S$0.15 capital return.
Own 1,000 DBS shares, and you were S$810 richer just before the holidays.
And DBS wasn’t alone.
Shareholders of bourse operator Singapore Exchange (SGX: S68), or SGX, pocketed S$0.1125 a share.
These are just two of the many companies that paid out last month.
Extra cash amid rising inflation
This year, though, dividends are quietly doing a far more important job.
Think back to your last meal at the hawker centre.
That plate of chicken rice, that kopi, that bowl of sliced fish soup — none of it costs what it did a few years ago.
The Middle East crisis has caused oil prices to rise, and the after-effect is already seeping into our daily expenses.
Here’s the thing about prices: they rarely come back down.
And that slow, steady leak shrinks the value of your dollars.
A growing dividend does the opposite.
It’s a pay raise that lands in your account — the one you didn’t have to request.
Here’s what I mean.
Two years ago, in May 2024, our flagship Smart Dividend Portfolio had collected around S$1,700 in dividends for the year.
This year? Nearly S$3,000.
That’s our annual income up by more than 70% — in just two years.
Try squeezing that out of a fixed deposit.
So how did S$1,700 become nearly S$3,000?
No magic. Three things did the heavy lifting.
First, we kept adding.
Between 2024 and 2026, we steadily put fresh money to work — no different from the everyday investor who tops up his holdings every month, payday after payday.
It’s consistency, not cleverness.
Second — and this is the part you don’t want to miss — the dividends themselves grew.
DBS and SGX both raised their payouts over the past five years.
And what a five years it was: a global pandemic, a worldwide vaccination drive, the steepest interest rates in a generation, a tariff war, and conflict in the Middle East.
Through all of it, both companies kept paying. And kept raising.
Take DBS.
When we bought our shares at S$19.34 in April 2020, the regulator was about to cap bank dividends so lenders could conserve capital through the pandemic.
DBS’s quarterly payout was trimmed to around S$0.16 a share.
Scary times.
But the portfolio held anyway.
Look at the climb since: roughly S$0.33 per share by 2022, S$0.54 by 2024, and this year, S$0.66 in ordinary dividends — before you even count the S$0.15 capital return on top.
SGX tells a similar story.
Five years ago, the exchange paid around S$0.08 a share each quarter.
Today, it pays S$0.1125 a share — and management has pledged to keep nudging it higher by a quarter-cent every three months, all the way through 2028.
Third, the portfolio reinvested the proceeds.
Every dividend The Smart Dividend Portfolio collects goes straight back to work, buying more shares — which, in turn, pay the portfolio even more dividends.
The SGX position is a good example.
The portfolio bought it four separate times since 2020, at prices between S$9.06 and S$9.71.
SGX’s share price today? S$21.98.
Get Smart: The quiet bonus most income investors miss
That last number points to something easy to overlook.
When a company can sustain and grow its dividend, the market tends to notice — and reward it with a higher share price, too.
In other words, you don’t have to choose between income and capital gains.
Get the business right, and you often get both: a rising dividend in one hand, a rising share price in the other.
DBS and SGX have been good to the portfolio. But they are far from the only ones.
As things stand, our Smart Dividend Portfolio holds seven stocks that have more than doubled our initial investment.
And here’s the part I find most exciting.
The portfolio is just six years old.
In investing terms, that’s a toddler — still finding its feet, with most of its growing-up still ahead of it.
If this is what the early years look like, I’m more than happy to be patient for whatever comes next.
At the Smart Dividend Portfolio, that’s exactly the job we set out to do: assemble a basket of Singapore-listed companies with one purpose — to pay us a growing, dependable income, year after year.
The S$3,000 the portfolio has collected so far this year is simply that plan, doing its work.
Until next time.
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Disclosure: Chin Hui Leong owns shares of DBS Group and Singapore Exchange.
