It’s a brand new year, but there’s still time left to reflect on 2021.

Our December was a blur. My wife was deployed until the 18th and then we rushed to get Christmas going. The turnaround to my youngest’s 8th birthday is quick, so we scrambled through that as well. We’ve got house renovations going on and it looks like that will be the story of January as well. (It’s not that the renovations will go on that long, but that we can start to move to other projects when this one is done.)

At the start of the month we did a beach clean-up with the Cub Scouts. There was just one problem? The beach was extremely clean already. No one had seen anything like it. Nonetheless, each scout got a couple pieces. I took the kids to a great playground afterwards. We don’t usually go there, but since it was close it was on my mind.

We went to a few Christmas displays and a parade where Santa lights the town tree. Santa also makes a trip down our street before Christmas, which is fun for the kids to see. We got some very good sledding in, too. We watched the traditional claymation Rankin Bass Christmas movies as well as the requisite Yogi’s First Christmas and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (cartoon with the mice that is also Rankin Bass). It’s hard to squeeze Christmas into a week, so we certainly missed some classics this year.

The 9-year-old got his green belt in karate, while the 8-year-old got his blue belt. Maybe they’ll be black belts by 11 or 12? I don’t know how the progression goes, but I love watching the journey.

Among quite a few gifts, we got an Oculus Quest and it is amazing. You won’t see any pictures of it here, because it 2D pictures of virtual reality doesn’t make sense. I think it would be fair to say that the Oculus is my top $300 or less purchase in the last 3 or 4 years.

That’s enough of the personal stuff… 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 to it. 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 right now. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where on that journey we are. Each month, you’ll see that the bank owns less and we own more. When we get to owning 100% there will be no mortgages and all that rental income can be used for living expenses. When it comes to 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

I categorize our passive income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job” – that’s not passive at all. (I do 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 “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. For example, I’m writing this while boarding 2 dogs right now. I leave real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way if you want to only count that you can do that.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

December was a quieter month for boarding dogs. We had a short vacation planned for before Christmas. We ended up canceling it to be able to have a Christmas. I still kept my status as away. It was too last minute to get any meaningful dog bookings anyway. We also limited the dogs we took over Christmas to two that we knew and trusted wouldn’t create havoc. In some ways, we missed a third of the month of dog sitting.

The good news is that dog sitting has become much more passive lately. There are few dogs and fewer meet and greets to schedule. It’s nice to have regular customers.

Cruella de Vil has 99 problems, because she’s missing these two. My son has no problems at all working so, so hard to make sure they enjoy their stay.

Blogging was going fairly badly for most of the month. Then around Christmas the advertiser that ghosted me last month came back and actually paid his debt. It was a good one-time windfall and turned the whole month around.

In November, “dogs and blogs” combined for a total of $5,286.62. In December, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $3,256.03

That’s below average for the year, but I don’t mind at all. It’s still three times more than I did last December.

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 9-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. My 8-year-old was a little slower to dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche of catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them. This help means that 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.

Someday, I want to get them more involved in blogging, taking pictures, and things like that. During school, they have too much to keep them busy. After school, there’s homework, becoming mini-ninjas, scouting, and sports fill up their days. Being a kid is hard work!

(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 properties had about $5,000 in appreciation this month according to Zillow. That’s very good. We always pay down a couple thousand of debt with mortgages. That’s a good combination

We went from 71.82% to 72.25% ownership of the equity in our properties. These tiny percentage gains add up month after month, year over year.

If we owned the rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), I calculate that, after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance we’d make about $3,400 a month. That number represents our net gain.

My 9-year-old used his dollar store freebie (I give the a dollar to spend at the dollar store on whatever they want) to buy silly string. He had never seen it. “R.I.P. chore chart.”

If you multiply our expected net rent by $3,400 by the amount of equity we have (i.e. where we are on our journey to 100% equity ownership), 72.25%, you get $2,447 in estimated monthly passive income. That’s a gain of $5 from last month, which isn’t much.

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. So in 5 years, we’ve seen that number more than double to 2,447. That’s the power of 15-year mortgages.

In about 5 more years from now, the ratio will grow to 100% of that $3,400 rent. Well, hopefully that rent will be closer to $3700 in the next year – our properties are way below market. Since rent is inflation-resistant (we can raise rents as costs of living go up), we don’t have to factor in inflation like other investments. So we can think of it as around $40,000/yr. of income in today’s dollars buying the same value in the future. That should be enough money for us to live on with our own home paid off (plus our solar panels, frugal shopping habits, and military healthcare.) Of course, that’s just part of the plan as you can see.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $2,442.

Total Rental Property Income: $2,447

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I assume we will earn a 2.5% dividend yield on our holdings. That could be from a high-dividend ETF. For example, HDV is currently paying about a 4.04% yield. It could also come from simply holding strong companies that have a long history of dividend growth. There are some income investing ideas here. 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% average dividend yield. (That link to the newsletter has a special discount rate and in full disclosure, I make a few dollars if you sign up for it.)

Of course, we may not convert everything over to dividend income at all, it’s just a conservative way to think of our investment portfolio. If I used a 3.5% or 4% withdrawal rate, the numbers would be much bigger.

99.9999% of the time they want to kill each other. This seems like a touching moment, but in reality my 9-year-old is trying to use the back-and-forth motion of a Snoopy hat to lightly bonk my 8-year-old on the head. What a microcosm!

The markets fell on January 5th when I make my net worth spreadsheet. I try to wait for the rent checks to get in and mortgages to get paid out. Fortunately, my wife was busy on the 5th and I couldn’t get information on her accounts until the 7th. By that time, the markets bounced back a bit. I had a little spare cash from year-end dividends and used that Jan 5th drop as a mini-buying opportunity. That was more about my own psychology than it was any meaningful portfolio change.

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The business was almost ideally positioned in this pandameic due to its virtual nature. In fact, the business was doing so well they had some extra money to send out before the end of the year, but I didn’t include that here. Maybe if this bonus is consistent they’ll up the profit-sharing and I’ll be able to add more into this report from that. 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: $3,833

Last month, it was $3,767, so we’re back to heading in the right direction. We’re still a little below the all-time of $3,945. Who knows what the markets for 2022 will be, but we’re fairly diversified.

At the start of 2021, this number was $3,441, so we added nearly $400/mo. in passive income. That’s good for $4,705.42 a year. We still have 14 years until we get to 59 and a half. We can’t possibly have this kind of growth for 14 more years, but maybe we’ll get to $8,000. The biggest question may be if I’ll still be blogging in 14 years. I plan to be, but a lot can happen over that time.

When I started tracking this number in January of 2017 we were at $1,180/mo. So in exactly 5 years we’ve grown this potential monthly income by $2,653. That’s a lot of growth.

I guess this should be in January’s update, but Google Photos says it is December. Happy New Year!

Our money is working hard to multiply, especially because we aren’t adding much to the investments. Instead we’re focusing on saving money for my wife to retire. Except that, as of last month, my wife got a new job and isn’t looking to retire. Her long journey to make the rank of Captain (O-6) seems so assured that people are whispering about her being on a path to Admiral. Whatever she wants to do is fine with me. For now, she’s very excited about the new job.

Also, the first person to contact me and send the word “Rumpelstiltskin” in the subject will earn $10. Make sure to leave your Paypal address so I can send you money. If you don’t have Paypal, sorry, you can’t participate in this one. (I’m going to try to put more Easter Eggs like this into my articles in 2022.)

Giveaway over – we have our winner.

Annualized, this monthly $3,833 would be $46K. Like the rent number above of around $40,000, we should be able to live on this by itself (once mortgage free in a few years). However, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t use much of this potential income for now. (We can use the profit-sharing check as it goes straight to our checking account.) We’ll have to see if we want to tap it at age 59.5 or let it continue until we are required to take some of it at age 72. We’ve started to see an estate planning lawyer, but I have a lot of paperwork to do with that before I can move forward. We may look at tax and financial professionals soon.

Very Close to Passive Income

Our “very close to passive income” is a combination of rental property income and dividend income. If there were some royalty income from books, movies, or music, I’d include that as well. 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 at the beginning that takes some active work to keep up.

Remember when they closed playgrounds early on in the pandemic? Go crazy kids!

We aren’t back to all-time highs as the stock market drop is too much for the real estate market to cover. That’s okay. I love having both types of income working together for us. I think everyone interested in FIRE should have stocks 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.

Break: This month in COVID

COVID has gotten it’s own section. I threw it in here, because it doesn’t fit in very well in its own monthly article. It does impact a lot of our plans.

Last month, I celebrated my kids getting vaccinated. This proved to be helpful for keeping them in school the last few days. They’ve been close contacts. However, fully vaccinated students without symptoms can still go to school while we wait for the PCR tests. The unvaccinated students have to stay home. Vaccinated kids at age 8 and 9 like mine are very protected.

With Climate Change doing its thing, we’ll jump at the chance to sled at any snow we get. This was actually an action shot and he’s running and jumping onto the sled, but it looks like a normal run.

Also, last month I announced that we were going to Puerto Rico in March. One of the reasons was that they didn’t have much COVID there. Well that changed very quickly. We still have our reservation, but that’s up in the air as things change every day.

When I was writing my last update on December 5th, Omicron hadn’t spread very far in the US. Obviously that’s changed. It’s almost like each variant is its own different beast. The initial COVID was bad, we didn’t have vaccines to protect us. The Delta variant was bad, it spread a lot more easily and many people weren’t vaccinated. Now we’ve got Omicron which spreads like a California wildfire :(, but it it appears to not be as harmful. Hospitalizations and death numbers are rising, but if you are vaccinated it’s mostly an annoyance of getting tested a lot and some services not running. Of course, there are some people who can’t be vaccinated and we should do the best we can with them in mind.

This may sound insensitive, especially to the people who are seriously threatened by COVID. However, people who get Omicron seem to have more immunity from Delta which is more deadly. Maybe we’re getting closer to some kind of herd immunity from the most deadly effects of COVID?

Now… back to the month in passive income.

Very Close to Passive Income: $6,281

Last month it was $6,209, so this is a very good gain. This would be ~$75,000 a year of passive-ish income. We wouldn’t need to touch the investments themselves. We wouldn’t have to sell stocks or have a “withdrawal rate.” We wouldn’t have to get a reverse mortgage on our home or the 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 choose to draw them down for more fun, charity, or other spending.

In the last year, we went from $5,526 to $6,281, a gain of $754 a month in passive income. That’s $9,000 a year. That can cover a lot of expenses, such as our property tax and some utility bills.

It only took 13 years for my dog to get a bed he loves. He’s had other beds, but he just ignored them and jumped up on the couch. It’s harder for him to jump now. He can still make it up on the couch, but this is another good option for him.

This “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354/mo. in January 2017. So in exactly 5 years, we’ve added almost $4,000 in monthly passive income – or $48,000 a year. That’s a lot more than the $34,000 I made as a software engineer out of college in 1998. This is one of the reasons why I went with the “Lazy” name, it shows that money investing can do more “work” (or somehow produce more “value”) than I did. It’s a crazy system and you can see that I’m doing my best to work within it.

It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet (except for the profit-sharing check), because the money isn’t liquid. We don’t feel “rich” by any stretch of the word, even though we are relative to many people’s circumstances. We have gained almost $4,000/mo. in passive-ish income in almost 5 years. I used to wonder if we can get to $8,000/mo. in passive income by the start of 2025. A year ago, it was a stretch goal… now it feels like a certainty unless we have that major crash. I think we’re on pace to get there by the end of 2023 now.

Final Passive Income

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

Passive Income: $9,536.03

Last month it was $11,495.62. The lack of dog sitting income is showing up here. That’s fine, I could use a break. Dog sitting has always been seasonal in our tourist area of Newport, Rhode Island. Last December it was around $6,500, so all income is up by $3,000. I’ll take it.

I had set a goal at the start of the year for this to average $8,000 for the year, but I honestly didn’t think it was possible. However, I finished at $10,168.45 – soundly beating expections. It’s been a great year.

This ~$9,500/mo. income is over ~$114,000 a year. That (hypothetical) annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, and investing is very nice. This amount of dog sitting isn’t too bad, unlike previous months. If we can manage 100K from all these sources we’d be doing quite well – given our necessary expenses for the next 45 years. Of course, those necessary expenses aren’t going to cover all our spending, but it’s a large percentage of it.

As the last nearly two years have shown, you never know what bad news is lurking around the corner. This preparation gives us the financial flexibility to fight it.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s day job of bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income when she retires), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years (which isn’t passive at all). That’s the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well 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 gives me the flexibility to bring the kids to bring the kids to school and after-school activities.

I’m 98% sure that I did this when I was 8 as well.

I love two things about the graph below. First, there’s a solid trend of the numbers staying high for several months now. Second, it doesn’t dip down too far. It’s been above $6,000 for a while now. It seems safe to say that $7,000 or $7,500 should be considered the new floor.

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

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t very exciting as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote here.

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

We saw our net worth grow 1.55% in December. That reverses the losses in November. For all of 2021, our net worth is up 28%!! That’s the most our net worth has gone up in one year since 2013 when I started keeping meticulous net worth tracking. A big percentage gain after years of a big bull market means it is a big number.

Recently for something new, I decided to share our liquid cash growth (or loss). I’ve been tracking it for some time, but never thought to share it. Many other bloggers break down their income and expenses in great detail. I’m too “Lazy” for all that, even if my credit cards reports can do a lot of it. Looking at our liquid cash is a way to roughly gauge the bottom line, income minus expenses. In the past, we haven’t focused much on this because we’ve been investing that money. However, our focus now is to build enough cash so my wife feels comfortable retiring. Last report, our liquid cash went up by 26,500 thanks to a big IRS refund. This month we’ve lost around $10,800 as we’re paying a lot to renovate our basement. That is a lot of money, but adding ~200 sq. ft. of living space is life-changing.

It’s important to recognize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 15 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 out. 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+ 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. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned more in 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.

Turkey time has come on gone. We’re onto Christmas now. Well, we should be. However, with my wife deployed until around the middle of December, I can’t seem to find the time to put up decorations. We’ve watched some Christmas movies and listened to Christmas music in the car. That will have to be good enough for now. Enough about Christmas though, this is about reviewing November.

November was one of the more interesting months of my life. My wife was honored with an invitation to meet the President at the White House on Veterans Day. She got to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the 100th year. I went along, but it seems like the White House doesn’t allow “plus ones”, so I “only” got to see a speech from a special seating area.

(So proud!)

While in D.C. we got to spend a day exploring a bit. We hit the The National Air and Space Museum and The National Gallery of Art. It’s hard to believe that such great experiences are available for free! We barely touched the tip of the iceberg. Imagine what it must be like for teachers and students to be able to take field trips there. We have to plan to get the kids to go down there soon.

My wife had one more piece of big news, but I’m going to wait until later in the week to reveal that. It didn’t become official until recently, so technically it wasn’t something in November. It is life-changing news, so you’ll want to stay tuned.

As for the kids, my 3rd grader auditioned and won one of two small parts in the 8th grade play. We got progress reports from the school and both kids are doing well. They got to see their cousins for the first time in nearly two years at Thanksgiving. That was a great time for all of us.

I normally have a lot more to share, but single parenting (even for a month) is difficult and I’ve been going with the path of least resistance with everything.

That’s enough of the personal stuff… 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 to it. 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 right now. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where on that journey we are. Each month, you’ll see that the bank owns less and we own more. When we get to owning 100% there will be no mortgages and all that rental income can be used for living expenses. When it comes to 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

I categorize our passive income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job” – that’s not passive at all. (I do 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 “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. For example, I’m writing this while boarding 2 dogs right now. I leave real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way if you want to only count that you can do that.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

The year of dog boarding continues. Everyone getting a pandemic dog, plus vaccines, and a year of missed travel makes everything busy. Usually, dog boarding is seasonal, just the tourist season of the summer. This year has been very different.

November was boosted by the Thanksgiving holiday. Those rates are higher and it’s easy for us to be at capacity during those times of high demand. For the month, we’ve done just about the 5-month average since things really took off in June.

In the past (and above), I have written that dog sitting is passive-ish income, which is why it is on this report. When it is one dog a day on average, it is passive. With three dogs on average, it is much less passive. The dogs compete for attention. Coordinating schedules for drop-offs and pick-ups with other dog owners and Meet and Greets takes a lot of time. I will still count it as passive for now, because the numbers would get weird if I just deleted off a source of income. Also, with my other work and dog sitting my blogging income takes a hit.

I loved being able to catch this shot of two different dog boarder families having their dogs dance.

It looks like dog-sitting is going to be busy going forward. December’s bookings are a little light, but we’re closing to do a basement renovation and only taking a couple of dogs over Christmas.

That’s a lot about dog-sitting, but what about blogging? Blogging income was down in November. I sold a good amount of advertising, but the advertiser ghosted me instead of paying like they had in the past. I pulled the advertising before too long hoping that he’ll get his payment in to restart it, but it hasn’t yet. That income may never come in, which is unfortunate. The good news is that it’s very rare that something like that happens.

In October, “dogs and blogs” combined for a total of $6,520.55. In November, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $5,286.62

To put this number in context, the average for Nov 2018 and Nov 2019 was $2,598. I’m purposely leaving out last November, because the pandemic really killed off my income. So this is going very, very well.

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 9-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. My 7-year-old was a little slower to dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche of catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them. This help means that 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.

Someday, I want to get them more involved in blogging, taking pictures, and things like that. During school, they have too much to keep them busy. After school, there’s homework, becoming mini-ninjas, Scouting, and sports fill up their days. Being a kid is hard work!

(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 big housing jumps from earlier this year seem to be over. Maybe it was too much, too fast. Maybe it is seasonal. Maybe it is both. Zillow determined our properties were worth a little more this month. We continue to pay down the mortgages. This combinations mean that we grew our equity a little bit just as we do every month. In real terms it is several thousand dollars, but in percentage terms it looks tiny.

We went from 71.41% to 71.82% ownership of the equity in our properties. See, just a tiny percentage – but those tiny percentages add up month after month, year over year.

If we owned the rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), I calculate that, after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance we’d make about $3,400 a month. That number represents our net gain.

The Air and Space Museum. Can I tell you once again, it was free?!?!

If you multiply our expected net rent by $3,400 by the amount of equity we have (i.e. where we are on our journey to 100% equity ownership), 71.82%, you get $2,442 in estimated monthly passive income. That’s a small gain of $14 from last month, but slow and steady wins this race.

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. So in almost 5 years, we’ve seen that number more than double. That’s the power of 15-year mortgages.

In about 5 more years from now, the ratio will grow to 100% of that $3,400 rent. Except that rent should be closer to $3700 in the next year – our properties are way below market. Since rent is inflation-resistant (we can raise rents as costs of living go up), we don’t have to factor in inflation like other investments. So we can think of it as around $40,000/yr. of income in today’s dollars buying the same value in the future. That should be enough money for us to live on with our own home paid off (plus our solar panels, frugal shopping habits, and military healthcare.) Of course, that’s just part of the plan as you can see.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $2,428.

Total Rental Property Income: $2,442

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I assume we will earn a 2.5% dividend yield on our holdings. That could be from a high-dividend ETF. For example, HDV is currently paying about a 3.86% yield. It could also come from simply holding strong companies that have a long history of dividend growth. There are some income investing ideas here. 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 4-5% average dividend yield. (That link to the newsletter has a special discount rate and in full disclosure, I make a few dollars if you sign up for it.)

Of course, we may not convert everything over to dividend income at all, it’s just a conservative way to think of our investment portfolio. If I used a 3.5% or 4% withdrawal rate, the numbers would be much bigger.

The markets fell back around December 5th when I was updating my net worth spreadsheet. I try to wait for the rent checks to get in and mortgages to get paid out. In the last couple of days they’ve gone back up, but that doesn’t help for this report. Fortuantely things didn’t go too far down. I had a little spare cash and used that as a mini-buying opportunity. That was more about my own psychology than it was any meaningful portfolio change.

That’s the President of the United States talking in the distance

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The business was almost ideally positioned in this pandameic due to its virtual nature. In fact, the business was doing so well they had some extra money to send out before the end of the year, but I didn’t include that here. Maybe if this bonus is consistent they’ll up the profit-sharing and I’ll be able to add more into this report from that. 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: $3,767

Last month, it was $3,945, so that’s a drop. I guess you can’t have all-time highs every single month – only about 36 of the last 40 – LOL. When I started tracking this number in 2017 we were at $1,180/mo. Our money is working hard to multiply, especially because we aren’t adding much to the investments. Instead we’re focusing on saving money for my wife to retire. At the end of this report, I’ve given a liquid cash paragraph to help explain how that’s going.

Annualized, this monthly $3,767 is $45,201. Like the rent number above of around $40,000, we should be able to live on this by itself (once mortgage free in a few years). However, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t use much of this potential income for now. (We can use the profit-sharing check as it goes straight to our checking account.) We’ll probably let this investment continue to compound for another 14 years until we are age 59.5. Then we’ll have to see if we want to tap it or let it continue until we are required to take some of it at age 72. We’ve started to see an estate planning lawyer, but I have a lot of paperwork to do with that before I can move forward. We may look at tax and financial professionals soon.

Very Close to Passive Income

Our “very close to passive income” is a combination of rental property income and dividend income. If there were some royalty income from books, movies, or music, I’d include that as well. 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 at the beginning that takes some active work to keep up.

The drop in the stock market was too much for us to grow this month. Oh well, it’s bound to happen. At least the drop was minimal. Real estate didn’t move too much. I love having both types of income working together for us. I think everyone interested in FIRE should have stocks 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.

Break: This month in COVID

The big news for most of the world last month was the omicron variant. Scientists are worried about it, but they are still figuring some things out about it. I’m sure we’ll know more in my next report.

So let’s skip that “big news” and go with personal big news. Our kids, age 7 and 9, were able to get vaccines! They have both shots now and my 9-year-old marked the calendar for when they are considered fully vaccinated. The weird thing is that I didn’t push a big interest in this other than, “This is something that we do.” I don’t think anything particularly changes for them such as not wearing masks at school. We’re waiting for Rhode Island guidance on any kind of changes, but I don’t expect any until we get through the holidays and cases start to go back down from the get-togethers. However, maybe it will be spring with more people outside when we see real changes.

Speaking of spring, we booked real travel. We’re going to Puerto Rico in March! We feel very good about it. We’ll all be vaccinated. We’ll be able to spend a lot of time outside. They don’t have that many cases there. It’s very similar to our trip to Hawaii last March. These weren’t necessarily the places we expected to go on vacation before COVID, but we’re thankful to be able to go on vacation, stay in the United States, and introduce the kids to a culture that’s very different from a small New England port town.

I know there are new variants and it’s tough to vaccinate the entire world, but I believe the human race can win the war against COVID if we can convince everyone to fight the battle. We have safe, very effective, vaccines and they’ll be getting better. The government is stepping up further to push cheap ($12) or free rapid tests to prevent the spread at events. Pfizer has a pill that seems to reduce hospitalizations and deaths by 90%. The pills have been tested on people with risk factors, but they should even better when no risk factors are involved if the costs are low enough.

Now… back to the month in passive income.

Very Close to Passive Income: $6,209

Last month it was $6,373, so this is a very good gain.

This would be almost $75,000 a year of passive-ish income. We wouldn’t need to touch the investments themselves. We wouldn’t have to sell stocks or have a “withdrawal rate.” We wouldn’t have to get a reverse mortgage on our home or the 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 choose to draw them down for more fun, charity, or other spending.

This “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354/mo. in January 2017. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet (except for the profit-sharing check), because the money isn’t liquid. We don’t feel “rich” by any stretch of the word, even though we are relative to many people’s circumstances. We have gained almost $4,000/mo. in passive-ish income in almost 5 years. I used to wonder if we can get to $8,000/mo. in passive income by the start of 2025. A year ago, it was a stretch goal… now it feels like a certainty unless we have that major crash. I think we’re on pace to get there by the end of 2023 now.

Final Passive Income

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

Passive Income: $11,495.62

Last month it was $12,893.55. It looks like I won’t be setting new records for a while. Dog sitting will probably slow in January and grow again in February when school vacations happen.

I had set a goal at the start of the year for this to average $8,000 for the year, but I honestly didn’t think it was possible. However, it’s over $10,000 and looks like it is going to finish that way. It’s been a great year.

This ~$11,500/mo. income is over $135,000 a year. That (hypothetical) annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, and investing is very nice. However, this amount of dog care isn’t something that I want to continue over the longer term. If we could manage 100K from all these sources we’d be doing quite well – given our necessary expenses for the next 45 years. Of course, those necessary expenses aren’t going to cover all our spending, but it’s a large percentage of it.

As the last nearly two years have shown, you never know what bad news is lurking around the corner. This preparation gives us the financial flexibility to fight it.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s day job of bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income when she retires), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years (which isn’t passive at all). That’s the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well 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 gives me the flexibility to bring the kids to bring the kids to school and after-school activities.

I love two things about the graph below. First, there’s a solid trend of the numbers staying high for several months now. Second, it doesn’t dip down too far. It’s been above $6,000 for a while now. It seems safe to say that $7,000 or $7,500 should be considered the new floor.

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

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t very exciting as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote here.

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

We saw our net worth drop in November, but it wasn’t too bad. The drop was 1.63% and it has probably more than recovered by now. For the year overall, our net worth is up 26.11%. That’s the most our net worth has gone up in one year since 2013 when I started keeping meticulous net worth tracking. A big percentage gain after years of a big bull market means it is a big number.

Recently for something new, I decided to share our liquid cash growth (or loss). I’ve been tracking it for some time, but never thought to share it. Many other bloggers break down their income and expenses in great detail. I’m too “Lazy” for all that, even if my credit cards reports can do a lot of it. Looking at our liquid cash is a way to roughly gauge the bottom line, income minus expenses. In the past, we haven’t focused much on this because we’ve been investing that money. However, our focus now is to build enough cash so my wife feels comfortable retiring. Last report, our liquid cash went down $7,412.09 this month as we’ve had some rent check problems from a tenant. This month we had a big IRS refund as we finished our 2020 just in time for the extension. Along with some other savings, we were able to grow the liquid cash number by more than $26,500. It may be temporary since we’re finishing a basement, buying restuarant gift cards on holiday deals, and other holiday spending.

It’s important to realize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 15 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back then, but it’s in the news a lot now. We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting out. 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 11 of blogging (year 13 of early retirement planning). Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15 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. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned more in 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.

It’s near the start of a new month, so that means I have the financial numbers to review for last month. Before we get into the numbers, here’s a little personal review.

The best part of September was that I felt very happy the whole month. That’s not usually the case. I capped off almost every night in our inflatable hot tub spa with some streaming service on a tablet. Sometimes I’d just pause the show and look up at the stars and listen to the crickets for a minute or two.

Usually, I’m rushing around and September was no exception, but it was good rushing around for stuff, not stressed.

As always, we had some notable events of the month. The kids are back in school. We were lucky to have school all last year, so this is just “normal awesome” instead of the “wow awesome!” that many families experienced in the last 4-6 weeks. Our oldest son turned 9 and I informed him we’re halfway done with him. That was jokingly, of course. I’ve been joking about shipping him off to catch Pokemon at age 10 like Ash Ketchum for years, so it’s a running gag.

Our youngest started soccer and he’s really good at it. It’s at least in part because he is the oldest on the team. The other part is that he’s willing to be aggressive. It’s also age 7 soccer, so picture a bunch kids crowded together kicking.

Both kids have been in karate for a year and got new belts this month. They are on their 4th and 5th belts with their respective ages. It’s halfway to the black belt in terms of the number of belts, but my understanding is that it gets more difficult to achieve each new belt.

We had some social experiences. We took a day trip to Mystic, CT with some friends. We didn’t see Julia Roberts, but we did eat at Mystic Pizza. Other than that, we spent a little time at the beach squeezing out the last bit of summer. We also went to a mansion lawn party.

My wife bought us a special event fundraiser experience at the local zoo. We all got to go in the bear den and feed the bears. It’s less dangerous than it sounds because we placed food in their den while they were asleep in their “secure bedroom.” Then from outside the den we watched the bears come out and scavenger hunt for the food we placed. It was a little expensive, but it included breakfast, created a unique memory, and helps out the zoo.

My friend, and prominent money writer, Miranda Marquit came to town. In the 8 years, we’ve lived in Newport, RI, I think it was my first friend who I was able to give a tour to. It was a ton of fun to take the day off and create an itinerary of historic places and local experiences.

Finally, my wife won the state’s Pharmacist of the Year award, so we got dressed up in suits (including the kids) for a fancy banquet. I’ve written about her career a good amount lately, and this personal update is too small to include too much about it. I guess I would say that she’s been cleaning up in the awards area lately. She wonders if people are buttering her up so that she doesn’t retire.

My family isn’t a bunch of animals, but my kids saw these edits on my phone recently and thought themselves as dog and turtle face was quite possibly the funniest thing ever. As a side note, I don’t know why this picture looks like was taken with my old Palm Pre from 2009.

That’s enough of the personal stuff… let’s start the Passive Income report. I used to call this the Alternative Income Report, but everyone loves passive income better. While I transition to the new terminology, there may be some “alternative income” mentions including the FAQ. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you’ll likely have a lot of questions.

The way I calculate these numbers requires that long explanation – it isn’t intuitive at all. The reason why I do things a little differently is that this catalogs a journey. For example, we don’t have passive income from our rental properties while we are paying down their mortgages. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where on that journey we are. Each month you see that the bank owns less and we own more. When we get to owning 100% there will be no mortgages and all that rental income can be used for living expenses.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income

I categorize our passive income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job” – that’s not passive at all. (I do 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 “somewhat active” income. They are more passive because I can make money even when I’m literally not tending to them. I leave real estate and investment income as their own separate main sources of very passive income.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

September saw people finally get back to school and stop their vacations. Revenue was down 25% from August, but we still had more than twice the income of our biggest month outside of this summer surge. October has it slowing down even more so far. I’m happy that it is less busy – it’s time for a break.

In the past, I have written that dog sitting is passive-ish income, which is why it is on this report. When it is one dog a day on average, it is passive. In September it was still fairly active work! Coordinating schedules with other dog owners and Meet and Greets takes a lot of time.

With summer tourism over, my dog can enjoy the beaches again.

Dog sitting is looking like it will be back to being mostly passive going forward. Beach town tourism disappears in the wintertime. Hopefully, we’ll have a happy medium.

That’s a lot about dog-sitting, but what about blogging? Blogging income was down as some advertisers didn’t pay their invoices on time. That money will be in October’s results, so it will all balance out.

In August, “dogs and blogs” combined for a total of $7,138.91. In September, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $5,326.58

It would have been nice to continue to hit new records, but it’s more important to get the kids started off well at school. This is still far more than I usually make, so it’s a success.

My kids in a bear den!

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 9-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. My 7-year-old is good too, but it’s more of a work in progress. This help means that 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.

Someday, I want to get them more involved in blogging, taking pictures, and things like that. During school, they have too much to keep them busy. Homework, becoming mini-ninjas, scouting, and soccer fill up their days.

(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 huge housing market surge seems to have settled down. Zillow estimated that our properties went down a tiny bit. This seems a lot healthier. We continue to pay down the mortgages. Typically that’s about $2000 a month. This month that mortgage pay down is our main gain.

We went from 70.66% to 70.93% ownership of the equity in our properties. We are only a few years away from getting real profits from the rental properties.

If we owned the rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), I calculate that, after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance we’d make about $3,400 a month. That number represents our net gain.

If you multiply our expected net rent by $3,400 by the amount of equity we have (i.e. where we are on our journey to 100% equity ownership), 70.93%, you get $2,412 in estimated monthly passive income. That’s only a gain of $10 from last month, but slow and steady wins the race.

This Newport mansion lawn party was fun – food trucks and music. Perfect for a couple of hours after work/school.

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. So in almost 5 years, we’ve seen that number more than double. That’s the power of 15-year mortgages.

In about 5 years from now, the ratio will grow to 100% of that $3,400 rent. Since rent is inflation-resistant (we can raise rents as costs of living go up), we don’t have to factor in inflation like other investments. So we can think of it as around $40,000/yr. of income in today’s dollars buying the same value in the future. That should be enough money for us to live on with our own home paid off (plus our solar panels, frugal shopping habits, and military healthcare.)

In the previous report, the rental property income was $2,402.

Total Rental Property Income: $2,412

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I assume we will earn a 2.5% dividend yield on our holdings. That could be from a high-dividend ETF or from simply holding strong companies that have a long history of dividend growth. There are some income investing ideas here. 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 closer to a 4% average dividend yield. (That link to the newsletter has a special discount rate and in full disclosure, I make a few dollars if you sign up for it.)

We had a 9th birthday part at the house outside. Next year, I’d like to do it at a trampoline park. Hosting people at our house requires a lot of preporation.

The markets fell from their highs. There was always going to be a time when the markets go down. I diversified some money across industries and increase the amount in bonds in hopes that they’ll be more stable if a crash does happen. Since the markets were only down a little, I don’t know if helped too much. If we see a full 10% correction, I’ll start to sell some bonds and buy stocks at a discount. I try to plan to be able to keep doing this every time the market drops 10%, 15%, 20%, etc. from its highs.

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The business was almost ideally positioned in this pandameic due to its virtual nature. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for the purposes of this report, it makes sense to group together all stock ownership in this bucket.

Total Dividend-ish Income: $3,786

Last month, it was $3,880. It’s a significant drop, but we’ve been up for so long it doesn’t matter too much to me. When I started tracking this number in 2017 we were at $1,180/mo. Our money is really working hard to multiply, especially because we aren’t investing much, but instead focusing on saving money for my wife to retire.

Improtu stop at a local bookstore in Mystic, CT lead to this cool moment

Annualized, this monthly $3,786 is $45,433. If our mortgage was paid off, we might be able to live on this by itself. However, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t use much of this potential income for now. (We can use the profit-sharing check as it goes straight to our checking account.) We’ll probably let this investment continue to compound for another 14 years until we are age 59.5. Then we’ll have to see if we want to tap it or let it continue until we are required to take some of it at age 72. I still need to see an estate planning lawyer and possibly some other tax and financial professionals soon.

Very Close to Passive Income

Our “very close to passive income” is a combination of rental property income and dividend income. If there were some royalty income from books, movies, or music, I’d include that as well. 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 at the beginning that definitely takes some more work.

The big growth this month came from the stock market. Real estate was mostly flat. I love having both types of income working together for us. I think everyone interested in FIRE should have stocks 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 month in COVID

For a little while now, I’ve been giving some thoughts on the state of COVID in the middle of this section, so it might as well have a title. Delta looks to have peaked and is now down about 30% in cases from the peak. I guess the combination of vaccines and herd immunity is working a bit. At 100,000 cases we still have a ways to go to get to the 12,000 from earlier this summer.

I’m optimistic we’ll get there.

Every year, we go to Gregg’s, a local restaurant chain and our oldest gets a piece of Death by Chocolate cake.

Kids under 12 will soon be able to get vaccines and that might help stop the spread. I think more people will be able to get booster shots going forward. It’s looking like we’ll get cheap ($12) or free rapid tests for home use soon. Experts say that kind of near-instant detection could help prevent the spread a lot.

Not that this is related to case numbers, but the Merck pill treatment seems like a huge win. The odds that you would still be okay with breakthrough COVID were good, but this extra treatment may make even that diagnosis not so scary.

We still have Thanksgiving and Holidays to get through, so things could still spike then. I’m looking forward to late January when it seems like everything is in place – vaccines for our family, boosters for us adults, good overall community immmunity, low cases due to easy testing at group events, and easy affordable treatment.

Now… back to the month in passive income finance.

Very Close to Passive Income: $6,198

Last month it was $6,283. For the first time in a long time our passive investments didn’t grow. That’s bound to happen sometimes when we’re dependent on things we don’t control such as the stock and real estate markets.

This would be nearly $75,000 a year of almost completely passive income. What’s better is that there would be no need to touch the investments themselves. We wouldn’t have to sell stocks for the dividends are assuming or get a reverse mortgage. 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 choose to draw them down for more fun, charity, or other spending.

This “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354/mo. in January 2017. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet (except for the profit-sharing check), because the money isn’t liquid. We don’t feel “rich” by any stretch of the word, even though we are relative to many people’s circumstances. We have gained almost $4,000/mo. in passive-ish income in a little more than 4 years. I used to wonder if we can get to $8,000/mo. in passive income by the start of 2025. A year ago, it was a stretch goal… now it feels like a certainty unless we have that major crash.

Final Passive Income

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

Passive Income: $11,524.58

Last month it was $13,420.91. Looks like I’m done setting records until next year’s dog sitting season. I started the year thinking that I was just going to lower and lower because the “dogs and blogs” weren’t working. Even though this is less passive with all the dog sitting, it’s great to have real earning power. When “dogs and blogs” aren’t going well, the passive-ish income can still keep me from getting too low.

I had set a goal at the start of the year for this to average $8,000 for the year, but I honestly didn’t think it was possible. However, it’s over $9,700 on average now, so I just have to keep things going for three more months.

This ~$11,500+/mo income is almost $140,000 a year. That (hypothetical) annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, and investing is very nice. However, this amount of dog care isn’t something that I want to continue over the longer term. If we could manage 100K from all these sources we’d be doing quite well – given our necessary expenses for the next 45 years. Of course, those necessary expenses aren’t going to cover all our spending, but it’s a large percentage of it.

It was a bit of work, but I reached the best of the best in a small DuoLingo group.

As the 18 months have proven, you never know what bad news is lurking around the corner. This preparation gives us the financial flexibility to fight it.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s day job of bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income when she retires), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years (which isn’t passive at all). That’s the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, but the flexibility gives me the time to stretch almost every dollar in almost all our spending. It also gives me the flexibility to bring the kids to a bunch of events.

I love two things about the graph below. First, there’s a solid trend of the numbers staying high for several months now. Second, it doesn’t dip down too far. It’s been above $6,000 for a while now. It seems safe to say that $7,000 or $7,500 should be considered the new floor.

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

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t very exciting as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote here.

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

As we saw with the investing numbers above, September was a poor month for our net worth. We lost 1.43%. For the year overall, our net worth is up 24.32%, so a one-month hiccup is no big deal.

Last month for something new, I decided to share our liquid cash. I’ve been tracking it for some time, but never thought to share it. Many other bloggers break down their income and expenses in great detail. I’m too “Lazy” for all that, even if my credit cards reports can do a lot of it. Looking at our liquid cash is a way to roughly gauge the bottom line, income minus expenses. In the past, we haven’t focused much on this because we’ve been investing that money. However, our focus now is to build enough cash so my wife feels comfortable retiring. We grew our liquid cash by $4,684.91 this month. The dog sitting income has really made a difference, so we might not be able to improve this as much in the future without cutting down on spending.

It’s important to realize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 15 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back then, but it’s in the news a lot now. We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting out – especially ones saddled with huge student loans. 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 11 of blogging (year 13 of early retirement planning). Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15 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. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned more in 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 September? Let me know in the comments.

September is here and the kids are in school. That means I should have fewer kids and dogs to care for, which will mean more writing here. Much like the July numbers, the August numbers were amazing because I boarded every dog in the world. We’ll get to that in a bit though. There’s a reason why it’s “personal” before “finance.” Let’s get to the personal part with a life update.

Life updates in this space are almost always positive. To write this section, I go through my phone’s pictures over the last month and I take pictures of the good times. Usually, when bad things are happening, I don’t stop to take pictures of them. So keep in mind that you are seeing a highlight reel and it’s not like everything is great all the time.

This August was so busy with dog sitting my wife ended up taking the kids to some of the events. They went to a local water slide that wasn’t great, so they went to a much better water park a little later in the month. My wife was helping run an event at a golf tournament and brought my 8-year-old. Of course, he won a big basket of chocolate in a raffle. Chocolate is his favorite thing in the world. She also brought the kids on their first fishing trip with her father and they both caught fish. I was a little sad to miss these events, but sometimes it was nice to be have some time to myself have some time with a million strange dogs. My wife works a lot, so it was good that she got this time with them.

The kids continued their specialty camps. My older boy (8-year-old) did another cooking class. My younger boy (7-year-old) did art. The 8-year-old wanted to switch camps at the last minute, so we canceled one and tried another. However, that camp canceled on us (not enough enrollment). With my wife and I were both working, we turned to some of what I call “fun home school“. He did a few worksheets, some Tynker.com programming, and MoneyTime Kids, with some breaks in between for TV or recess. The TV breaks were Science Max on YouTube. (The MoneyTime Kids was also a push for myself to develop Kid Wealth to be ready for official launch.

My favorite art of my 7-year-old. It always makes me laugh. A dragon coming out of another dragon’s eye, but he’s upset because his watch is broken.

We went to the beach a few times – sometimes in the evening for a concert or event, sometimes during the day. We got to the military base’s Officer’s Club a few times. It’s a restaurant with a fantastic view and very, very cheap prices. They had food trucks and fireworks to say goodbye to summer. My wife got us invited to a somewhat exclusive beach club for a pharmacy convention. My 7-year-old got invited to the most exclusive beach club, famous for the Vanderbilts and Astors memberships. It was so exclusive that we couldn’t go with him. He said it was boring as it didn’t have a water slide.

That’s enough of the personal stuff… let’s start the Passive Income report. I used to call this the Alternative Income Report, but everyone loves passive income better. While I transition to the new terminology, there may be some “alternative income” mentions including the FAQ. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you’ll likely have a lot of questions.

The way I calculate these numbers requires that long explanation – it isn’t intuitive at all. The reason why I do things a little differently is that this catalogs a journey. For example, we don’t have passive income from our rental properties while we are paying down their mortgages. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where on that journey we are. Each month you see that the bank owns less and we own more. When we get to owning 100% there will be no mortgages and all that rental income can be used for living expenses.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income – June 2021

I categorize our passive income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job” – that’s not passive at all. (I do 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 “somewhat active” income. I leave real estate and investment income as their own separate main sources of very passive income.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

I continue to see growth in the dog sitting business. That’s what happens when everyone gets vaccines and goes on vacation after getting a pandemic dog. Here’s the growth by month:

April: 447% (March was almost non-existent because of few vaccines and travel
May: 27% (Most I had made in a month in 5 years)
June: 65% – Destroying the May record
July: 49% – Destroying the June record (more than all of 2020)
August: 17% – almost half of all of 2019 (pre-COVID numbers)

Eight-year-old enjoyed cooking camp and knows his way around a kitchen very well now

We’ve consistently had dogs which has been a game-changer. In the past, I’ve averaged one dog a day. We’re up to 3.5 dogs a day on average now and I charge more (mostly to limit the number of requests). My wife encouraged me to print business cards a few months ago. However, during the summer months, I essentially have all the business I can handle and I’m turning dogs away. I’m not the only one though. Sometimes another sitter will text me if I have availability because they are too full as well.

In the past, I have written that dog sitting is passive-ish income, which is why it is on this report. When it is one dog a day on average, it is passive. At this new level, it’s active, active, work! Coordinating schedules with other dog owners and Meet and Greets takes a lot of time.

Dog sitting is starting to go back to being passive in September. It’s looking like we’ll get fewer dogs with kids go back to school and families traveling less. Beach town tourism disappears in the wintertime. We had a busy Labor Day weekend, but we’ll see what happens after that. I think I’m more popular than I was before this summer, so maybe I’ll continue to be busy.

That’s a lot of dog-sitting writing, but what about blogging? Blogging income is just going okay. It’s a little above average, but I need to put more time into it. Fortunately, if the dog sitting drops off, I’ll have more time.

In July, “dogs and blogs” combined for a total of $7,148.45. In August, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $7,138.91

I missed a new record by less than $10! Ouch. I actually had a some website advertising that was done in August pay me in early September, but I’m keeping it in September. This is still a great number.

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 8-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 even got a $20 tip from a client! My 7-year-old is good too, but it’s more of a work in progress. This help means that 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. I want to get them more involved in blogging, taking pictures, and things like that, but it’s going slow. During school, they have too much to keep them busy. I thought we might make progress this summer, but their camps and our vacations kept them busy.

(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

Zillow’s estimates on the property values seems to have settled down after the big run-up of a few months ago. In fact, they even fell a tiny bit. I get nervous about bubbles when prices rise so much and so suddenly. I am happy to have a little pause. Of course, while this pause is going on, we continue to pay down the mortgages. We generally pay down $3000 a month in the real properties. Some months, like this month, that’s our only gain.

The kids built a hermit crab habitat. My 7-year-old was in charge of building. My 8-year-old fetched the hermit crabs from the ocean. At one point they had around 20 in this hole.

This month we went from 70.59% to 70.66% ownership of the equity in our properties. Yikes, that’s a small sliver. We are only a few years away from getting real profits from the rental properties.

If we owned the rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), I calculate that, after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance we’d make about $3,400 a month. That number represents our net gain.

If you multiply our expected net rent by $3,400 by the amount of equity we have (i.e. where we are on our journey to 100% equity ownership), 70.66%, you get $2,402 in estimated monthly passive income. I feel like the paperboy in Better Off Dead – “I want my two dollars!”

A friend had a foam platform for lakes and oceans. This was a big hit, so we might get one. However, they are fairly expensive at $300 or $400.

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. So in a little more than 4 years, we’ve seen that number double. That’s the power of 15-year mortgages.

In about 5 years from now, the ratio will grow to 100% of that $3,400 rent. Since rent is inflation-resistant (we can raise rents as costs of living go up), we don’t have to factor in inflation like other investments. So we can think of it as around $40,000/yr. of income in today’s dollars buying the same value in the future. That should be enough money for us to live on with our own home paid off (plus our solar panels, frugal shopping habits, and military healthcare.)

In the previous report, the rental property income was $2,400.

Total Rental Property Income: $2402

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I assume we will earn a 2.5% dividend yield on our holdings. That could be from a high-dividend ETF or from simply holding strong companies that have a long history of dividend growth. There are some income investing ideas here. 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 closer to a 4% average dividend yield. (That link to the newsletter has a special discount rate and in full disclosure, I make a few dollars if you sign up for it.)

Hurricane Henri hit us and we lost a tree branch. That’s not too bad. A week later, we got hit by Ida and the same tree lost a bigger branch. Strange, it’s a completely healthy tree.

The markets reached new highs yet again. I feel it can’t continue, but it does, so I guess I better enjoy it now. There will be a time when the markets go down. I’m preparing myself for that by focusing on all these gains now. I’m also trying to diversify money across industries and increase the amount in bonds in hopes that they’ll be more stable if a crash does happen.

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The business was almost ideally positioned in this pandameic due to its virtual nature. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for the purposes of this report, it makes sense to group together all stock ownership in this bucket.

Total Dividend-ish Income: $3,880

Last month, it was $3,821. This dividend-estimated number hasn’t historically moved that much from month to month, so this is a good return back to those times. When I started tracking this number in 2017 we were at $1,180/mo. Our money is really working hard to multiply, especially because we aren’t investing much, but instead focusing on saving money for my wife to retire.

The kids climbed a sizable rock formation at the beach. I probably won’t win Father of the Year since I was this far away taking the picture. I put a stop to it when they came racing down holding hands.

Annualized, this monthly $3,880 is $46,564. If our mortgage was paid off, we might be able to live on this by itself. However, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t use much of this potential income for now. (We can use the profit-sharing check as it goes straight to our checking account.) We’ll probably let this investment continue to compound for another 14 years until we are age 59.5. Then we’ll have to see if we want to tap it or let it continue until we are required to take some of it at age 72. I still need to see an estate planning lawyer and possibly some other tax and financial professionals soon.

Very Close to Passive Income

Our “very close to passive income” is a combination of rental property income and dividend income. If there were some royalty income from books, movies, or music, I’d include that as well. 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 at the beginning that definitely takes some more work.

I would have probably got this MoneyTime Kids question wrong.

The big growth this month came from the stock market. Real estate was mostly flat. I love having both types of income working together for us. I think everyone interested in FIRE should have stocks 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.

The Delta variant cases are starting to slow their meteoric rise. I guess that’s the good news. The bad news is that cases are still very high. My kids are starting school and I’m more nervous this year than I was last year. Their school did exceptionally well to stay in-person all last year without any cases of students (to the best of my knowledge). When they sent people home, it was always precautionary because a close contact of a student had tested positive. I think we are about 4-5 months away from vaccines for the 5-11 year-old group that includes my kids. If they get vaccinated and we get boosters, I think we’ll all be in sync for feeling as prepared as possible.

If you haven’t gotten vaccinated yet and you are eligible, please don’t put it off. Getting vaccinated can help kids and other people who aren’t eligible. There was thinking that kids were mostly immune to COVID, but Delta spreads a lot faster so getting a lot more kids means more hospitalizations. There’s some debate on whether should be mandated to wear masks in the classroom. Until they are vaccinated, the best way to get our kids unmasked in school is for the eligible people to choose to get vaccinated. As my kids are fond of saying about a number of things now, “you can’t have it both ways.”

Finally, I think it is quite patriotic to help America’s hospitals and health care by doing everything you can to avoid adding to the problem. Vaccinations are on the rise, so maybe people are starting to see that there’s been at least a billion worldwide doses administered and there’s no problem. I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Very Close to Passive Income: $6,283

Last month it was $6,220. The $6,283 is another all-time high. It seems like I can just leave that sentence in my template for when I write this article.

This would be more than $75,000 a year of almost completely passive income. What’s better is that there would be no need to touch the investments themselves. We wouldn’t have to sell stocks for the dividends are assuming or get a reverse mortgage. 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 choose to draw them down for more fun, charity, or other spending.

The Newport Officer’s Club event to send everyone off on a great summer. I know the picture is blurry, but that’s the best I had.

This “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354/mo. in January 2017. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet (except for the profit-sharing check), because the money isn’t liquid. We don’t feel “rich” by any stretch of the word, even though we are relative to many people’s circumstances. We have gained almost $4,000/mo. in passive-ish income in a little more than 4 years. I used to wonder if we can get to $8,000/mo. in passive income by the start of 2025. A year ago, it was a stretch goal… now it feels like a certainty unless we have that major crash.

Final Passive Income

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

Passive Income: $13,420.91

Last month it was $13,369.45. That’s squeaking into another all-time. I started the year thinking that I was just going to lower and lower because the “dogs and blogs” weren’t working. Even though this is less passive with all the dog sitting, it’s great to have real earning power. When “dogs and blogs” isn’t going well, the passive-ish income can still keep me from getting too low.

I had set a goal at the start of the year for this to average $8,000 for the year, but I honestly didn’t think it was poassible. Dogs and blogs were not performing at the start of the year. However, it’s over $9,500 on average now, so I just have to keep things going through the leaner winter months.

This picture of the Newport Officer’s Club is better.

This ~$13,000+/mo income is more than $160,000 a year. That (hypothetical) annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, and investing is very nice. However, this amount of dog care isn’t something that I want to continue over the longer term. If we could manage 100K from all these sources we’d be doing quite well – given our necessary expenses for the next 45 years. Of course, those necessary expenses aren’t going to cover all our spending, but it’s a large percentage of it.

As the last year and a half has proven, you never know what bad news is lurking around the corner. This preparation gives us the financial flexibility to fight it.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s day job of bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income when she retires), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years (which isn’t passive at all). That’s the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, but the flexibility gives me the time to stretching almost every dollar in almost all our spending. It also gives me the flexibility to bring the kids to a bunch of events.

I love two things about the graph below. First, there’s a solid trend of the numbers staying high for several months now. Second, it doesn’t dip down too far. It’s been above $6,000 for a while now. It seems safe to say that $7,000 or $7,500 should be considered the new floor.

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

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t very exciting as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote here.

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

One restaraunt near us had lunch boxes filled with action figures for the kids to play with while we waited for food. This is such a wonderful idea and I don’t know why no one else does it!

August was another good month for our net worth. We saw it jump 1.49%. For the year overall, our net worth is up 26.12%. That’s usually the best we do in any year and there’s still time for it to grow.

For something new this month, I decided to share our liquid cash. I’ve been tracking it for some time, but this is the first time that I thought I’d share it. Many other bloggers break down their income and expenses in great detail. I’m too Lazy for all that, even if my credit cards can do a lot of it. This is a way to roughly gauge the bottom line. In the past, we haven’t focused much on this because we’ve been investing it. However, our focus now is to build enough cash so my wife feels comfortable retiring. We grew our liquid cash by $8,206.95 this month. For the year, we’ve grown it $27,026.51, so the average is about $3,000/mo. The dog sitting income has really made a difference.

It’s important to realize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 15 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back then, but it’s in the news a lot now. We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting out – especially ones saddled with huge student loans. 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 11 of blogging (year 13 of early retirement planning). Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15 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. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned more in 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 August? Let me know in the comments.