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Passive Income Update: February 2023

March 7, 2023 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

Happy March everyone! I’m getting excited for the weather to get better. It’s still too cold for me up here in New England. At least the days are getting longer. I recently gave an an update here about little stuff going on in our life. I’ve been a little down lately, but can you tell that I’m trying to be more upbeat?

We started February by watching Punxsutawney Phil’s Groundhog Day routine. I took a picture of the kids with my laptop, but I couldn’t figure out why until just now. It worked out well that it happened before school. It looked like they had a good party going on down there. Maybe one day we’ll go in person.

We went into Providence to do some ice bumper boats. It’s like bumper cars, but you do on ice. It’s expensive, but it’s become a tradition now. We also use it as an excuse to get up to Providence to do some other things that we wouldn’t normally do down in Newport.


(Here’s what the ice bumper boats look like.)

I started co-teaching Lego Robotics with another parent for my younger kids’ class. It’s a bunch of 2nd and 3rd graders meeting at 5:30PM. At that point, they are barely evolved Gremlins, but we’ve managed to learn something. Perhaps more importantly, they kids are having fun. The high school class is there at the same time and they’ve built some very impressive things, which is always entertaining. The group got a grant or somehow bought a $100,000 Boston Dynamics dog (Spot), but we didn’t play with that until March, so you’ll have to come back next month to see it.

My wife and I also celebrated Valentine’s Day at the Officer’s Club on the base. We were married there almost 16 years ago. We first went that dinner 16 years ago, because they wanted us to see what a function was like before getting married there. We’ve been trying to go whenever they have offered it. It’s a little like an anniversary of sorts.

We finally got a little snow, just a few inches – enough for the kids to get some sledding in. It was fun for about the first 45 minutes and then they proceeded to try to kill each other. This happens a lot.

Let’s start the new and improved Passive Income report. I’ve streamlined this a bit, so hopefully, it will be a faster, easier read. I’ll try to continue to trim it down through the year.

I used to call it alternative income, but that idea didn’t catch on as it did when I used it back in 2008. Everyone loves “passive income” better. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you may have some questions about the math that I’m going to use in this post.

The way I calculate these numbers requires that little explanation – it isn’t intuitive. I do things a little differently to show the journey. For example, we don’t have much real passive income from our rental properties. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where we are on that journey. Over time, the bank owns less of the properties, and we own more of them. There will be no mortgages when this number gets to 100%, and all that rental income can be used for living expenses.

When calculating the percentage of rental income, I take the rent (minus estimated expenses) and apply it to the portion of equity we own. Think of it like you and a friend owning a property 50/50. This would be how you’d handle it, with each of you splitting the profits at the end 50/50. If your friend is the bank and it owns 80%, you should only count on 20% of that net rental income. We used to be in that 20% range, but now it’s closer to 75%.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income

Passive Income Pyramid
My Passive Income Pyramid

I categorize our passive income into three primary sources that are represented mainly in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job,” – that’s not passive at all. (I have some income in that area, but that’s not the focus of this report.) I combine dog-sitting and blogging into one section of my “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. I can do other money-making activities while I board dogs. When I’m on vacation, some blog money still comes in. I combine real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way, if you want only to count those, you can do that.

New for this year, my passive income is only going to be 50% of blogging and dog-sitting income, 80% of real estate, and 100% of dividend income. That rewards types of income that are truly passive and punishes my quasi-passive sources like blogging.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

February is often a good month for dog sitting. A lot of schools have a February vacation. Our kids’ private school is unusual because they have a March vacation. That means that I’m around for when everyone else goes on vacation – which works out very well. My dog boarding income was 75% more than February of 2022, so that’s fantastic!


(I like when the dogs run like this, because they come back in and sleep for a few hours. That’s the easy money!)

Blogging income continues to go downhill. You may have noticed, but I haven’t been motivated to write a lot lately.

In January, “dogs and blogs” combined for $2,226.37. In February, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $5,521.50

That’s a really good number, but I needed it. January is typically bad. We’re going on vacation in March, which means limited dog boarding. Things will hopefully pick back up in April.

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 10-year-old is extremely good with dogs at this point. He can feed them, let them out, and play with them in the yard. He’s spending more time in front of the clients as a helper at pick-ups and drop-offs. My 9-year-old was a little slower to develop dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them.

Their help means I can pay them a legitimately earned income (a percentage of the overall dog-sitting income). Because the income is earned, they can save money in their kid Roth IRAs and it will be money that they’ll never pay tax on. Here’s why kids should start a Roth IRA as soon as possible.

2. Rental Property Income

Rental property income is very boring lately. When mortgage rates are high, we don’t see any gains in pricing. So we continue to build equity by paying own the mortgages. It’s slow going.

Unfortunately, one of our properties has had a few problems lately. I guess the boiler was never properly vented and that’s creating an issue that requires repiping a bunch of stuff. I think it might be better to just sell the properties and invest in the market. We’ll have to run the numbers and see what kind of return we’re getting from rents. We haven’t raised our rents in a long time and they are way under market value. Why deal with headaches and stress if we can make the same money more passively?


(It’s always fun to look at my kids’ homework. He didn’t get too far with regrouping/borrowing here, but it worked out in the end.)

In the last month, we went from 75.76% to 76.05% ownership of the equity in our properties. It’s a very tiny change from month to month. In a year, we might only get 3% more equity. If we owned both of our rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), we’d make about $2,200 a month after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance.

If you multiply our rents of $2,200 by the amount of equity we have, 76.05%, you get $1,673/mo. in estimated passive income. Last month it was $1,667/mo. This $6 in passive income isn’t going to do too much, but it adds up over time.

When I started tracking rental property income this way (January 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties, and the properties had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 of passive income back then. In six years, it grew a ton. We sold our biggest rental property last year and invested that money in the stock market. It’s much more passive now. That was a strong driver as to why I started to count certain passive income sources as less valuable than others in this report.

When we get to 100% ownership of the two properties, they should bring about $25,000 after expenses. Rent is inflation resistant as it’ll rise over time. That means that even though this is $25,000 in today’s dollars, it will still have that buying power in the future.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,673

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I look at our stock market investments. I assume we could earn a 2.5% dividend yield on those investments. That assumption is a conservative number that helps us think about what kind of cash we can expect. It should be easy to get that 2.5% number as we could simply put all of our portfolios in a high-dividend ETF. For example, the high-yield ETF, HDV, is currently paying a 3.52% yield.

With today’s interest rates, a 2.5% yield seems ridiculously low. I need to remember that interest rates could go back to where they were a year ago.


(I guess the kids are still young enough to enjoy a fun game of box! They ended up cutting this one into a house with a door they could call through. It was an access tunnel into a kids’ room for a few days.)

Most bloggers use the actual dividends they earned that month. I have quite a few accounts, and I’m too Lazy to add up the dividends on them. Even if we aren’t getting the 2.5% number now, we could always move the money around from growth to dividends if we needed to live off the cash flow. A vast majority of our money is in retirement accounts, so cash flow isn’t important to us now. I also combine all the taxable and retirement account numbers. It’s too much work to separate them out.

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The company is doing well, and they occasionally throw an extra profit-sharing check to me. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for this report, it makes sense to group all stock ownership in this bucket.

The markets moved down a bit, so this is going to go down too. Oh well, at least it generally moves up.

With the market recovery, our dividend-ish income grew quite a bit:

Total Dividend-ish Income: $3,960

Last month it was $4,031. That’s a loss of $71. So much for last month’s gain of over $180. It’s two steps forward and one step back.

In January 2017, the dividend income was at $1,180/mo. We’re almost at $50,000 a year – enough for us to live fairly well, especially if we paid off our mortgage. For the 35th month in a row (?), we’re looking into estate planning, but they gave us a lot of paperwork to do before we can move forward. I’m still not making any progress on this. For the first time in about 15 months, I got to a point where I thought I might be able to get the paperwork back out. One of my main goals for the year is to work on this, so hopefully, it won’t just become another wish.

Adjusted Passive Income

I used to combine real estate and dividend income into “very close to passive income.” However, now I’ll simply add up the 50% dogs/blogs, 80% real estate, and 100% dividend income. This makes things a lot easier.

Dog/Blogs: $5,521.50 – Adjusted to $2,760.75
Rentals: $1,673 – Adjusted to $1,338.40
Dividends: $3,960 – Remains at $3,960


Dogs/Blogs Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $8,059.15

Last month it was $6,477.79. So you can see that even if I count dogs/blogs at 50% that’s the main difference here. The rental and dividend stuff didn’t move too much.

Annually, this $8k-ish number is about $96,000 of passive income. As you’ll see in the chart below our 3-month average of this number is almost always in the $8-9k range. So I guess it’s reasonable to call it $100k a year.

It’s very useful to have different income streams. As blogging income becomes more difficult, dog boarding income has grown to supplement it. For a long time, real estate didn’t grow much at all; then, in the last couple of years, it grew a ton. The stock market grew for more than a decade from 2010 to 2021 but had a little setback last year. When something goes down, it seems another thing jumps up and over time we are making consistent progress.

The chance of all the income streams falling on hard times is low, but certainly not impossible. If we had another event like the Great Recession in 2008, they’d all be impacted quite a bit. In that case, we’d have to rely more on active income (the other 50% of our dogs/blogs, 20% of rental income, and other jobs) or rely on savings for a while. Also, dog boarding went away completely with COVID, so something like that can be just around the corner.


(The Valentine’s Day dinner was $85 (including a bottle of wine), which is a very, very nice for a date night.)

It’s also important to remember that these numbers aren’t “real” because much of the money isn’t liquid. We can’t spend those retirement investments without penalties. We can’t access the equity we have in properties without selling them or opening a HELOC. There are some money moves around these, but it’s not worth making any of them until my wife retires.

You’d think we’d feel “rich” having won the money game. We don’t. Our social circle tends to have generationally rich people. However, we are “rich” relative to many people’s circumstances. Money is relative. It’s nice not to have to worry about emergency bills and make reasonable splurges.

(The blue line represents the total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the three-month average.)

The three-month average in February 2021 was $5,678.80. In February 2022, it was $7,381.33. Now in February of 2023, it is $8,109.95. I think we can grow it more in 2023, but we shut down for renovations for half of January and lost some dog income. This helps me feel a little better about losing the blog income.

I don’t know how long dog boarding will last. It was a lot of work last year. This year has been easier with the lighter schedule. I think that with dog boarding, either the market will change or I’ll change. Perhaps I’ll want to travel more. Perhaps, I’ll want a different challenge. I’m on my third career (software engineering, blogging, and dog boarding), so it would be naive of me to think it might be my last.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning day job as a pharmacist or the minor freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years – neither is passive at all. When my wife retires, we can count her vested military pension as more passive income. It looks like it might be worth around $68,500 and includes access to a good health care plan. A pension is like a passive income cheat code. They are so rare nowadays.

For now, this active income (including the dog boarding) is the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well, get our kids a top education at a privaet school, pay off our mortgages, and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, but the flexibility gives me the time to stretch almost every dollar in much of our spending. It also allows me the flexibility to bring the kids to school and to after-school activities.

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t fascinating as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote, not its own article.

I truly believe that net worth is one of the most critical numbers in personal finance, so it is worth sharing in some way. Showing relative growth can be helpful.


(Finally, the proof of sledding. Good free fun if you already own a couple of sleds as we do.)

This past month, our net worth was down 1.25%. For the year it’s up 1.81%. We’re getting close to our all-time highs. That’s great, considering that the markets are still off their highs by nearly 10%. I feel like I can truly say that we’re in the best money situation we’ve ever been in. I know a lot of people can’t say the same – inflation and the down market can be difficult.

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s military pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether we should include it in our net worth. If the U.S. government didn’t back it like treasuries or FDIC, I may feel I should account for some uncertainty. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned a larger immediate salary if she didn’t work for the government. That would have boosted all the numbers across the board. Calculating pension value is not easy, but here’s the best way to know what a pension is worth.

It’s important to recognize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 16 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back in 2006, but that’s been my goal since the first sentence of this blog.

We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting. Many of those readers are saddled with huge student loans that we didn’t have to deal with. If you are one of these readers, I hope you won’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above. I didn’t start many of these graphs until year 10 of blogging and early retirement planning. Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15-20 years.

How was your month? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Alternative Income Tagged With: alternative income streams

Passive Income Update: January 2023

February 14, 2023 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

We’re at the point in the new year where I’m no longer writing 2022 on my checks. Wait, I don’t write checks – all my money has been automated for years. Well, at least I generally know what year it is now. This is an excellent time to review those 2023 goals and resolutions.

Usually, I use the Super Bowl as a reminder to get stuff into gear for Valentine’s Day. That wasn’t very helpful this year. Valentine’s Day snuck up on me very quickly. Fortunately, the local Navy Base has a fancy dinner for a reasonable price. I got reservations a couple of weeks ago, so at least there’s a bit of a plan.

January was a busy month for us. Half the month, we renovated the house. Clarification, we paid for people to come to renovate the home. We had 90% of the interior painted and fresh pet-friendly carpeting upstairs. That required shuffling everything from one room to another while they worked.

We celebrated two birthdays. Our youngest turned nine, and we had lunch and a trip to an arcade with a few friends.


[This is actually both our sons, but the other friends were there.]

Our dog celebrated his 14th birthday. I brought him to the beach, and a wave crushed him. It surprised me too. It wasn’t the most fantastic birthday present. We got him a new vet recently, so we’ll see if that helps him to get to a 15th birthday.

We had our usual bunch of events. The kids continue their martial arts. They were getting bored of it, but they introduced swords (big wooden sticks for them) this month, and that got them excited again.

My oldest finished his Lego Robotics class with a team win of the Core Values trophy at the state championship. It’s funny because he was the only fourth grader, and I felt like he was mostly on the sideline sitting and watching the older kids do everything – not award-winning sportsmanship. My youngest just started his robotics, and that’s more his thing. I’m a co-coach, and most of the kids are way more advanced than the Lego Explore curriculum.

Let’s start the New and Improved Passive Income report. I’ve streamlined this a bit, so hopefully, it will be a faster, easier read. I’ll try to continue to trim it down through the year.

However, that idea didn’t catch on as it did when I used it back in 2008. Everyone loves “passive income” better. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you may have some questions about the math that I’m going to use in this post.

The way I calculate these numbers requires that little explanation – it isn’t intuitive. I do things a little differently to show the journey. For example, we don’t have much real passive income from our rental properties. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where we are on that journey. Over time, the bank owns less of the properties, and we own more of them. There will be no mortgages when this number gets to 100%, and all that rental income can be used for living expenses.

When calculating the percentage of rental income, I take the rent (minus estimated expenses) and apply it to the portion of equity we own. Think of it like you and a friend owning a property 50/50. This would be how you’d handle it, with each of you splitting the profits at the end 50/50. If your friend is the bank and it owns 80%, you should only count on 20% of that net rental income. We used to be in that 20% range, but now it’s closer to 75%.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income

Passive Income Pyramid
My Passive Income Pyramid

I categorize our passive income into three primary sources that are represented mainly in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job,” – that’s not passive at all. (I have some income in that area, but that’s not the focus of this report.) I combine dog-sitting and blogging into one section of my “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. I can do other money-making activities while I board dogs. When I’m on vacation, some blog money still comes in. I combine real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way, if you want only to count those, you can do that.

New for this year, my passive income is only going to be 50% of blogging and dog-sitting income, 80% of real estate, and 100% of dividend income. That rewards types of income that are truly passive and punishes my quasi-passive sources like blogging.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

January is always my worst month with blogging and dog-sitting. Most people are finished with their holiday travel and don’t need a lot of dog boarding. Advertising agencies are resetting their budgets, so they aren’t spending much on bloggers. I would be nervous, but now I recognize that it happens every year.

Knowing that January was going to be a slow month, we closed the dog boarding business for two weeks so we could paint much of the interior of the house and install new carpeting. We ended up turning away significant business. Oh well. As my wife says, “We need to renovate sometime.” I took the opportunity to raise prices by about 7% – we had too much demand, and I’d rather have fewer dogs pay more.

The blogging income for the month was the lowest in years. Yikes! Blogging is trending towards zero while dog boarding goes up.

In December, “dogs and blogs” combined for $9,168.65. In January, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,226.37

Even with that big drop, I’m happy with the number. It was almost a perfect storm of terrible circumstances, but that kind of money still works well with our investments and other income. Sometimes it’s good to test the bottom.

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 10-year-old is extremely good with dogs at this point. He can feed them, let them out, and play with them in the yard. He’s spending more time in front of the clients as a helper at pick-ups and drop-offs. My 9-year-old was a little slower to develop dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them.

Their help means I can pay them a legitimately earned income (a percentage of the overall dog-sitting income). Because the income is earned, they can save money in their kid Roth IRAs and it will be money that they’ll never pay tax on. Here’s why kids should start a Roth IRA as soon as possible.

2. Rental Property Income

Our rental properties have been very boring for several months. With mortgage rates high, property values have come down a tiny bit. We’re not seeing the great appreciation that we saw last year. However, we continue to pay down the mortgages every month. The result is a lot like running in the place – we aren’t going very far.

We might be able to raise rents this year. Our rents are far below market rates. Unfortunately, it is a tough time for a lot of renters, so we don’t want to move up rates too much.

In the last month, we went from 75.55% to 75.76% ownership of the equity in our properties. That seems like a small amount, but that’s what happens month-to-month. I calculate this number as a fraction, with equity we own as the numerator and total property value being the denominator. If we owned both of our rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), we’d make about $2,200 a month after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance.


[My newly 9-year-old can build anything. Here he’s showing off the Lego Minecraft kit he built in the physical world and then the virtual one in Minecraft world.]

If you multiply our rents of $2,200 by the amount of equity we have, 75.76%, you get $1,667/mo. in estimated passive income. Last month it was $1,662/mo. Obviously, the $5 doesn’t matter much. It could maybe buy a cheap streaming subscription. However, it adds up over time.

When I started tracking rental property income this way (January 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties, and the properties had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 of passive income back then. In six years, it grew a ton. We sold our biggest rental property last year and invested that money in the stock market. It’s much more passive now. That was a strong driver as to why I started to count certain passive income sources as less valuable than others in this report.

When we get to 100% ownership of the two properties, they should bring about $25,000 after expenses. Rent is inflation resistant as it’ll rise over time. That means that even though this is $25,000 in today’s dollars, it will still have that buying power in the future.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,667

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I look at our stock market investments. I assume we could earn a 2.5% dividend yield on those investments. That assumption is a conservative number that helps us think about what kind of cash we can expect. It should be easy to get that 2.5% number as we could simply put all of our portfolios in a high-dividend ETF. For example, the high-yield ETF, HDV, is currently paying a 4.17% yield.

With today’s interest rates, a 2.5% yield seems ridiculously low. I need to remember that interest rates could go back to where they were a year ago.

Most bloggers use the actual dividends they earned that month. I have quite a few accounts, and I’m too Lazy to add up the dividends on them. Even if we aren’t getting the 2.5% number now, we could always move the money around from growth to dividends if we needed to live off the cash flow. A vast majority of our money is in retirement accounts, so cash flow isn’t important to us now. I also combine all the taxable and retirement account numbers. It’s too much work to separate them out.


[My dog wasn’t happy with his unexpected polar plunge!]

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The company is doing well, and they occasionally throw an extra profit-sharing check to me. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for this report, it makes sense to group all stock ownership in this bucket.

I found an error in my spreadsheet. It seems that I was double counting one account for a few months. I’m not going to fix all the old posts, but it was easy enough to fix the charts here and going forward. With my new system of only counting 80% of real estate and 50% of dogs and blogs, it is another reason not to look back.

With the market recovery, our dividend-ish income grew quite a bit:

Total Dividend-ish Income: $4,031.00

Last month it was $3,847. The easy math shows that it was up $184. That’s a very big gain for one month. I don’t know if we’ll have too many of those this year. I guess that’s part of the beauty of the situation though – no one knows what to expect with the markets.

In January 2017, the dividend income was at $1,180/mo. It’s been a tremendous six years. If you think about it, that amount of dividend income couldn’t offset some expenses, but it wasn’t enough for many people to say that they live off of that completely. We’d have to make some significant lifestyle changes, but the $4,000 income is nearly $50,000 a year – enough for us to live fairly well if we paid off the small remaining part of our mortgage first.

For the 35th month in a row (?), we’re looking into estate planning, but they gave us a lot of paperwork to do before we can move forward. I’m still not making any progress on this. For the first time in about 15 months, I got to a point where I thought I might be able to get the paperwork back out. One of my main goals for the year is to work on this, so hopefully, it won’t just become another wish.

Adjusted Passive Income

I used to combine real estate and dividend income into “very close to passive income.” However, now I’ll simply add up the 50% dogs/blogs, 80% real estate, and 100% dividend income. This makes things a lot easier.

Dog/Blogs: $2,226.37 – Adjusted to $1,113.19
Rentals: $1,667 – Adjusted to $1,333.60
Dividends: $4,031.00 – Remains at 4,031.00


Dogs/Blogs – Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $6,477.79

In the past, that used to be much higher. However, this is more accurate. It’s also particularly low because January is a slow month.

Annually, that’s $77,733.48. That’s significant because, at the start of this blog, I aimed to have around $75,000 in passive income. That was my definition of “winning the money game.” It would be enough to cover our needs and most of our wants.

I think it’s very useful to have different income streams. As blogging income becomes more difficult, dog boarding income has grown to supplement it. For a long time, real estate didn’t grow much at all; then, in the last couple of years, it grew a ton. The stock market grew for more than a decade from 2010 to 2021 but had a little setback last year.


[I had this Hamilton Beach Sandwich Maker gathering dust for years. In January, I made breakfast for myself and a school lunch for my oldest at the same time.]

The chance of all the income streams falling on hard times is low, but certainly not impossible. If we had another event like the Great Recession in 2008, they’d all be impacted quite a bit. In that case, we’d have to rely more on active income (the other 50% of our dogs/blogs, 20% of rental income, and other jobs) or rely on savings for a while.

It’s also important to remember that these numbers aren’t “real” because much of the money isn’t liquid. We can’t spend those retirement investments without penalties. We can’t access the equity we have in properties without opening a HELOC. There are some money moves around these, but it’s not worth making any of them until my wife retires.

You’d think we’d feel “rich” having won the money game. We don’t. Our social circle tends to have generationally rich people. However, we are “rich” relative to many people’s circumstances. Money is relative. It’s nice not to have to worry about emergency bills and make reasonable splurges.

[The blue line represents the total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the three-month average.]

The three-month average in January 2021 was $5,605.67. In January 2022, it was $7,612.64. Now in January of 2023, it is $8,984.80. Those are some good gains for the worst month of every year. I hope to get that adjusted passive income to average $10,000/month for the year 2023. I had just about ended December at that high, so we’ll see how it goes all year on average.

That kind of income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, investing, and landlording is awesome. I don’t know how long dog boarding will last. It was a lot of work last year – this year has been easier with the lighter schedule. I think that with dog boarding, either the market will change or I’ll change. Perhaps I’ll want to travel more. Perhaps, I’ll want a different challenge. I’m on my third career (software engineering, blogging, and dog boarding), so it would be naive of me to think it might be my last.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning day job as a pharmacist or the minor freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years – neither is passive at all. When my wife retires, we can count her vested military pension as more passive income. A pension is like a passive income cheat code. They are so rare nowadays.

For now, this active income (including the dog boarding) is the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well, get our kids a top education, pay off our mortgages, and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, but the flexibility gives me the time to stretch almost every dollar in much of our spending. It also allows me the flexibility to bring the kids to school and to after-school activities.

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t fascinating as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote, not its own article.

I truly believe that net worth is one of the most critical numbers in personal finance, so it is worth sharing in some way. Showing relative growth can be helpful.

In January, our net worth was up 3.16%. We’re now about half a percent from our all-time highs. That’s great, considering that the markets are still off their highs by nearly 10%. I feel like I can truly say that we’re in the best money situation we’ve ever been in.


[The sportsmanship award is almost as big as the biggest overall trophy!]

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s military pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether we should include it in our net worth. If the U.S. government didn’t back it like treasuries or FDIC, I may feel I should account for some uncertainty. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned a larger immediate salary if she didn’t work for the government. That would have boosted all the numbers across the board. Calculating pension value is not easy, but here’s the best way to know what a pension is worth.

It’s important to recognize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 16 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back in 2006, but that’s been my goal since the first sentence of this blog.

We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting. Many of those readers are saddled with huge student loans that we didn’t have to deal with. If you are one of these readers, I hope you won’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above. I didn’t start many of these graphs until year 10 of blogging and early retirement planning. Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15-20 years.

How was your month? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Alternative Income Tagged With: passive income

Passive Income Update: December 2022

January 10, 2023 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

Now that we are so far into January, it feels weird to go back to December. So many people have made their goals and resolutions, and I’ve barely thought about mine. I’ll have them ready for February at this rate.

December always starts with my wife’s birthday. It’s usually a quick transition after Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving was earlier this year, so we had a little extra time. We went out for a great meal at her favorite restaurant.

Soon after that, we turn our attention to Christmas. Our neighbor changes a half-acre of his yard into a mini-Christmas spectacular. Below is a picture of the least impressive of 10-12 displays. The older kids at our kids’ school always puts on a good Grinch That Stole Christmas. All the kids have their own winter concert as well. It felt like we always had something to do. We didn’t even get to some of our favorite Christmas movies.


(One of the )

I’m including other pictures of Christmas happenings. Santa comes down our street every year. The kids set up the Christmas tree. We went to a fabulous gingerbread house display.

The kids went to the Enchanted Village, which is a huge draw from a furniture store in Massachusetts. They bought iconic displays from a 1950s department store and added some things like ice skating and other stuff. My wife took the kids to that after an overnight in Boston, where they also saw The Art of the Brick – a Lego event. I was too busy boarding dogs.

My 10-year-old competed in his first Lego Robotics competition. He’s the youngest, most inexperienced member in a group of veterans, so he didn’t participate too much. I’m more excited about it than he was, so this may be the last competition. He did have a lot of fun, and they advanced to the state’s competition, so maybe it’s not done yet. My 9-year-old is much, much more into Legos.

Finally, we all stayed up to welcome the New Year. It’s the first time my 8-year-old (now 9) was able to do that.

Let’s start the Passive Income report. I used to call this the Alternative Income Report because some of this income has an active component. However, that idea isn’t catching on, and everyone loves “passive income” better. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you may have some questions about the math.

The way I calculate these numbers requires that little explanation – it isn’t intuitive. I do things a little differently to show the journey. For example, we don’t have real passive income from our rental properties. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where on that journey we are. You’ll see that the bank owns less, and we own more each month. There will be no mortgages when we own 100%, and all that rental income can be used for living expenses. When calculating the percentage of rental income, I take the rent (minus estimated expenses) and multiply it by the portion of equity we own. Think of it like you and a friend owning a property 50/50. This would be how you’d handle it, with each of you splitting the profits at the end 50/50.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income

Passive Income Pyramid
My Passive Income Pyramid

I categorize our passive income into three primary sources that are represented mainly in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job,” – that’s not passive at all. (I have some income in that area, but that’s not the focus of this report.) I combine dog-sitting and blogging into one section of my “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. I leave real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way, if you want only to count those, you can do that.

Starting next month, the first month I review 2023, I’m only going to count 50% of blogging and dog-sitting income, 80% of real estate, and 100% of dividend income. That’s more realistic of what counts as passive. Until then, the main numbers will use this. For now, I’ve added a section at the end that uses this more realistic calculation of passive income.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

November dog boarding was the best month we’ve ever had, so I didn’t expect to keep up with that pace. We still did very well in December. We boarded a few dogs around Christmas and the holiday pay worked out really well. The business is really moving, but I’m always about January. It’s always our slowest month, and we’re closing for two weeks to have work done on the house. My inferiority complex is creeping up and making me think that my customers are going to go elsewhere and never come back again.


(“I’m going to bite your face off! No, I’m going to bite your face off!)

Blogging did well too. It was our third biggest month of the year. Unfortunately, blogging has been steadily going down for a long time now. There are too many things competing for attention. Who wants to read text when your brain can get juiced on TikTok? I enjoy blogging, though, so if it is a hobby that makes money, I’m fine with that.

In November, “dogs and blogs” combined for $10,938.99. In December, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $9,168.65

That’s a big drop from November, but it’s still the second-best month of the year – or any year that I’ve tracked this.

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 10-year-old is extremely good with dogs at this point. He can feed them, let them out, and play with them in the yard. He’s spending more time in front of the clients as a helper at pick-ups and drop-offs. My 8-year-old was a little slower to develop dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them. This year they finished up vet summer camp at the local animal shelter.


(These dalmatians just inspected our kitchen and certified that there’s no fires going on.)

Their help means I can pay them a legitimately earned income (a percentage of the overall dog-sitting income). Because the income is earned, they can save money in their kid Roth IRAs and it will be money that they’ll never pay tax on. Here’s why kids should start a Roth IRA as soon as possible.

(Note: The blue line is the monthly number. The red line is a 3-month average which helps smooth the curve.)

2. Rental Property Income

Rental properties have been very boring the last few months. With mortgage rates high, property values have come down a tiny bit. We continue to pay down the mortgages every month. The result is a lot like running in the place – we aren’t getting anywhere. That’s okay; the property values went crazy in 2022. It’s good to let some air out of the bubble.

We went from 75.66% to 75.55% ownership of the equity in our properties. It sounds weird to own less of our properties. This number is calculated as a fraction, with equity being the numerator and property value being the denominator. When properties lose value and our liabilities stay the same, they can go back a bit. If housing crashed, we’d still have the same liabilities, but the property values would be trash. If we have $100,000 in mortgages and the properties are worth $110,000, we don’t own very much. It’s a much different story if liabilities are $100,000 and the properties are worth $1,000,000.


(It’s great to have a little help around the house.)

If we owned both of our rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), we’d make about $2,200 a month after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance.

If you multiply our rents of $2,200 by the amount of equity we have, 75.55%, you get $1,662/mo. in estimated passive income. Last month it was $1,664/mo.



Better Off Dead was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I saw it last year, and it is still hilarious. Then again, I like all moves with John Cusack.

When I started tracking rental property income this way (January 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties, and the properties had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. In 5.5 years, it grew a ton. We sold our biggest rental property in 2022, and even with all that cash have a great number.

When we get 100% ownership, it should bring about $25,000 after expenses. Rent is inflation resistant as it’ll rise over time. That means that even though this is $25,000 in today’s dollars, it will still have that buying power in the future.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,662

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I assume we could earn a 2.5% dividend yield on our equities – even if I may choose to invest differently. That 2.5% could be from a high-dividend ETF. For example, HDV is currently paying about a 4.20% yield. The 2.5% dividend assumption is a conservative number that helps us think about what kind of cash we can expect.

We can also look at making passive income with Dividend Kings. If we wanted to simply retire on this dividend income, I would get Sure Dividend’s newsletter to try to get a 5-6% average dividend yield. (That link to the newsletter has a special discount rate; in full disclosure, I make a few dollars if you sign up for it.)


(I thought the Lego Robotics looked cool and super fun, but I’m a huge nerd.)

With today’s interest rates, getting a 2.5% yield shouldn’t be too hard. We wouldn’t want to move our money around too much to chase rates.

Most bloggers use the actual dividends they earned that month. I have quite a few accounts, and I’m too Lazy to add up the dividends on them. Even if we aren’t getting the 2.5% number now, we could always move the money around from growth to dividends if we needed to live off the cash flow. A vast majority of our money is in retirement accounts, so we are more focused on growth for now. I combine all the taxable and retirement numbers – breaking them down would be too complex.

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The company is doing well, and they occasionally throw an extra profit-sharing check to me. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for this report, it makes sense to group all stock ownership in this bucket.

I used a snapshot of our finances from January 9th. The markets have kind of recovered a little bit from an off-December. In fact, just like our rental properties, this was like running in place.

Total Dividend-ish Income: $4,301.00

Last month it was $4,303. So once again, I lost two dollars. Neither category has ever been as close at $2, and now they both are in the same month? That is crazy!

When the market recovers to all-time highs, this dividend-ish income should be around $5,000.

In January 2017, we were at $1,180/mo. It’s been a tremendous six years.


(This is just as the kids woke up for Christmas. The picture came out grainy because I was running to catch up to them.)

For the 25th month in a row (?), we’re looking into estate planning, but they gave us a lot of paperwork to do before we can move forward. I’m still not making any progress on this. For the first time in about 15 months, I got to a point where I thought I might be able to get the paperwork back out. Maybe when the dog boarding dies down in January, we’ll make progress.

Very Close to Passive Income

Our “very close to passive income” combines rental property income and dividend income. If we had any royalty income from books, movies, or music, I’d also include that. I’m too tone-deaf to have a rockstar music career, but I may write a book someday. I had a lead on a publisher, but they charge authors tens of thousands of dollars, which isn’t what I’m looking for.

I feel it’s important to keep track of this separately to differentiate it from the dogs and blogs’ income. Dogs and Blogs take active work to keep up. Rental property requires a little work, but not nearly as much. The dividend income takes no work.


(My just-turned 9-year-old loves art. He’s creating a Pokemon character with a couple of evolutions here. He used a pen that has 10 different colors to color it in. I was too late to remind him that he had 10,000 crayons and colored pencils.)

I love having both the rental properties and stock market income working together. When the stock market dropped this year, our real estate kept our net worth high. It was the opposite for the last decade – real estate didn’t do much while stocks quadrupled. Everyone interested in FIRE should consider having stock market and real estate income streams. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most FIRE folks in the case of an unfortunate economic event. We’ll still likely get rent checks if the stock market crashes. We’ll still get dividend checks if a tenant is late paying for a while. Of course, a bad economy may impact both at the same time, but that’s what an emergency fund is for.

Very Close to Passive Income: $5,963.00

We’re trying to get back up to the $6,500 high from April 2022. We’ll need a market recovery in 2023 or some big surprise windfall. This would be almost $72,000 in annual income. We wouldn’t have to sell stocks or have a “withdrawal rate” – simply live off dividends. We wouldn’t have to get a reverse mortgage on our home or investment properties. Property maintenance and property taxes for rental properties are already factored in. We would still have all the underlying assets (property, stocks, etc.) and be able to pass these on to the kids for them to build on – unless we draw them down for more fun, charity, or other spending.

When I started this blog, I aimed to have around $75,000 in passive income. That was my definition of winning the money game. It would be enough to cover our needs and most of our wants. We’re not quite there, but we are close. If you count us being able to draw down on our accounts a little or get more than a 2.5% dividend return, we’re there.

This “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354/month in January 2017. So in about six years, we’ve more than doubled our passive income (an extra $1,000 from the double). Our money is working almost as hard as we are. It’s a crazy system. I’m just doing my best to work within it.

Remember, these numbers are fudged and aren’t “real” because much of the money isn’t liquid. We can’t spend those retirement investments or the equity we have in properties. However, we can make some money moves if my wife chooses to retire and we get into a lower tax bracket.


(There were 43 million pounds of gingerbread to make this tower. I’m completely making up the number of pounds, but it was a lot. It’s an impressive feat for a local thing.)

We don’t feel “rich” by any stretch – especially because our social circle tends to have generationally rich people. However, we are “rich” relative to many people’s circumstances. Sometimes money is relative.

I hope to get our close to passive income to $8,000/month by the end of 2024. It looks like it might not happen, but a lot can happen in two years.

Final Passive-ish Income

When you add up “dogs and blogs” to the “very close to passive income,” you get:

Passive-ish Income: $15,131.65

That would be over $180k a year. Last month, this number was $16,905.99 because we did more dog sitting (not so passive). That (hypothetical) annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, investing, and landlording is awesome. I don’t know how long dog boarding will last. Either the market will change, or I’ll change. Perhaps I’ll want to travel more. Perhaps, I’ll want a different challenge. In a lot of ways, I’m on my third career (software engineering, blogging, and dog boarding), so why not a fourth?

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning day job as a pharmacist or the minor freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years – neither is passive at all. When my wife retires, we can count her vested military pension as more passive income. A pension is like a passive income cheat code. They are so rare nowadays.


(Santa’s sleigh that comes by our street every year.)

For now, this active income (including the dog boarding) is the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well, get out kids a top education, pay off our mortgages, and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, but the flexibility gives me the time to stretch almost every dollar in much of our spending. It also allows me the flexibility to bring the kids to school and after-school activities.

I love two things about the graph below. First, there’s a definite trend of the numbers staying high for several months. Second, it doesn’t dip down too far. We should be able to count on at least $9,000. The big bump you see is almost all dog boarding business.

(The blue line is the monthly number. The red line is a 3-month average which helps smooth the curve.)

Adjusted Passive Income

I mentioned at the beginning of this website that I shouldn’t count dog boarding, blogging, or landlording as completely passive income. For 2023, my passive income is only going to count as 50% of blogging/dog-sitting and 80% of real estate income. However, I’m going to count 100% of the dividend income.

Thanks to the power of spreadsheets, I can bring you these numbers now. Our adjusted passive income would be $10,214.93 or over $120,000 a year. That’s down from $11,103.70 last month. It’s unfair that the big differences in these numbers are the non-passive dog boarding.

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t fascinating as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote, not its own article.

I truly believe that net worth is one of the most critical numbers in personal finance, so it is worth sharing in some way. Showing relative growth can be helpful.

In December, our net worth was down 0.83%. For the year, our net worth was down 2.07%. I’m very happy with that overall. Diversification into real estate really helped us whether the down market.

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s military pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether we should include it in our net worth. If the U.S. government didn’t back it like treasuries or FDIC, I may feel I should account for some uncertainty. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned a larger immediate salary if she didn’t work for the government. That would have boosted all the numbers across the board. Calculating pension value is not easy, but here’s the best way to know what a pension is worth. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, this isn’t money we can spend right now.

It’s important to recognize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 16 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back in 2006, but that’s been my goal since the first sentence of this blog.

We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting. Many of those readers are saddled with huge student loans that we didn’t have to deal with. If you are one of these readers, I hope you won’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above. I didn’t start many of these graphs until year 10 of blogging and early retirement planning. Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15-20 years.

How was your month? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Alternative Income Tagged With: alternative income streams

Passive Income Update: November 2022

December 13, 2022 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

It didn’t seem possible that it’s already December, so I’ve decided to lean into Christmas. I’m doing everything related to the holidays possible. However, I still need to close out November, so let’s get started.

I know every month is busy, but it seems like November is always a little extra busy. Maybe it’s because it has Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s because everyone is trying to squeeze everything in before December and the holidays.

The month started with a sick kid. It seems to have been the normal flu going around, but he was in a bad place for about 5-6 days. As he was getting better, he attempted to do a little work at home with some hilarious results:


He did the rest of the work more seriously than this example. He even got the right answers unlike here.

We had a bunch of one-off events. My wife flew to Washington, D.C., for a quick one-day training. I let the kids sleep in our bed and took their bed. They think that switch-up is a treat. My cousin (the only one I see consistently) got married and had a beautiful wedding. I got to see all kinds of relatives, which isn’t something that happens very often. We had a Thanksgiving dinner with family.

The kids had another successful month of Cub Scouts. They learned how to fold flags and were part of the color guard at a Providence Bruins game. They also continued their advancement in karate. As they get to more complicated stuff, the belt advances are coming slower and slower.

Let’s start the Passive Income report. I used to call this the Alternative Income Report because some of this income has an active component. However, that idea isn’t catching on, and everyone loves “passive income” better. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you may have some questions about the math.

The way I calculate these numbers requires that little explanation – it isn’t intuitive. I do things a little differently to show the journey. For example, we don’t have real passive income from our rental properties. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where on that journey we are. You’ll see that the bank owns less, and we own more each month. There will be no mortgages when we own 100%, and all that rental income can be used for living expenses. When calculating the percentage of rental income, I take the rent (minus estimated expenses) and multiply it by the portion of equity we own. Think of it like you and a friend owning a property 50/50. This would be how you’d handle it, with each of you splitting the profits at the end 50/50.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income

Passive Income Pyramid
My Passive Income Pyramid

I categorize our passive income into three primary sources that are represented mainly in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job,” – that’s not passive at all. (I have some income in that area, but that’s not the focus of this report.) I combine dog-sitting and blogging into one section of my “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. I leave real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way, if you want only to count those, you can do that.

For 2023, I’m only going to count 50% of blogging and dog-sitting income, 80% of real estate, and 100% of dividend income. That’s more realistic of what counts as passive. Until then, the main numbers will use this. For now, I’ve added a section at the end that uses this more realistic calculation of passive income.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

November dog boarding can go in either direction, good or bad. I was surprised at how busy October was, and I was more surprised about November. Maybe, being available to host for Thanksgiving makes all the difference. We were able to host at Thanksgiving and had a lot of our regulars book. It’s great having a stable group of customers because I know their dogs well. November was the best dog sitting month we’ve ever had – and it wasn’t close.

Last month I said I wanted to raise prices, but I was concerned about losing regular customers. I raised prices a couple of weeks ago, and it looks like we’ll still have plenty of business.


This dog has stayed with us more than any other dog this year. She’s very comfortable sitting at the dining room table with the family. Here she’s interrupting our Allowance game for my review on Kid Wealth.

Blogging income was almost exactly average. It takes some time to grow blogging income, but I don’t have the time to invest.

In October, “dogs and blogs” combined for $8,844.18. In November, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $10,938.99

In the last report, we had a record of more than $1,000. This month it is more than $2,000 over that record!

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 10-year-old is extremely good with dogs at this point. He can feed them, let them out, and play with them in the yard. He’s spending more time in front of the clients as a helper at pick-ups and drop-offs. My 8-year-old was a little slower to develop dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them. This year they finished up vet summer camp at the local animal shelter.

Their help means I can pay them a legitimately earned income (a percentage of the overall dog-sitting income). Because the income is earned, they can save money in their kid Roth IRAs and it will be money that they’ll never pay tax on. Here’s why kids should start a Roth IRA as soon as possible.


(Note: The blue line is the monthly number. The red line is a 3-month average which helps smooth the curve.)

2. Rental Property Income

The rental market has become quite dull. According to Zillow, the properties bare changed value. It makes sense that they aren’t likely to go up anymore after such a big run and high mortgage rates.

I’m happy they are mostly retaining their value while we continue to chip away at the mortgages. In the meantime, we make about $500 a month on the two of them.

We went from 75.35% to 75.66% ownership of the equity in our properties. It’s very slow and steady at this point. One of the properties is on a new 20-year mortgage because we did a 1031 exchange (selling one property and buying another to avoid taxes). I wasn’t a fan of “starting over” with this mortgage, as it pays more interest upfront before earning equity, but the 4% interest rate seems very good now.


As the kids get older, 8 and 10 now, it’s getting rare to find these pictures of them sleeping together.

Suppose we owned both remaining rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity). In that case, we’d make about $2,200 a month after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance.

I like to use an “expected rent” as we’re currently trying to catch up from years of very low rents. We liked our tenants, so we’ve kept them at a discount. However, with housing and rents going up so quickly, there’s a massive gap between what we could reasonably be bringing in and what we are bringing in.

If you multiply our expected net rent of $2,200 by the amount of equity we have, 75.66%, you get $1,654/mo. in estimated passive income. When I started tracking this (January 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties, and the properties had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. In 5.5 years, it grew a ton, even after selling our biggest rental property.

When we get 100% ownership, it should bring about $25,000 after expenses. Rent is inflation resistant as it’ll rise over time. That means that even though this is $25,000 in today’s dollars, it will still have that buying power.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,664

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I assume we could earn a 2.5% dividend yield on our equities – even if I may choose to invest differently. That 2.5% could be from a high-dividend ETF. For example, HDV is currently paying about a 3.47% yield. The 2.5% dividend assumption is a conservative number that helps us think about what kind of cash we can expect.

We can also look at making passive income with Dividend Kings. If we wanted to simply retire on this dividend income, I would get Sure Dividend’s newsletter to try to get a 5-6% average dividend yield. (That link to the newsletter has a special discount rate; in full disclosure, I make a few dollars if you sign up for it.)

Of course, with today’s interest rates, getting a 2.5% yield shouldn’t be too hard.

Most bloggers use the actual dividends they earned that month. I have quite a few accounts, and I’m too Lazy to add up the dividends on them. Even if we aren’t getting the 2.5% number now, we could always move the money around from growth to dividends if we needed to live off the cash flow. A vast majority of our money is in retirement accounts, so we are more focused on growth for now. I combine all the taxable and retirement numbers – breaking them down would be too complex.


It’s off to school. I have no idea why I took this picture. It must have been a Monday, as the fourth grade learns the ukulele that day.

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The company is doing well, and they occasionally throw an extra profit-sharing check to me. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for this report, it makes sense to group all stock ownership in this bucket. A few times a year, we get an extra check because the company is doing well and there are more profits to share.

The stock market had a nice recovery in November. We saw a big boost because of that. We hit another all-time high in this category. The main reason is that we sold a rental property and invested the money in stocks. In any event, it’s nice to see this continue to grow.

Total Dividend-ish Income: $4,303.00

Last month it was $4,113. When the market recovers to all-time highs, we’d be pushing $5,000. In the meantime, the journey keeps on generally moving up and to the right.

When I started tracking this number in January 2017, we were at $1,180/mo. It’s been a tremendous six years.

For the 25th month in a row (?), we’re looking into estate planning, but they gave us a lot of paperwork to do before we can move forward. I’m still not making any progress on this. For the first time in about 15 months, I got to a point where I thought I might be able to get the paperwork back out. Maybe when the dog boarding dies down in January, we’ll make progress.

Very Close to Passive Income

Our “very close to passive income” combines rental property income and dividend income. If we had any royalty income from books, movies, or music, I’d also include that. I’m too tone-deaf to have a rockstar music career, but I may write a book someday. I had a lead on a publisher, but they charge authors tens of thousands of dollars, which isn’t what I’m looking for.

I feel it’s important to keep track of this separately to differentiate it from the dogs and blogs’ income. Dogs and Blogs take active work to keep up. Rental property requires a little work, but not nearly as much. The dividend income takes no work.


Karate class. They are both brown belts now, so only red and black to go. (I think it takes about another year for red.)

I love having both the rental properties and stock market income working together. When the stock market dropped this year, our real estate kept our net worth high. It was the opposite for the last decade – real estate didn’t do much while stocks quadrupled. Everyone interested in FIRE should consider having stock market and real estate income streams. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most FIRE folks in the case of an unfortunate economic event. We’ll still likely get rent checks if the stock market crashes. We’ll still get dividend checks if a tenant is late paying for a while. Of course, a bad economy may impact both at the same time, but that’s what an emergency fund is for.

Very Close to Passive Income: $5,968

We’re working our way back up to the $6,500 high in April. We’ll need more of a market recovery or some big surprise windfall. This would be almost $72,000 in annual income. We wouldn’t have to sell stocks or have a “withdrawal rate” – simply live off dividends. We wouldn’t have to get a reverse mortgage on our home or investment properties. Property maintenance and property taxes for rental properties are already factored in. We would still have all the underlying assets (property, stocks, etc.) and be able to pass these on to the kids for them to build on – unless we draw them down for more fun, charity, or other spending.

When I started this blog, I aimed to have around $75,000 in passive income. That was my definition of winning the money game. It would be enough to cover our needs and most of our wants. We’re not quite there, but we are close. If you count us being able to draw down on our accounts a little or get more than a 2.5% dividend return, we’re there.

This “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354/month in January 2017. So in about six years, we’ve more than doubled our passive income (an extra $1,000 from the double). Our money is working almost as hard as we are. It’s a crazy system. I’m just doing my best to work within it.

Remember, these numbers are fudged and aren’t “real” because much of the money isn’t liquid. We can’t spend those retirement investments or the equity we have in properties. However, we can make some money moves if my wife chooses to retire and we get into a lower tax bracket.

We don’t feel “rich” by any stretch – especially because our social circle tends to have generationally rich people. However, we are “rich” relative to many people’s circumstances. Sometimes money is relative.

I hope to get our close to passive income to $8,000/month by the end of 2024. It looks like it might not happen, but a lot can happen in two years.

Final Passive-ish Income

When you add up “dogs and blogs” to the “very close to passive income,” you get:

Passive-ish Income: $16,905.99

(Last month, it was $14,615.18.) That would be over $200k a year. That (hypothetical) annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, investing, and landlording is Captain Insane-O. In reality, I don’t expect dog boarding to be this profitable forever. Either the market will change, or I’ll change. Perhaps I’ll want to travel more. Perhaps, I’ll want a different challenge. In a lot of ways, I’m on my third career (software engineering, blogging, and dog boarding), so why not a fourth?

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning day job as a pharmacist or the minor freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years – neither is passive at all. When my wife retires, we can count her vested military pension as more passive income. A pension is like a passive income cheat code.

For now, this active income (including the dog boarding) is the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well, pay off our mortgages, and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, with the exception of this one month, but the flexibility gives me the time to stretch almost every dollar in much of our spending. It also allows me the flexibility to bring the kids to school and after-school activities.


Our dog has lost a lot of strength in his back legs, but he’s still always happy.

I love two things about the graph below. First, there’s a definite trend of the numbers staying high for several months. Second, it doesn’t dip down too far. We should be able to count on at least $8,000, maybe $9,000 a month. The big bump you see is almost all dog boarding business.

(The blue line is the monthly number. The red line is a 3-month average which helps smooth the curve.)

Adjusted Passive Income

I mentioned at the very beginning that I shouldn’t count dog boarding, blogging, or landlording as completely passive income. For 2023, my passive income is only going to count as 50% of blogging/dog-sitting and 80% of real estate income. However, I’m going to count 100% of the dividend income.

Thanks to the power of spreadsheets, I can bring you these numbers now. Our adjusted passive income would be $11,103.70 or over $133,000 a year. That’s up from $9,861.49 last month. It may be unfair that the big difference was a ton of non-passive dog boarding. However, part of that increase was due to holiday rates, not just boarding more dogs. It was more work than I’d like, so I raised rates a bit. I hope that I can make a little less money from a significantly smaller number of dogs. That would pay well and be more passive.

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t fascinating as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote, not its own article.

I truly believe that net worth is one of the most critical numbers in personal finance, so it is worth sharing in some way. Showing relative growth can be helpful.

For much of the year, we’ve had negative months of net worth. The markets are still down over 15%. However, this month our net worth was up 4.24%. Go, markets, go! For the year, our net worth is down only 0.64%. I’ll take less than 1% in what some consider “bad economic times.” When the markets come back, we should be able to do quite well.

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s military pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether we should include it in our net worth. If the U.S. government didn’t back it like treasuries or FDIC, I may feel I should account for some uncertainty. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned a larger immediate salary if she didn’t work for the government. That would have boosted all the numbers across the board. Calculating pension value is not easy, but here’s the best way to know what a pension is worth. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, this isn’t money we can spend right now.

It’s important to recognize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 16 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back in 2006. We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting. Some of those readers are saddled with huge student loans that we didn’t have to deal with. If you are one of these readers, I hope you won’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above. I didn’t start many of these graphs until year 10 of blogging and early retirement planning. Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15-20 years.

How was your month? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Alternative Income Tagged With: Alternative Income

Passive Income Update: October 2022

November 8, 2022 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

Is it November already? How did that happen?

Last month, I mentioned that my dog looked like he was on the last of days a few months before his 14th birthday. He continues to get better. It might be 1% a day, but it’s noticeable.
October started with us going to a local brewery that was having an Oktoberfest. It was too loud, so we didn’t stay long, but I noticed they had a classic Nintendo game set-up. It inspired me to set up an old Sega system I bought a few years ago. The games are terrible, and the kids confirmed that. It’s hard for old games to compete with new games unless there’s nostalgia involved.


Our basement project still needs work as you can tell. We’re getting it painted in January. In the meantime, it’s great to have this space that isn’t defined.

One of the Newport Mansions had a Halloween event. You walk through in costume, and they give you candy at certain stations. They didn’t do much decorating, though, and instead of candy, it was mostly unsharpened pencils and superballs (in an eyeball design). It was very disappointing, but the mansions are always still impressive.

There was a Scouting event in our town, and Scouts came from all over New England. There were great stations like knots typing, a climbing wall, fire safety, etc. It was also by the ocean, which makes it a little more special.

We went to the annual pumpkin display at the Roger Williams Zoo in Providence. That was with the Scouts as well. The kids got to have some animal encounters. The only problem was that it was from 4-8, and there was no food available until around 7:30. We have gone to the pumpkins every year for about $18 a person, but the Scouting event was about $35 each. We’ll just do the pumpkins on our next year.


The theme of the pumpkin display was the history of television and I was happy to find that Buffy made it. Seinfeld had it’s own section, but Friends was nowhere to be seen.

When Halloween came, one kid was sick. He got to do some trunk or treats before, and we got him plenty of candy. However, he never wore his intended costume and just went as a soccer player. What kind of 8-year-old doesn’t like costumes on Halloween?

On the school front, our youngest kid won scientist of the week for grades K-4. It wasn’t explained what he did to earn it, but it’s fun nonetheless. My older kid completed a sailing program that the school has. Fourth graders go sailing on Tuesdays and Thursdays for six weeks. While one group is sailing, the other is learning science through sailing. It’s a cool program – very Rhode Island-y.

Let’s start the Passive Income report. I used to call this the Alternative Income Report because some of this income has an active component. However, that idea isn’t catching on, and everyone loves “passive income” better. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you may have some questions about the math.

The way I calculate these numbers requires that little explanation – it isn’t intuitive. I do things a little differently to show the journey. For example, we don’t have real passive income from our rental properties. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where on that journey we are. You’ll see that the bank owns less, and we own more each month. There will be no mortgages when we own 100%, and all that rental income can be used for living expenses. When calculating the percentage of rental income, I take the rent (minus estimated expenses) and multiply it by the portion of equity we own. Think of it like you and a friend owning a property 50/50. This would be how you’d handle it, with each of you splitting the profits at the end 50/50.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income

Passive Income Pyramid
My Passive Income Pyramid

I categorize our passive income into three primary sources that are represented mainly in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job,” – that’s not passive at all. (I have some income in that area, but that’s not the focus of this report.) I combine dog-sitting and blogging into one section of my “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. I leave real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way, if you want only to count those, you can do that.

For 2023, I’m only going to count 50% of blogging and dog-sitting income, 80% of real estate, and 100% of dividend income. That’s more realistic of what counts as passive. Until then, I’ll continue the way I’ve been doing it. However, I’ll add this new calculation as well.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

Surprisingly, October is sometimes one of our best months for dog boarding. It seems to have unique circumstances every year. One year, we had a family with three dogs leave for a long time. Another year we had a couple of other dogs stay with us for most of the month. Also, October has always been boosted by holiday rates on Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day. For some reason, Rover.com did NOT apply it this year – specifically calling out that it wouldn’t be a Rover holiday.

This October, we had an all-time record month of dog boarding! It beat our April month by 5%. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it was a ton of work. It was much less work when I started including this in my passive income report. I want to raise prices to limit the number of dogs, but I love our regular customers. I don’t want to lose them. I’ve also raised rates a lot already.


Scouting event with a real fire hose!

Blogging income was a virtual tie for the yearly record! I got lucky with some good advertisements. I should refocus and see what I can do to increase blog income. I’ve got some ideas of what I’d do, but it takes time that I simply don’t have.

In September, “dogs and blogs” combined for $5,506.35. In October, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $8,844.18

That number is banana pants crazy. It’s a record of more than $1,000. It may even be more than I made at the height of my software engineering career. (I was never paid that well. I also wasn’t very good. Finally, it was 2006.)

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 10-year-old is extremely good with dogs at this point. He can feed them, let them out, and play with them in the yard. He’s spending more time in front of the clients as a helper at pick-ups and drop-offs. My 8-year-old was a little slower to develop dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them. This year they finished up vet summer camp at the local animal shelter.

Their help means I can pay them a legitimately earned income (a percentage of the overall dog-sitting income). Because the income is earned, they can save money in their kid Roth IRAs and it will be money that they’ll never pay tax on. Here’s why kids should start a Roth IRA as soon as possible.

(Note: The blue line is the monthly number. The red line is a 3-month average which helps smooth the curve.)

2. Rental Property Income

Sometimes I feel like we still have three properties. I still need to adjust. We sold one, and now we’re down to two. It seems like the market is shifting to buyers, so maybe we’ll pick up a rental property later. That should be at least a couple of years away, though.

It’s great to move from semi-passive to fully passive income. We’ve finally got all the money invested. We have a diverse portfolio at Vanguard, and I put some leftover cash in Ally, where it can earn 2.5%. I left some more money at our local bank (which doesn’t make much interest). Between Ally and the local bank, we have about four months of an emergency fund.


This was extremely popular at the early Halloween events, but it seems like everyone had them at bigger gatherings. It’s still a lot of fun.

Let’s get back to the remaining two rental properties. We have less potential rental income than before. However, we also have lower liabilities as our mortgage debt on them is significantly reduced.

Zillow decided our remaining properties were worth a tiny bit more this month. So much for the buyers’ market. We are still paying off our mortgages, and that’s building equity.

We went from 74.89% to 75.35% ownership of the equity in our properties. It’s very slow and steady at this point. One of the properties is on a new 20-year mortgage because we did a 1031 exchange (selling one property and buying another to avoid taxes). I wasn’t a fan of “starting over” with this mortgage, as it pays more interest upfront before earning equity, but the 4% interest rate seems very good now. Also, the payments are really low now, so we’re making money.

If we owned both remaining rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), we’d make about $2,200 a month after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance.

I like to use an “expected rent” as we’re currently trying to catch up from years of very low rents. We liked our tenants, so we’ve kept them at a discount. However, with housing and rents going up so quickly, there’s a massive gap between what we could reasonably be bringing in and what we are bringing in.

If you multiply our expected net rent of $2,200 by the amount of equity we have, 75.35%, you get $1,658/mo. in estimated passive income. When I started tracking this (January 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties, and the properties had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. In 5.5 years, it grew it a ton, even after cashing out of our biggest rental property.

When we get 100% ownership, it should bring about $25,000 after expenses. Rent is inflation resistant as it’ll rise over time. That means that even though this is $25,000 in today’s dollars, it will still have that buying power.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,658

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I assume we could earn a 2.5% dividend yield on our equities – even if I may choose to invest differently. That 2.5% could be from a high-dividend ETF. For example, HDV is currently paying about a 4.59% yield, but it has been much less in the past. The 2.5% dividend assumption is a conservative number that helps us think about what kind of cash we can expect.

I previous wrote some income investing ideas here. Using those, I started implementing our investment plan with the money from the sale of the condo earlier this year. We’re building a runway.


I guess they can’t do too much with a historic mansion, but they basically put a small skeleton on a table and called it Halloween. It just seemed… disproportionate.

We can also look at making passive income with Dividend Kings. If we wanted to simply retire on this dividend income, I would get Sure Dividend’s newsletter to try to get a 5-6% average dividend yield. (That link to the newsletter has a special discount rate; in full disclosure, I make a few dollars if you sign up for it.)

Most bloggers use the actual dividends they earned, but I figure we can always move the money around from growth to dividends. A vast majority of our money is in retirement accounts, so we are more focused on growth for now. In this section, we include all the taxable and retirement numbers – breaking them down would be too complex.

The stock market had a minor recovery. It didn’t move the needle too much for us.

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The company is doing well, and they occasionally throw an extra profit-sharing check to me. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for this report, it makes sense to group all stock ownership in this bucket.

Total Dividend-ish Income: $4,113

Last month it was $4,247. It looks like a big drop, but it’s actually a little loose accounting on my part. After the condo sale, we had a lot of cash to invest, and I counted this as money that could easily earn dividends. Our tax people got back to us about the bill we owe the IRS, and we wrote a big tax check. So, in reality, I was counting money that I shouldn’t have. That problem is corrected now.

When I started tracking this number in January 2017, we were at $1,180/mo. It’s been a tremendous, nearly six years.

For the 25th month in a row (?), we’re looking into estate planning, but they gave us a lot of paperwork to do before we can move forward. I’m still not making any progress on this. For the first time in about 15 months, I got to a point where I thought I might be able to get the paperwork back out. Maybe when the dog boarding dies down in January.

Very Close to Passive Income

Our “very close to passive income” combines rental property income and dividend income. If we had any royalty income from books, movies, or music, I’d also include that. I’m too tone-deaf to have a rockstar music career, but I may write a book someday. This is important to separate from the dogs and blogs’ income. That takes some active work to keep up. Rental property requires a little work, but not nearly as much.

I love having both the rental properties and stock market income working together. With the stock market dropping recently, our real estate has kept our net worth fairly high. We locked in some real estate gains by selling and investing in this “cheap” market. It was the opposite for the last decade – real estate didn’t do much while stocks quadrupled. Everyone interested in FIRE should consider having stock market and real estate income streams. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most FIRE folks in the case of an unfortunate economic event. We’ll still likely get rent checks if the stock market crashes. We’ll still get dividend checks if a tenant is late paying for a while. Of course a bad economy may impact both at the same time, but that’s what an emergency fund is for.


This rope bridge was a lot harder to cross than it looks. I think about 75% of people fell off, but my son went through it without much of a problem.

There’s not a lot happening with this number. The reason for the change (a drop) was just my poor job of not accounting for taxes.

Very Close to Passive Income: $5,771.00

This would be nearly $70,000 a year of passive-ish income. We wouldn’t have to sell stocks or have a “withdrawal rate” – simply live off dividends. We wouldn’t have to get a reverse mortgage on our home or investment properties. Property maintenance and property taxes for rental properties are already factored in. We would still have all the underlying assets (property, stocks, etc.) and be able to pass these on to the kids for them to build on – unless we draw them down for more fun, charity, or other spending.

When I started this blog, I aimed to have around $75,000 in passive income. That was my definition of winning the money game. It would be enough to cover our needs and most of our wants. We’re not quite there, but we are close. If you count us being able to draw down on our accounts a little or get more than a 2.5% dividend return, we’re there.

This $5,771 of “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354/month in January 2017. So in less than six years, we’ve more than doubled our passive income (an extra $1,000 from the double). It’s an excellent income for many, even in their top earning years. This is one of the reasons why I went with the “Lazy” name; it shows that investing money can do more “work” (or somehow produce more value) than active working can. It’s a crazy system. I’m just doing my best to work within it.

Remember, these numbers are fudged and aren’t “real” because much of the money isn’t liquid. We can’t spend those retirement investments or the equity we have in properties. However, we can make money moves if my wife chooses to retire and we get into a lower tax bracket.

We don’t feel “rich” by any stretch – especially because our social circle tends to have generationally rich people. However, we are “rich” relative to many people’s circumstances. Sometimes money is relative.

I want to get to $8,000/month in passive income by the end of 2024. However, I know it’s almost all about the market’s performance. If the stock market gets to new highs, we should be close.

Final Passive-ish Income

When you add up “dogs and blogs” to the “very close to passive income,” you get:

Passive-ish Income: $14,615.18

Last month it was $11,372.53. That would be over $175k a year. That (hypothetical) annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, investing, and landlording is very nice. That $135k is much more than for our average necessary expenses for the next 45 years. Of course, those necessary expenses aren’t going to cover all our spending, but they are a large percentage.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning day job as a pharmacist or the minor freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years – neither is passive at all. When my wife retires, we can count her vested military pension as more passive income. Since it is vested, should I count that now?

For now, this active income (including the dog boarding) are the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well, pay off our mortgages, and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, but the flexibility gives me the time to stretch almost every dollar in much of our spending. It also allows me the flexibility to bring the kids to school and after-school activities.


This is what the special animal encounters were at the zoo. You get to watch the elephants eat closer than you would when they are outside I guess. They had set up a petting zoo with goats, but they also fed them dinner during the time we were allowed to see them… and we couldn’t go into the feeding area. So that was a big bust.

I love two things about the graph below. First, there’s a definite trend of the numbers staying high for several months. Second, it doesn’t dip down too far. We should be able to count on at least $8,000, maybe $9,000 a month. The big bump you see is mostly due to the dog boarding business.

(The blue line is the monthly number. The red line is a 3-month average which helps smooth the curve.)

Adjusted Passive Income

I mentioned above that I shouldn’t count dog boarding and landlording as completely passive income. For 2023, I’m only going to count 50% of blogging and dog-sitting income, 80% of real estate, and 100% of dividend income.

Thanks to the power of spreadsheets, I can bring you these numbers now. This adjusted passive income would be $9,861.49 or nearly $120,000 a year. That’s up from $8,289.67 last month. I don’t know if it’s fair that it’s up when the big difference was a ton of non-passive dog boarding. However, I think I could raise prices and do limited dog boarding. That would pay well and be more passive.

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t fascinating as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote, not its own article.

I truly believe that net worth is one of the most critical numbers in personal finance, so it is worth sharing in some way. Showing relative growth can be helpful.

In the last report, we saw our net worth drop by 3.01%. This month it fell by another 0.16%. That’s mostly a round-off error. The markets did well, but we wrote that big check to the IRS, so it mostly balanced out. For the year, our net worth is down 4.79%. That’s still really good, considering how far down the markets are.

It’s important to recognize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for almost 16 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back in 2006. We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting. Some of those readers are saddled with huge student loans that we didn’t have to deal with. If you are one of these readers, I hope you won’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above. I didn’t start many of these graphs until year 10 of blogging and early retirement planning. Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15-20 years.

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s military pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether we should include it in our net worth. If the US government didn’t back it like treasuries or FDIC, I may feel I should account for some uncertainty. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned a larger immediate salary if she didn’t work for the government. That would have boosted all the numbers across the board. Calculating pension value is not easy, but here’s the best way to know what a pension is worth. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, this isn’t money we can spend right now.

How was your month? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Alternative Income Tagged With: Alternative Income

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