It’s the middle of the month, so that means that I have the final alternative income numbers for last month. It always takes awhile for the tenants to have their rent checks in and for us to get all the money moved.

April was another busy month for us. In addition to all the financial stuff below, there was a lot of family stuff going on. The kids are still taking swim classes and one moved up a level. We reached a crucial milestone where if they fell into a pool they wouldn’t drown (I think). The older, 6-year old was one of the stars of a school play, so we’ll probably be investing in children theater classes in a few months. The younger, 5-year old seems to have acting in his blood, but he’ll have to wait until he’s 7.

They accidentally got renewed in a cooking class after school, so we just rolled with that. It’s great money-saving skill to learn at a young age. However, it means that we have to miss the local chess club. In a text document somewhere I have some research into Android apps that may fill the gap as long as they are still interested.

This also happened:

Found a bunch of a games at a yard sale. Picked out 8 classics. The seller wanted a dollar a game. I offered a $20 and she was so excited. pic.twitter.com/15pn17PJew

— LazyManAndMoney (@LazyManAndMoney) April 28, 2019

Both kids asked me if they could learn Japanese so they can work at The Pokemon Company someday. We’ve got more than 20 straight days on Duolingo together. We’re also learning French because their school starts that in Kindergarten. We’ll have to plan a trip to Canada in a little bit.

I’ll mix in some pictures throughout the financial update, because numbers can be boring.

If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you’ll have a lot of questions.

Lazy Man’s Alternative Income – March 2019

In looking at our alternative income, I break it down to 3 main sources… each with their own caveats.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

This summed up our dog sitting in April:

I got 99 problems… pic.twitter.com/501wLKof1m

— LazyManAndMoney (@LazyManAndMoney) April 7, 2019

Sometimes it felt like we had 101 dogs during the month. It was just a tremendous month where we were at our limit for a little while.

Blogging income for April was far above average as well. For some reason, advertisers were coming out of the woodwork and business was great.

In March, we were on vacation and these combined for a total of $2,148.86. In April, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $4,975.38

Ba-BAM!!

That’s the best these categories have done since 2017 and it’s nearly double what I’ve been averaging for a long time. The only downside is that I don’t think I discovered a secret that could lead to sustained success.

Here’s a historic chart with the red line being a 3-month average:

2. Rental Property Income

Zillow kept the value of our rental properties about the same. Like every month, we paid off a couple thousand of mortgage debt. It was boring, but in a great, slow and steady way.

We now have 55.20% of the equity in our properties with an estimated combined rent of $3,325. The rent number is after insurance, property taxes, and condo fees. That’s so we can estimate what we’d really be taking home after expenses.

If you multiply $3,325 by 55.20% you get $1,835 in estimated monthly alternative income. When I started tracking this (beginning of 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties and they had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. So in 27 months, we’ve seen the number grow $661/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $8,000 raise until the end of time from where we were just 2+ years ago.

As the years march on, the ratio will grow to 100% of the $3,325 monthly inflation-resistant rent. That’s what gets us to that annual $40,000 income I mentioned in the FAQ.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $1,819. This number always moves slowly. This number only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent. Later this year, we should be able to raise the rents a bit.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,835

3. Dividend Income

April did nothing for our portfolios. The stock market soared in April, but I didn’t get to take the numbers until May 11 – after Trump escalated the trade war with China causing the markets to give up their gains

Total Dividend Income: $1,659

Last month, it was $1,656, so we gained $3 of theoretical monthly money from theoretical dividends. Earlier in the month, I think this would have been $1,700 or close to it. This is an all-time new record for us, but obviously not exciting.

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 residual income from books, movies, or music, we’d include that here (but we don’t have that).

The stock market goes up and down fast which makes the dividends calculation fluctuate a bit. The rental property income keeps going up because the mortgages are always getting paid down every month. Unless there’s a housing market crash, this should continue to happen.

Having both types of income working together for us is great. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most people in the case of an unfortunate event. We’ll still likely get rent checks if there’s a brief trade war in China. We’ll still get dividend checks if a tenant is late paying one month.

Very Close to Passive Income: $3,494

Last month it was $3,475, so it’s up $19. Last month was an all-time high, so we continue breaking records. It has grown from a combined $2,354 in January 2017. Since then, this has gone from an estimated annual income of $28,252 from these two sources to $41,933. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet. However, I’m looking forward to 9 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties are paid off. Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number could reach $85K/year or more.

Final Alternative Income

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

December’s Very Close to Passive Income: $8,469.38

That would be $101,632.56 a year. I’ve been trying to get this number over $100,000 and we’re finally there. However, I don’t think we’ll stay over $100,000.

That largely hypothetical annual income for writing on a blog, and taking care of dogs, and investments feels a little like a dream. In the long term, that 100K+ would be a lot more income than we’d need. Here’s what our expenses for the next 45 years looks like.

These numbers don’t include any of my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her NOW VESTED military pension or some of the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last several months.

As always, I’m still hoping to write a book someday. I’m probably going to tip my toe into self-publishing soon. I would love to talk to a real a publisher, but I don’t want to take on the “job” of writing. If you know someone who I could talk to contact me.

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t very exciting as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s little more than 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, I think? (Let me know in the comments.)

I use Personal Capital to track my net worth and it makes everything easy. It’s free and you should give it a try. For full disclosure, I might make a few dollars if you do.

With the stock market not doing much and Zillow valuing our rental properties the same, there wasn’t much to impact our net worth. However, a neighbor sold their home and I think it triggered to Zillow to update their math as the value of our home went up. Our total net worth went up 0.95%. For the year it’s up 20.76%, a large percentage of that was based on a website sale that I had at the beginning of the year.

I always have to remember that percentages can be weird due to the law of large numbers. Imagine someone with a net worth of $100 finds a $100 bill on the ground. Instantly it doubles his/her net worth. As our net worth grows larger, the percentage of growth will come down too. You’d rather have 10% growth of a million dollars ($100,000 gain) than 20% growth of a $100K ($20,000 gain), right?

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask Should I Include a Pension in Our Net Worth?. I decided that it does make sense to do it. Later this month, I’m planning to write how to make such a calculation. It’s a big pension that’s potentially worth $2 million or more.

However, because that would ridiculously dominate our net worth, I think I’ll include it as two separate numbers in our spreadsheet. Since I don’t share the numbers anyway, except for these hints, it shouldn’t matter much.

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

It’s past the middle of the month and that means I have the numbers (and time to process them) for last month’s alternative income.

This month I’m doing something a little different. The software engineer in me extracted 90% of the 2500 words that give background information each month and put them in a FAQ. For now, I’m including the FAQ in the beginning of the article. However, in future months, it will probably be a separate page… or maybe something that expands when you click on it. Please bear with me if there are some errors on this. It’s more complicated than it looks.

If you are a regular reader and just want to get to the numbers, there’s a link to jump you over the FAQ and to the month’s update

Before we get all the boring numbers, I need to give you March’s back story.

You’d think that the biggest thing that happened in March is that we spent two weeks in Orlando, Florida. (You’d be wrong.)

Indeed we did Disney World and Universal Studios. With two weeks, we took some much needed days off in between. Two weeks is a long time to be away with kids ages 5 and 6. I’ll write a longer article about the trip, but I’ll also share some highlights here because it was a large part of the month.

Going on vacation for two weeks is a great test of alternative income. If the alternative income stays high, I’ll probably continue to do well if I am home and earning money from hobbies.

You’d think that the biggest thing that happened in March is that I turned 43. (You’d be wrong.)

I had a great birthday, perhaps the best ever. My wife surprised me with a much-needed suit. I can finally donate the 20 year old ones that don’t fit anymore. I’m not sure where I’ll wear my new suit, but something usually comes up once a year or two.

You’d think that the biggest thing that happened in March is I received a Tweet from a HUGE celebrity who I have been a card-carrying fan club member for over 20 years. (You’d be wrong.)

I’ll be sharing that Tweet in this email.

You’d think that the biggest thing that happened in March was my wife reaching 20 years of military service and a pension worth around $55,000 a year.

This time you’d be right!

It’s obviously a huge deal – the whole inspiration for creating this blog. I’ll have more to write about this over time, but for now I’m just speechless and blessed.

Skip the FAQ and jump to the monthly update

Alternative Income FAQ

In 2006 I started tracking my alternative income on this website and continued it for years. Life intervened, as it does, and I stopped.

In January 2017, I publishing monthly reports again. Since most of the reports are very similar, I decided it would be best to create this FAQ for new readers. This will give you the background information to get you up to speed. This helps regular readers zero in on the monthly update of “what’s new.”

Q. What is “Alternative Income?”

A. I coined “alternative income” in 2006 to be purposely vague.

I needed something to cover the small amount of blogging income I was making. On one hand, blogging is not passive income – it’s work. On the other hand, there’s a residual nature to the income. If I go on vacation for a couple of weeks, I still make money from the previous articles I’ve written.

Alternative income was more passive back in 2006 before social media, podcasting, and video. Today it seems like every blogger talks of hustling (as in moving quickly, not grifting people) and “being everywhere.” I’m sticking to my dinosaur roots as the only one dumb enough to just keep writing blog posts without cool, “pinnable” images.

Alternative income is best described as income where you don’t directly trade your time for money. Some common alternative income sources include collecting rent, dividends, royalties, and blogging. It’s very subjective. Your definition of alternative income may be a little different than mine. That’s okay, many people have different definitions for “retirement”.

I believe we all get the concept. That’s the important part.

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Q. How Do You Make Alternative Income?

A. Currently, it’s blogging, dog sitting, and two types of investments: rental properties and securities (stocks/bonds). I’m extremely likely to add another type of alternative income by the summer. It’s already in the works. After that I really need to get started in writing a book to increase royalties that way.

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Q. How Do You Spend Your Time?

A. This is important. Someone with few dependents or responsibilities can focus their energy more on creating alternative income sources. If you have to work 2 full-time jobs just to pay rent and childcare, it is going to be difficult to create alternative income.

My first priority is to be a stay-at-home dad. My military wife works long days on top of getting an online MBA (to add to her Pharm.D.) from a prestigious school. For promotion, she’s strongly encouraged to take on a number of other committee head positions. Yes, she “brings home the bacon.”

The kids are in school/camp during the day, which gives me time to do the basic family errands (shopping, cooking, dishes, laundry, walking the dog, etc.). There’s this blog, dog sitting business, and managing the rental properties. In the middle of 2018, I took on two ongoing freelance jobs that take about 20-25 hours of week of my time. The hours are flexible and the pay is good.

It’s hard for me to put a specific label on what I am. I can’t label it myself. However, as you can see I’m not under a palm tree sipping a Mai Tai… well not always.

There’s more detail on my Now page.

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Q. Can you Tell me More about Your Blogging and Dog Sitting Income

A. I don’t publicly break out the difference between blogging income vs. dog sitting income. One impacts the other. When I have a lot of dogs, I don’t have as much time or the focus to blog. When I’m blogging a lot, it’s usually because I don’t have too many dogs to sit.

Dog sitting can be high in the summer as people go on vacation. Blogging can be low in the summer with internet traffic low… as people go on vacation. They end up complimenting each other quite well. It’s almost like a school teacher opening up an ice cream shop.

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Q. Dog sitting income doesn’t seem like alternative income to me.

A. That’s not even a question!

It is true that both seem like trading time for money. However, this is one area where alternative income is subjective.

Sitting dogs itself isn’t a time-intensive job. While there is more overhead than you might think between booking dogs and meeting dogs for suitability, we do often have regular clients that are very easy.

The important differentiation with dog sitting is that I can “double-dip” and earn money from something else (such as blogging) at the same time. It’s very different than being an Uber driver. Double-dipping doesn’t work there as the police tend to frown on blogging and driving.

If you are interested, I wrote a very detailed article on how to make money dog sitting.

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Q. Blogging doesn’t seem like alternative income to me.*

A. Again, that’s not a question.

Like dog sitting, blogging isn’t directly trading time for money either. If I write an article for the blog today, I don’t necessarily get any significant money for it. The money I make from blogging now is a direct result of having built a reputation and a collection of nearly 2500 articles over 13 years of blogging.

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Q. What’s the background on your rental properties

A. We have three rental properties in our real estate accidental “empire”. (“Empire” is in quotes for a reason – it is a joke.) They are all on 15-year fixed mortgages. This means that we don’t make money on them now, but we are paying down those mortgages more quickly than most people. In 2027, we should be able to collect an estimated income of $40,000 a year (in today’s dollars, after expenses) on them.

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Q. How do you calculate rental property alternative income

A. Most landlords just calculate how much money they make after their expenses. That’s the easy way.

However, most landlords choose a 30-year fixed to keep their expenses low. We wanted to pay them off quickly. Thus our mortgages are high and we don’t make money on a monthly basis.

I came up with an alternative calculation that effective gives us the percentage of the rent that is ours. That is opposed to the percentage of the rents that are the bank’s. Imagine that you and a friend bought a $200,000 property and each owned 50%. If the property brought in $1500 a month in rent after expenses, each person gets $750 a month. This is what I do.

I add up all the properties’ equity (what we own) and estimated value. (Zillow is very accurate for these condos.) I calculate the percentage of the property that we own by dividing the equity to that estimated value.

Then I calculate the rents of all the properties as if they were owned free and clear. I subtract the expenses (condo fees, maintenance, etc.). I then multiply the percentage of the property that we own by that adjusted profit number.

If you are confused this article on calculating cash flow of cash flowless real estate explains it in more detail.

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Q. What about inflation of the real estate? Won’t that eat into the buying power of $40,000

A. Since rents are typically rise in line with inflation over the long term, we don’t have to adjust the numbers for the future. We’ll raise the $40,000 rents now to $80,000 at some point in the future, but it will still have roughly the same $40,000 buying power of today.

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Q. How do you calculate dividend alternative income?

A. We don’t focus on putting our money in dividend stocks, but I’m going to pretend that we do for sake of this exercise. In reality we a vast majority in index funds, but I do some stock picking with a small percentage of our portfolio. Though the index funds do pay dividends, it’s not their core goal.

We can pretend that I moved all the money into a dividend focused portfolio. I estimate that we could easily earn 2.50% in dividends. This gives us a conservative number that we could expect to have.

However, since almost all this money is in retirements accounts, we can’t access it in a practical way without tax penalties. We’re going to ignore this for the sake of the report. In the end we need to capture around 20 years of mostly maxing out retirement contributions and compound interest.

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Q. What’s “very close to passive income
A.

This is the income that is almost universally considered passive income. For us that would include just the rent payments and dividends. Maybe someday it will include royalties or book sales. I’m not counting blogging or dog sitting income in this.

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* While on the topic of blogging, I’d like to add that it isn’t all about the money. I highly recommend personal finance blogging. I wouldn’t aim for creating the greatest blog in the world. Instead, I’d think of it as a way to keep yourself accountable. That’s worked for me. Here’s how to get started blogging with any type blog you might be interested in.

Lazy Man’s Alternative Income – March 2019

In looking at our alternative income, I break it down to 3 main sources… each with their own caveats.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

March’s dog sitting was very poor. That’s to be expected when you spend half the month in Florida. However, even when we weren’t in Florida we didn’t have a lot of requests. It almost made me feel like the business was dying and people were going with other Rover sitters. Fortunately, we’ve seen a huge pick-up in April and it’s one of our biggest months ever.

Blogging income in March was just about average. I was surprised as I didn’t get a chance to blog much with the vacation. This is where the library of nearly 2,500 old posts seems to pay off.

In February, these two categories combined for a total of $2,850.40, a little below the average of 2018. In March, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,148.86

For missing nearly two weeks, that’s a pretty good number. I’m not sure too many people would be excited for what amounts to a $25K income. However, when characterized as extra money earned on vacation, it’s great. Since we are more than halfway through April now, I can forecast that it could be one of the best months ever.

Here’s a historic chart with the red line being a 3-month average:

Remember that important Tweet that I mentioned in the beginning. Here’s Steven Tyler retweeted me with some encouragement on my roller coaster fears at Universal Studios.

YOU CAN DO IT!!!! ??? ?? https://t.co/XuRoRt36ld

— Steven Tyler (@IamStevenT) March 14, 2019

2. Rental Property Income

Zillow moved the value of our rental properties down a few thousand dollars. At the same time, we were able to reduce the mortgages (like every month). That has an effect almost canceling each other out.

We now have 54.71% of the equity in our properties with an estimated combined rent of $3,325. The rent number is after insurance, property taxes, and condo fees. That’s so we can estimate what we’d really be taking home after expenses.

If you multiply $3,325 by 54.71% you get $1,819 in estimated monthly alternative income. When I started tracking this (beginning of 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties and they had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. So in 26 months, we’ve seen the number grow $645/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $7,740 raise until the end of time from where we were just 2+ years ago.

As the years march on, the ratio will grow to 100% of the $3,325 monthly inflation-resistant rent. That’s what gets us to that annual $40,000 income I mentioned in the FAQ.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $1,814. This number usually moves slowly and this $5 increase was the lowest in awhile. This number only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent. Later this year, we should be able to raise the rents a bit.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,819

My wife and I had a staycation/no-kid-overnight at the historic Castle Hill hotel in Newport, RI. This was our view from the patio. The panorama image doesn’t translate well to a web page:

3. Dividend Income

March was a tremendous month for our portfolios. The stock market continued to soar from the lows in the year.

Total Dividend Income: $1,656

Last month, it was $1,567, so we gained $89 of theoretical monthly money from theoretical dividends. Amazingly, we gained exactly $89 the month before. This is an all-time new record for us. I’d like to say that we are executing amazingly, but it’s mostly the stock marketing going well. We continue to save and invest, so we’re control what we can.

It’s almost impossible to have a better birthday than I had:

It's not even 8:30 and I have already had the best birthday ever (starting early last night).

– Favorite meal at favorite restaurant
– New suit (replacing college one from 20 years ago)
– Red Sox big 9th inning rally after 1AM
– Favorite candy around a ? pic.twitter.com/bIVTXOisoI

— LazyManAndMoney (@LazyManAndMoney) March 30, 2019

Very Close to Passive Income

This is a combination of rental property income and dividend income.

The stock market goes up and down fast which makes the dividends fluctuate as well. The rental property income keeps going up because the mortgages are always getting paid down every month. The stock market can move a lot faster than the housing market.

Having both types of income working together for us is great. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most if there’s a market downturn in the future.

Very Close to Passive Income: $3,475

Last month it was $3,381, so it’s up $94. Last month was an all-time high, so we continue breaking records. It has grown from a combined $2,354 in January 2017. Since then, this has gone from an estimated annual income of $28,252 from these two sources to $41,697. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet. However, I’m looking forward to 9 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties are paid off. Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number could reach $85K/year or more.

My kids found their favorite mouse at Disney:

It took nearly 2 weeks at Disney, but I finally found what Walt meant when he said it all started with a mouse.#Epcot #worldshowcase #japan pic.twitter.com/JKcToxrecL

— LazyManAndMoney (@LazyManAndMoney) March 22, 2019

Final Alternative Income

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

December’s Very Close to Passive Income: $5,623.86

That would be $67,486.32 a year. I’m trying to get this number over $100,000 so it’s moving in the wrong direction. However, I think we’ll be close in April.

That largely hypothetical annual income for writing on a blog, and taking care of dogs feels a little like a dream. In the long term, we can get by on much less than $67K of income. Here’s what our expenses for the next 45 years looks like.

That doesn’t include any of my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her NOW VESTED military pension or any of that freelance work I’ve been doing over the last several months. It also doesn’t include how much we could get selling our kids on the black market. (Just checking if you are reading this.)

As always, I’m still hoping to write a book someday. If you know of a publisher who I could talk to contact me. I’ve got 3 or 4 very marketable ideas in the personal finance space.

We brought the kids to see The Breakers for the first time. It’s a great field trip/history lesson just a couple of miles from our home. From a personal finance perspective, it’s fascinating what moguls could buy when there was no income tax:

Net Worth Update

This isn’t very exciting as I don’t share the exact numbers of our net worth. That’s why it’s little more than 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, I think? (Let me know in the comments.)

I use Personal Capital to track my net worth and it makes everything easy. It’s free and you should give it a try. For full disclosure, I might make a few dollars if you do.

Due to the strong stock market and steady real estate market, our net worth went up 2.70% in March. That would have been our best growth month in 2018 and the numbers are bigger now, which makes it harder to do. For the year it’s up 19.62%, a large percentage of that was based on a website sale that I had at the beginning of the year.

I always have to remember that percentages can be weird… Imagine with someone with a net worth of $100 finds a $100 bill on the ground. Instantly it doubles his net worth. As our net worth grows larger, the percentage of growth will come down too. You’d rather have 10% growth of a million dollars than 20% growth of a hundred thousand, right?

There’s a new big wild card in calculating our net worth this month. Now that my wife’s pension is vested, it’s reasonable to include it’s value in a net worth calculation. I’ll have an article about whether a pension should be included in the future. I’ll also write about how to evaluate the value of the pension. It’s a strong pension that’s potentially worth $2 million or more. Because that would ridiculously dominate our net worth, I don’t think I’ll include it.

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

It’s past the middle of the month. That means that I am late in posting the final numbers on last month’s alternative income. I always wait a few days because tenant checks are coming in and we are paying off mortgages at the start of the month. With the money passing back and forth, it can take a week to let everything settle.

However, this time, I’m late, because we’re on vacation at Disney World. I’ll give you more details in March.

February flew by so quickly as it always does. The annual Patscom Day sucks a week of productivity out of me every year. (If you’ve never heard of Patscom day, it’s because I’ve decided to coin a new term to more accurately describe the Super Bowl.)

February is also known for Valentine’s Day. My wife and I don’t celebrate it that much, preferring to take some private time later in the month (or early March as we did this year). Instead, we took the kids and dog to a frugal New York City vacation for the first time.

I’ll be randomly inserting some other “life event” pictures from the past month.

Regular readers probably know that I use 90% of last month’s Alternative Income article to make this one. Someday, I hope to separate the most of the explanations to a FAQ and then just give you the new details.

Alternative Income Update: February 2019

For those that don’t know the term, “alternative income”, I started using it around 13 years ago to be purposely vague. I needed something to cover the small amount of blogging income I was making, while I growing my peer-to-peer lending portfolio as an income stream. (The P2P worked for a bit, but I’ve soured on it over the last few years.) Blogging income can be very erratic, but there’s a residual nature to it as well. I think alternative income was more passive back in 2007 before social media, podcasting, and video. Today it seems like every blogger talks of hustling (as in moving quickly, not grifting people) and by that they mean “being everywhere.” I feel like the only one dumb enough to just keep writing blog posts… blog posts that often don’t have cool “pinnable” images.

In general, I label alternative income everything that comes from passive investment and these side hustles. The best way to think of it is income where you aren’t directly trading your time for money. I think you’ll get the idea as we go along. It’s very subjective though, so your view of alternative income may be very different than mine.

To include my investments into this paradigm, I have to fudge the numbers a bit. You’ll see what I mean as we go along… or you can see a more detailed explanation back in January, 2017.

The last month I reported, January 2019, my alternative income added up to $5,074.23 . That was a particularly week month since most of it was impacted by a government shutdown, a local gas emergency that went national, and a typical seasonally, weak dog sitting month.

In any case, January is ancient history now, so let’s move on to more recent history… February.

Lazy Man’s Alternative Income – February 2019

In looking at our alternative income, I break it down to 3 main sources… each with their own caveats.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

My “real world” friends have asked me, “What do you do?” I’m not a fan of the question… because it’s simply rude. I feel it’s used to size up or pigeonhole someone. My responses of “software engineer” has received very differently reactions than “dog sitter.” Nonetheless, some response is required. I rotate among all the things that I do. What are those things?

I suppose the best answer is that I’m a stay-at-home dad. The kids go to school for about 8 hours a day during the week. My “non-Dad stuff” is 40 hours a week. That gives me time to do some basic family errands (shopping, cooking, dishes, laundry, walking my own dog, etc.) and dog sitting and blogging fills in the gaps. Over the last several months, I’ve taken two extra paying side gigs. I’m a blog editor for one company and a customer support representative for a different company. That might seem like a demotion from my software engineering days, but the hours are flexible and the pay is good. With these two jobs, it’s certainly easier to convince people that I “work.”

If you want a very short list of what I’m doing check out my “Now” page.

At blogging conventions a popular question is “Are you a full-time blogger?” I say yes, but then explain that I spend very few hours blogging. I don’t think most people grasp the concept of not having a full-time job, but still having a full slate of activity. Even before the new contract jobs, I was doing much, much more than I ever did at a full-time job. I think everyone assumes that Boss Lazy Man will tell Employee Lazy Man to take the day off from the blog to do non-blogging stuff. That’s not really how it works. People with standard jobs have a lot of insulation where they can say, “See, my boss says that I’m not available.”

I apologize for the soapboxing.

I don’t publicly break out the difference between blogging income vs. dog sitting income. One impacts the other. When I have a lot of dogs, I don’t have as much time or the focus to blog. When I’m blogging a lot, it’s usually because I don’t have too many dogs to sit. And both are impacted by how much time I spend on the contract side gigs which varies month-to-month.

You may be asking right now, “Isn’t alternative income about NOT trading time for money?” Isn’t dog sitting and blogging TRADING time for money? That’s a solid point. However, I don’t do it directly. Let me explain:

Sitting dogs itself isn’t a time-intensive job… at least with the number of dogs I typically have. However, there is considerably more overhead than you might think between booking dogs and meeting dogs for suitability. The important differentiation with dog sitting is that I can “double-dip” and earn money from another side hustle, such as blogging, at the same time. It’s very different than being an Uber driver. The police tend to frown on blogging and driving.

If you are interested, I wrote a very detailed article on how to make money dog sitting.

Blogging is usually much more time-intensive than sitting dogs. (The busy summer months are the exception). However, it isn’t directly trading time for money either. If I write an article for the blog today (such as this one!), I don’t necessarily get any significant money for it. The money I make from blogging now is a direct result of having built a reputation and a collection of nearly 2500 articles over 13 years of blogging.

February’s dog sitting was a little above the average of 2018. We had tremendous demand at the start of the month, but lost business when we traveled to the NYC trip ourselves over the long weekend. Still it was a great rebound for the previous month.

Blogging income in February was about an average month in 2018. That’s a great rebound as well, because January was terrible.

While on the topic of blogging, I’d like to add that it isn’t all about the money. I highly recommend personal finance blogging. I wouldn’t aim for creating the greatest blog in the world. Instead, I’d think of it as a way to keep yourself accountable. That’s worked for me. Here’s how to get started blogging with any type blog you might be interested in.

In January, these two categories combined for a total of $1,806.23, the lowest total in years. In February, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,850.40

For a short month, that extra $1000+ is very nice. Unfortunately, March isn’t looking good for either income. The kids are back on vacation for another two weeks and if we don’t go somewhere they drive me crazy. I’m starting to wonder if they ever go to school.

This chart has a new 3-month moving average. Grrr…. I really need to work on this.

2. Rental Property Income

Here is where I need to fudge the numbers. Sorry, but it’s necessary.

We have three rental properties in our real estate accidental “empire”. (“Empire” is in quotes for a reason – it is a joke.) They are all on 15-year fixed mortgages. This means that we don’t make money on them now, but we are paying down those mortgages more quickly than most people. In 9 years, we should be able to collect an estimated income of $40,000 a year (in today’s dollars, after expenses) on them.

So here’s why I have to fudge the numbers. For the purposes of this report, it doesn’t make sense to count the properties as zero income. I don’t want this report to push me towards a bad decision. It might make me sell them and invest the money differently just to make the numbers look better. For example, if someone offered you a million dollars in 10 years or $10 per year right now, you’d wait for the million (I hope). However, for this report, the $10 per year would give you better numbers.

It’s an extreme example, but it shows how sometimes the short-term plan is the enemy of the long-term plan.

Here’s how I’ve decided to fudge the numbers.

I add up all the properties’ equity and estimated value. Zillow is very accurate for these condos – it has a lot of data points to work with. Next I calculate an equity-to-value ratio. In short, this is the percentage of the property value that we own vs. the bank. Then I calculate the rents of all the properties as if they were owned free and clear. Thus we can say that we are “banking” (in a completely fudgey sense) a percentage of the rent that we would expect to have in the future. Since rents are typically rise in line with inflation over the long term, we don’t have to adjust the numbers.

If you are confused (and you probably are), this article on calculating cash flow of cash flowless real estate explains it in more detail… $40,000 now will be $80,000 in the future, but still have roughly the same $40,000 buying power of today.

Here are the numbers for February. We have 54.56% of the equity in our properties with an estimated combined rent of $3,325. The rent number is after insurance, property taxes, and condo fees. That’s so we can estimate what we’d really be taking home after expenses.

If you multiply $3,325 by 54.56% you get $1,814 in “fudged” monthly alternative income. When I started tracking this (beginning of 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties and they had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. So in 25 months, we’ve seen the number grow $640/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $7,680 raise until the end of time from where we were just 2+ years ago.

As the years march on, the ratio will grow to 100% of the $3,325 monthly inflation-resistant rent. That’s what gets us to that annual $40,000 income I mentioned above.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $1,790. This number usually moves slowly and the $24 increase about average. This number only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent. I don’t control the housing market. Tenants are typically locked in for at least a year. The monthly paying down of the mortgages creates some equity each month.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,814

3. Dividend Income

Like the rental property “income”, I’m going to play a game with the numbers. You can decide if the game is fair. I always appreciate comments!

We don’t focus on putting our money in dividend stocks, but I’m going to imagine that we do for sake of this exercise. In reality we a vast majority in index funds, but I do some stock picking with a small percentage of our portfolio. Though the index funds do pay dividends, it’s not their core goal. I’m also fudging the numbers in another way. The money I’m referring to here is in our retirement accounts, so it isn’t something that we would tap as “income.”

Even though all this money is in retirement accounts, we could pull the money out and use it. We’d get tax penalties so we won’t do that. However, like the mortgages on the rental property, there’s real value here that I feel should be accounted for. My goal here is to capture the nearly 20 years of mostly maxing out retirement contributions.

Just like the rental income, we can pretend what the portfolio would earn if we moved all the money into dividend stocks or indexes. For the sake of pretending, I estimated that we could earn 2.50% in dividends. Most people estimate a 4% safe withdrawal rate, but withdrawal is not our plan here. We are only thinking about the cash that these investments could yield to pay for our living expenses.

February was a great month for our portfolios. The stock market continues to rebound from the lows in the year. The numbers would be even better, but I took then during a slight market dip on 3/8.

Total Dividend Income: $1,567

Last month, it was $1,478, so we gained $89 of theoretical monthly money from theoretical dividends. That a new record for us and it’s the first time we have been ahead of the highs of summer of 2018. I don’t have high expectations for the stock market this year, so we’ll see how it goes.

Fortunately, I think we’ll be able to grow this number as we deploy new cash into new investments. There’s something really exciting brewing on this front and if it works out, this number could grow sharply.

Very Close to Passive Income

Most people consider rental property income fairly passive income. It’s not, because you have to deal with tenants. However, when things are going well, there might only be “work” every couple of months. For sake of argument, I think we can agree it is “more” passive than writing blog posts and sitting dogs. I spend a lot more time on the later than the former.

Of course dividend income is completely passive, so I don’t need to argue much there.

This “very close to passive income” category is a combination of “rental property income” with “dividend income.” (Yes, that’s a lot of quotes.)

At the start of last year dividends and rental income were almost the same. By the end, rental property income bolted $393 ahead of the stock market income. While real estate decisively won the battle in 2018, the dividends are doing much better in 2019. That $393 difference has been cut down to $247 in just two months.

The stock market goes up and down fast which makes the dividends fluctuate as well. The rental property income keeps going up because the mortgages are always getting paid down every month. The stock market can move a lot faster than the housing market. In any case, having both of them working for us is great.

December’s Very Close to Passive Income: $3,381

Last month it was $3,269, so it’s up $112. Last month was an all-time high, so we’re breaking new records. It has grown from a combined $2,354 in January 2017. Since then, this has gone from an estimated annual income of $28,252 from these two sources to $40,578. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet. However, I’m looking forward to 9 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties are paid off. Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number could reach $85K a year or more.

I have ignored some minor (but important) details. Details such as our investments being in retirement accounts and paying taxes.

Final Alternative Income

Adding up “dogs and blogs” to the “very close to passive income”, this month we on the investment stuff had $6,231.40 in monthly “alternative” income. That would be $74,776.86 a year. Last year it averaged almost exactly $75,000.

That largely hypothetical ~$75K a year on investments, writing on a blog, and taking care of dogs feels a little like a dream. In the long term, we can get by on less than half of that income. That doesn’t include any of my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her potential military pension if she retires next year, or any of that freelance work I’ve been doing over the last several months.

This is the part of the article where I mention that I’m still hoping to write a book to boost my alternative income. I had always planned it to be an eBook, but if any readers out there know a publisher, I’d appreciate the hook-up. Seriously… it seems everyone in personal finance is getting a book deal except for me. I think I can make a compelling argument for a book that you’d see in a bookstore… that is if bookstores still exist by the time I’m done writing it.

Here’s another 3-month average (in red) chart. Why on only this chart and on the dogs and blogs above and not the others? The other charts are slow and steady. Without the roller coaster ride, they don’t benefit from the average.

Net Worth Update

This isn’t very exciting as I don’t share the exact numbers of our net worth. That’s why it’s little more than 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, I think? (Let me know in the comments.)

I use Personal Capital to track my net worth and it makes everything easy. It’s free and you should give it a try. For full disclosure, I might make a few dollars if you do.

Due to the strong stock market and steady real estate market, our net worth went up 1.82% in February. That would have been one our best months in 2018 and the numbers are bigger now. For the year it’s up 16.47%, a large percentage of that was based on a website sale that I mentioned last month.

I always have to remember that percentages can be weird… Imagine with someone with a net worth of $100 finds a $100 bill on the ground. Instantly it doubles his net worth. As our net worth grows larger, the percentage of growth will come down too. You’d rather have 10% growth of a million dollars than 20% growth of a hundred thousand, right?

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

It’s almost the middle of the month. That means that I have the final numbers on December 2018 alternative income. I always wait a few days because tenant checks are coming in and we are paying off mortgages at the start of the month. With the money passing back and forth, it’s easiest to let everything settle.

January was a difficult for me, but a lot of other people had it worse. The government shutdown hit almost all of my wife’s peers, but she wasn’t affected. A natural gas malfunction/shortage/scandal/investigation left thousands of families in the our town and a surrounding town without heat, but we weren’t affected by it (other than the kids’ school being closed). I was fighting through some of the final legal paperwork on a lawsuit that I won which I had thought was in the past.

There were plenty of good times in January too. My youngest turned 5 and had a birthday party. The kids had their last ice skating lesson. They decided that ice skating wasn’t for them. (I think they were tired of the lessons and needed a little more free skating, which we’ll try.) I legally gambled on sports and won $115 over the last two Patriots games. The boys discovered that they like going bowling at the local military base. It’s a great, frugal activity that’s fun for the whole family.

While I didn’t formally make any resolutions this year, I’ve started to eat a little healthier. I haven’t had the best diet for a long time, so I’m trying to take baby steps and build on it. So far it’s working. I’m hoping to get my yearly goals out this week. I’m still trying to sort out what reasonably possible in the time I have available. We’ll get to that in a little bit.

Finally, when the school was closed, I got to put together a whole homeschool curriculum using all the learning tools we have. We did a fair amount of Osmo Genius Kit, which is probably the best value we’ve gotten from any toy (except for a cardboard box). I also had real instruction time and we took breaks to watch the old Schoolhouse Rock on TV… just to keep it fresh. One of the benefits of being self-employed is that when there is a problem like school being closed, it’s not a huge problem.

I’ll be randomly inserting some pictures from the past month.

Regular readers probably know that I use 90% of last month’s Alternative Income article to make this one. Someday, I hope to separate the most of the explanations to a FAQ and then just give you the new details.

Before we get started, there’s a surprise update near the bottom of this article.

Alternative Income Update: January 2019

For those that don’t know the term, “alternative income”, I started using it around 13 years ago to be purposely vague. I needed something to cover the small amount of blogging income I was making, while I growing my peer-to-peer lending portfolio as an income stream. (The P2P worked for a bit, but I’ve soured on it over the last few years.) Blogging income can be very erratic, but there’s a residual nature to it as well. I think alternative income was more passive back in 2007 before social media, podcasting, and video. Today it seems like every blogger talks of hustling (as in moving quickly, not grifting people) and by that they mean “being everywhere.” I feel like the only one dumb enough to just keep writing blog posts… blog posts that often don’t have cool “pinnable” images.

In general, I call alternative income everything that comes from passive investment and these side hustles. The best way to think of it is income where you aren’t directly trading your time for money. I think you’ll get the idea as we go along. It’s very subjective though, so your view of alternative income may be very different than mine.

To include my investments into this paradigm, I have to fudge the numbers a bit. You’ll see what I mean as we go along… or you can see a more detailed explanation back in January, 2017.

The last month I reported, December 2018, my alternative income added up to $5,505.44. That was a particularly week month since half of it was consumed by a vacation to Aruba, the holidays, and a home renovation.

In any case, December is ancient history now, so let’s move on to more recent history… January.

Lazy Man’s Alternative Income – January 2019

In looking at our alternative income, I break it down to 3 main sources… each with their own caveats.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

My “real world” friends have asked me, “What do you do?” I’m not a fan of the question… because it’s simply rude. I feel it’s used to size up or pigeonhole someone. My responses of “software engineer” has received very differently reactions than “dog sitter.” Nonetheless, some response is required. I rotate among all the things that I do. What are those things?

I suppose the best answer is that I’m a stay-at-home dad. The kids go to school for about 8 hours a day during the week. My “non-Dad stuff” is 40 hours a week. That gives me time to do some basic family errands (shopping, cooking, dishes, laundry, walking my own dog, etc.) and dog sitting and blogging fills in the gaps. Over the last several months, I’ve taken two extra paying side gigs. I’m a blog editor for one company and a customer support representative for a different company. That might seem like a demotion from my software engineering days, but the hours are flexible and the pay is good. With these two jobs, it’s certainly easier to convince people that I “work.”

If you want a very short list of what I’m doing check out my “Now” page.

At blogging conventions a popular question is “Are you a full-time blogger?” I say yes, but then explain that I spend very few hours blogging. I don’t think most people grasp the concept of not having a full-time job, but still having a full slate of activity. Even before the new contract jobs, I was doing much, much more than I ever did at a full-time job. I think everyone assumes that Boss Lazy Man will tell Employee Lazy Man to take the day off from the blog to do non-blogging stuff. That’s not really how it works. People with standard jobs have a lot of insulation where they can say, “See, my boss says that I’m not available.”

I apologize for the soapboxing.

I don’t publicly break out the difference between blogging income vs. dog sitting income. One impacts the other. When I have a lot of dogs, I don’t have as much time or the focus to blog. When I’m blogging a lot, it’s usually because I don’t have too many dogs to sit. And both are impacted by how much time I spend on the contract side gigs which varies month-to-month.

You may be asking right now, “Isn’t alternative income about NOT trading time for money?” Isn’t dog sitting and blogging TRADING time for money? That’s a solid point. However, I don’t do it directly. Let me explain:

Sitting dogs itself isn’t a time-intensive job… at least with the number of dogs I typically have. However, there is considerably more overhead than you might think between booking dogs and meeting dogs for suitability. The important differentiation with dog sitting is that I can “double-dip” and earn money from another side hustle, such as blogging, at the same time. It’s very different than being an Uber driver. The police tend to frown on blogging and driving.

If you are interested, I wrote a very detailed article on how to make money dog sitting.

Blogging is usually much more time-intensive than sitting dogs. (The busy summer months are the exception). However, it isn’t directly trading time for money either. If I write an article for the blog today (such as this one!), I don’t necessarily get any significant money for it. The money I make from blogging now is a direct result of having built a reputation and a collection of nearly 2500 articles over 13 years of blogging.

January’s dog sitting was half of the average of 2018. Ouch. There aren’t a lot of travel days in January. We just had a few of our regular clients take a long weekend here and there.

Blogging income in January was so bad that it would have been the worst month of 2018. With all the other stuff going on, I didn’t write very much.

While on the topic of blogging, I’d like to add that it isn’t all about the money. I highly recommend personal finance blogging. I wouldn’t aim for creating the greatest blog in the world. Instead, I’d think of it as a way to keep yourself accountable. That’s worked for me. Here’s how to get started blogging with any type blog you might be interested in.

In December, these two categories combined for a total of $2,368.44, a very low number due to travel and holidays. In January, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $1,806.23

Yikes! Bad blogging income + bad dog sitting income adds up to a bad alternative income month.

That would be the lowest in all of 2018. That might be depressing, but I have three reasons to be happy:

1. February has been going well at least for dog sitting so far. I haven’t looked at blogging yet.
2. Nearly $2000 a month from my 3rd priority (after family flexibility and the contract side gigs) isn’t bad at all.
3. The surprise news at the bottom.

2. Rental Property Income

Here is where I need to fudge the numbers. Sorry, but it’s necessary.

We have three rental properties in our real estate accidental “empire”. (“Empire” is in quotes for a reason – it is a joke.) They are all on 15-year fixed mortgages. This means that we don’t make money on them now, but we are paying down those mortgages more quickly than most people. In 9 years, we should be able to collect an estimated income of $40,000 a year (in today’s dollars, after expenses) on them.

So here’s why I have to fudge the numbers. For the purposes of this report, it doesn’t make sense to count the properties as zero income. I don’t want this report to push me towards a bad decision. It might make me sell them and invest the money differently just to make the numbers look better. For example, if someone offered you a million dollars in 10 years or $10 per year right now, you’d wait for the million (I hope). However, for this report, the $10 per year would give you better numbers.

It’s an extreme example, but it shows how sometimes the short-term plan is the enemy of the long-term plan.

Here’s how I’ve decided to fudge the numbers.

I add up all the properties’ equity and estimated value. Zillow is very accurate for these condos – it has a lot of data points to work with. Next I calculate an equity-to-value ratio. In short, this is the percentage of the property value that we own vs. the bank. Then I calculate the rents of all the properties as if they were owned free and clear. Thus we can say that we are “banking” (in a completely fudgey sense) a percentage of the rent that we would expect to have in the future. Since rents are typically rise in line with inflation over the long term, we don’t have to adjust the numbers.

If you are confused (and you probably are), this article on calculating cash flow of cash flowless real estate explains it in more detail… $40,000 now will be $80,000 in the future, but still have roughly the same $40,000 buying power of today.

Here are the numbers for January. We have 53.84% of the equity in our properties with an estimated combined rent of $3,325. The rent number is after insurance, property taxes, and condo fees. That’s so we can estimate what we’d really be taking home after expenses.

If you multiply $3,325 by 53.84% you get $1,790 in “fudged” monthly alternative income. When I started tracking this (beginning of 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties and they had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. So in 24 months, we’ve seen the number grow $616/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $7,392 raise until the end of time from where we were just 2 years ago.

As the years march on, the ratio will grow to 100% of the $3,325 monthly inflation-resistant rent. That’s what gets us to that annual $40,000 income I mentioned above.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $1,765. This number usually moves slowly and the $35 increase this month is huge. This number only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent. I don’t control the housing market. Tenants are typically locked in for at least a year. The monthly paying down of the mortgages creates some equity each month. We typically gain $22,000 in equity from just the tenants paying down the mortgages. In January we saw the property values go up giving us most of the big boost.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,790

3. Dividend Income

Like the rental property “income”, I’m going to play a game with the numbers. You can decide if the game is fair. I always appreciate comments!

We don’t focus on putting our money in dividend stocks, but I’m going to imagine that we do for sake of this exercise. In reality we a vast majority in index funds, but I do some stock picking with a small percentage of our portfolio. Though the index funds do pay dividends, it’s not their core goal. I’m also fudging the numbers in another way. The money I’m referring to here is in our retirement accounts, so it isn’t something that we would tap as “income.”

Even though all this money is in retirement accounts, we could pull the money out and use it. We’d get tax penalties so we won’t do that. However, like the mortgages on the rental property, there’s real value here that I feel should be accounted for. My goal here is to capture the nearly 20 years of mostly maxing out retirement contributions.

Just like the rental income, we can pretend what the portfolio would earn if we moved all the money into dividend stocks or indexes. For the sake of pretending, I estimated that we could earn 2.50% in dividends. Most people estimate a 4% safe withdrawal rate, but withdrawal is not our plan here. We are only thinking about the cash that these investments could yield to pay for our living expenses.

January was a great month for our portfolios. After 4 months of seeing the stock market bring our portfolio down, it turned around in a big way.

Total Dividend Income: $1,478

Last month, it was $1372, so we gained $106 of theoretical monthly money from theoretical dividends. We aren’t far from the highs of middle of last year. I don’t have high expectations for the stock market this year, so we’ll see how it goes. Fortunately, we should be able to grow this a good amount this year. (That’s foreshadowing to the surprise news at the bottom.)

Very Close to Passive Income

Most people consider rental property income fairly passive income. It’s not, because you have to deal with tenants. However, when things are going well, there might only be “work” every couple of months. For sake of argument, I think we can agree it is “more” passive than writing blog posts and sitting dogs. I spend a lot more time on the later than the former.

Of course dividend income is completely passive, so I don’t need to argue much there.

This “very close to passive income” category is a combination of “rental property income” with “dividend income.” (Yes, that’s a lot of quotes.)

At the start of last year dividends and rental income were almost the same. By the end, rental property income bolted $393 ahead of the stock market income. While real estate decisively won the battle in 2018, the dividends are doing better in 2019. That $393 difference has been cut down to $312 in just one month.

The stock market goes up and down fast which makes the dividends fluctuate as well. The rental property income keeps going up because the mortgages are always getting paid down every month. The stock market can move a lot faster than the housing market. In any case, I like having both of them working for us.

December’s Very Close to Passive Income: $3,269

Last month it was $3,137, so it’s up $132. That’s an all-time high. It has grown from a combined $2,354 in January 2017. Since then, this has gone from an estimated annual income of $28,252 from these two sources to $39,223. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet. However, I’m looking forward to 9 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties are paid off. Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number could reach $85K a year or more.

I have ignored some minor (but important) details. Details such as our investments being in retirement accounts and paying taxes.

Final Alternative Income

Adding up “dogs and blogs” to the “very close to passive income”, this month we on the investment stuff had $5,074.23 in monthly “alternative” income. That would be $60,890.76 a year. Last year it averaged almost exactly $75,000. The lack of blogging income and dog sitting really hurt the projections. Fortunately, that’s looking a little better for February.

That largely hypothetical ~$60K a year on investments, writing on a blog, and taking care of dogs feels a little like a dream (probably because it is). In the long term, we can get by on less than half of that income. That doesn’t include any of my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her potential military pension if she retires next year, or any of that freelance work I’ve been doing over the last several months.

This is the part of the article where I mention that I’m still hoping to write a book to boost my alternative income. I had always planned it to be an eBook, but if any readers out there know a publisher, I’d appreciate the hook-up. Seriously… it seems everyone in personal finance is getting a book deal except for me. I think I can make a compelling argument for a book that you’d see in a bookstore… that is if bookstores still exist by the time I’m done writing it.

Net Worth Update

Normally, this isn’t very exciting as I don’t share the exact numbers of our net worth. However, this is where I have that surprise that I mentioned above. But first… I’m going to tease you a little longer.

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, I think? (Let me know in the comments.)

I use Personal Capital to track my net worth and it makes everything easy. It’s free and you should give it a try. For full disclosure, I might make a few dollars if you do.

At the beginning of the month, I sold a website (no, not this one) for a significant gain.

As a result of that, a strong investment market, and some checks from my freelancing gigs, our net worth went up 14.88% in January! Sometimes it’s hard to find that kind of gain in a whole year.

Right now the cash from the sale isn’t invested very well. It’s just in a money market fund. I’m going to be working on that throughout the month. As the money gets invested better, I’ll count it in the theoretical dividends number and we’ll see a boost there..

I always have to remember that percentages can be weird… Imagine with someone with a net worth of $100 finds a $100 bill on the ground. Instantly it doubles his net worth. As our net worth grows larger, the percentage of growth will come down too. You’d rather have 10% growth of a million dollars than 20% growth of a hundred thousand, right?

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

It’s past the middle of the month. That means that I am very late in presenting the final numbers on December 2018.

Was December even a month? It certainly didn’t feel like it. December always seems to fly by because the last 10 days are a wash with Christmas and New Years. This year we went on our annual vacation to Aruba on the 15th, coming back on the 22nd. On the 26th we started a fairly major home renovation. So as far as productive “work” went, it was literally half a month. Subtract out the time to pack for the trip, shop for Christmas, wrap, and get everything else done for the holidays (we hosted a small Christmas at our house), it was closer to 10 working days.

I can’t tell if I’m complaining about it or not, so I don’t know what you must think. I suppose I’m complaining about the rush of everything. However, what’s not to like about a week in Aruba and seeing the joy of your 5 and 6 year old open up their presents. This year, we probably try to do the vacation another time.

I’ll be randomly adding other personal family events throughout. This way you can choose what’s more boring: these financial numbers or some random guy’s family events. It’s not going to easy.

Regular readers probably know that I use 90% of the previous article to make this one. Someday, I hope to separate the most of the explanations to a FAQ and then just give you the new details.

Let’s get started:

Alternative Income Update: December 2018

For those that don’t know the term, “alternative income”, I started using it around 12 years ago to be purposely vague. I needed something to cover the small amount of blogging income I was making, while I growing my peer-to-peer lending portfolio as an income stream. (The P2P worked for a bit, but I’ve soured on it over the last few years.) Blogging income can be very erratic, but there’s a residual nature to it as well. Some popular bloggers are still struggling to categorize the nature of the income. I think alternative income was more passive back in 2007 before social media, podcasting, and video. Today it seems like every blogger talks of hustling (as in moving quickly, not grifting people) and by that they mean “being everywhere.” I feel like the only one dumb enough to just keep writing blog posts… blog posts that often don’t have cool “pinnable” images.

The last few months, I have sprinkled in images from the past month. I’ve seen other bloggers do it and readers tend to like it. My only rule here is that I’ll only show pictures of food if the presentation is amazing, such as an actual size Leaning Tower of Pisa made of grapes and toothpicks. (I will never understand why people take pictures of their food.)

In general, I call alternative income everything that comes from passive investment and these side hustles. The best way to think of it is income where you aren’t directly trading your time for money. This report is about all my alternative income. To include my investments into that paradigm, I have to fudge the numbers a bit. You’ll see what I mean as we go along… or you can see a more detailed explanation back in January, 2017.

The last month I reported, November 2018, my alternative income added up to $6,786.37. That was more than usual with a lot of dog sitting clients over Thanksgiving (and sweet holiday rates).

In any case, November is ancient history now, so let’s move on to more recent history… December.

Lazy Man’s Alternative Income – December 2018

In looking at our alternative income, I break it down to 3 main sources… each with their own caveats.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

My “real world” friends have asked me, “What do you do?” I’m not a fan of the question… because it’s simply rude. I feel it’s used to size up or pigeonhole someone. My responses of “software engineer” has received very differently reactions than “dog sitter.” Nonetheless, some response is required. I rotate among all the things that I do. What are those things?

This was a sunset in Aruba. I was completely unprepared but was able to run onto the beach with my phone and catch it at the last second.

I suppose the best answer is that I’m a stay-at-home dad. The kids go to school for about 8 hours a day during the week. My “non-Dad stuff” is 40 hours a week. That gives me time to do some basic family errands (shopping, cooking, dishes, laundry, walking my own dog, etc.) and dog sitting and blogging fills in the gaps. Over the last several months, I’ve taken two extra paying side gigs. I’m a blog editor for one company and I’m a customer support representative for a different company. That might seem like a demotion from my software engineering days, but the hours are flexible and the pay is good. With these two jobs, it’s certainly easier to convince people that I work.

If you want a very short list of what I’m doing check out my “Now” page.

At blogging conventions a popular question is “Are you a full-time blogger?” I say yes, but then explain that I spend very few hours blogging. I don’t think most people grasp the concept of not having a full-time job, but still having a full slate of activity. Even before the new contract jobs, I was doing much, much more than I ever did at a full-time job. I think everyone assumes that Boss Lazy Man will tell Employee Lazy Man to take the day off from the blog to do non-blogging stuff. That’s not really how it works. People with standard jobs have a lot of insulation where they can say, “See, my boss says that I’m not available.”

Time to move off that soapbox.

I don’t publicly break out the difference between blogging income vs. dog sitting income. One impacts the other. When I have a lot of dogs, I don’t have as much time or the focus to blog. When I’m blogging a lot, it’s usually because I don’t have too many dogs to sit. And both are impacted by how much time I spend on the contract side gigs.

You may be asking right now, “Isn’t alternative income about NOT trading time for money?” Isn’t dog sitting and blogging TRADING time for money? That’s a solid point. However, I don’t do it directly. Let me explain:

Sitting dogs itself isn’t a time-intensive job… at least with the number of dogs I typically have. However, there is considerably more overhead than you might think between booking dogs and meeting dogs for suitability. The important differentiation with dog sitting is that I can “double-dip” and earn money from another side hustle, such as blogging, at the same time. It’s very different than being an Uber driver. The police tend to frown on blogging and driving.

If you are interested in dog sitting, I wrote a very detailed article on the subject: Pros and Cons of Dog Sitting on Rover.

The Pokemon stuffed animals were shocked by the presents on Christmas. Vulpix unfairly got a present from one of my son’s. I fear the other Pokemon are plotting a Vulpixicide.

Blogging is usually much more time-intensive than sitting dogs. (The summer months are the exception). However, it isn’t directly trading time for money either. If I write an article for the blog today (such as this one!), I don’t necessarily get any significant money for it. The money I make from blogging now is a direct result of having built a reputation and a collection of nearly 2500 articles over 13 years of blogging.

December was the worst month for dog-sitting of the entire year. It was terrible. Between vacation, the holidays, and the home renovation, I wasn’t available to do much dog sitting. It’s a bit of a shame, because it could have been a very good month as other people travel and leave their dogs behind.

Blogging income was almost exactly the average. It’s doesn’t get any more boring than that.

While on the topic of blogging, I’d like to add that it isn’t all about the money. I highly recommend personal finance blogging. I wouldn’t aim for creating the greatest blog in the world. Instead, I’d think of it as a way to keep yourself accountable. That’s worked for me. Here’s how to get started blogging with any type blog you might be interested in.

In November, these two categories combined for a total of $3,626.37 an above average number. But for December it was…

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,368.44

That’s the lowest of the year. I thought I’d be more disappointed in the low number, but I think most people would be very happy with nearly $2500 month from what is essentially their 3rd priority (after family flexibility and the contract side gigs).

2. Rental Property Income

Here is where I need to fudge the numbers. Sorry, but it’s necessary.

We have three rental properties in our real estate accidental “empire”. (“Empire” is in quotes for a reason – it is a joke.) They are all on 15-year fixed mortgages. This means that we don’t make money on them now, but we are paying down those mortgages more quickly than most people. In 9 years, we should be able to collect an estimated income of $40,000 a year (in today’s dollars, after expenses) on them.

This is the water slide where we spent most of our time in Aruba. The kids are hiding in a little cave area in this picture.

So here’s why I have to fudge the numbers. For the purposes of this report, it doesn’t make sense to count the properties as zero income. I don’t want this report to push me towards a bad decision. It might make me sell them and invest the money differently just to make the numbers look better. For example, if someone offered you a million dollars in 10 years or $10 per year right now, you’d wait for the million (I hope). However, for this report, the $10 per year would give you better numbers.

It’s an extreme example, but it shows how sometimes the short-term plan is the enemy of the long-term plan.

Here’s how I’ve decided to fudge the numbers.

I add up all the properties equity and values. Zillow is very accurate for these condos – it has a lot of data points to work with. Next I calculate an equity-to-value ratio. In short, this is the percentage of the property value that we own vs. the bank. Then I calculate the rents of all the properties as if they were owned free and clear. Thus we can say that we are “banking” (in a completely fudgey sense) a percentage of the rent that we would expect to have in the future (rents are typically in line with inflation in the simplest sense).

If you are confused (and you probably are), this article on calculating cash flow of cash flowless real estate explains it in more detail.

Here are the numbers for December. We have 53.07% of the equity in our properties with an estimated combined rent of $3,325. The rent number is after insurance, property taxes, and condo fees. That’s so we can estimate what we’d really be taking home after expenses.

I brought Chad Carson’s Real Estate Book with me. I need to review it sometime soon before I forget all the comments I had… and there were a lot!

If you multiply $3,325 by 53.07% you get $1,765 in “fudged” monthly alternative income. When I started tracking this (beginning of 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties and they had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. So in 23 months, we’ve seen the number grow $591/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $7,092 raise until the end of time.

As the years march on, the ratio will grow to 100% of the $3,325 monthly inflation-resistant rent. That’s what gets us to that annual $40,000 I mentioned above.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $1,743. This number usually moves slowly, so we’ll take the $22 increase. This number only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent. I don’t control the housing market. Tenants are typically locked in for at least a year. The monthly paying down of the mortgages creates some equity each month. That’s where we saw the gains in December as the values of the properties stayed mostly the same.

Slow and steady wins the real estate race. In previous reports, I hoped that by the end of this year, we’d be looking at having 50% of the equity with $3,325 in rent or $1662.50 a month in fudged alternative income. As the properties have appreciated, we passed that mark earlier than I expected.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,765

3. Dividend Income

Like the rental property “income”, I’m going to play a game with the numbers. You can decide if the game is fair. I always appreciate comments!

We don’t focus on putting our money in dividend stocks, but I’m going to imagine that we do for sake of this exercise. In reality we a vast majority in index funds, but I do some stock picking with a small percentage of our portfolio. Though the index funds do pay dividends, it’s not their core goal. I’m also fudging the numbers in another way. The money I’m referring to here is in our retirement accounts, so it isn’t something that we would tap as “income.”

Even though all this money is in retirement accounts, we could pull the money out and use it. We’d get tax penalties so we won’t do that. However, like the mortgages on the rental property, there’s real value here that I feel should be accounted for. My goal here is to capture the nearly 20 years of mostly maxing out retirement contributions.

Just like the rental income, we can pretend what the portfolio would earn if we moved all the money into dividend stocks or indexes. For the sake of pretending, I estimated that we could earn 2.50% in dividends. Most people estimate a 4% safe withdrawal rate, but withdrawal is not our plan here. We are only thinking about the cash that these investments could yield to pay for our living expenses.

We are still opening and playing with some presents (especially the robots that require a little more time to learn.) However, Osmo seems to be by far the best toy. I plan to write a review at some point.

December was another poor month for our portfolios. The stock market went down quite a bit. We were saved a bit by the fact that I calculate the numbers around the 5th of the month when all the rent is (hopefully) collected and mortgages are paid off . Our holdings are down from where we started at the beginning of the year. I think most people are probably in the same boat. The end result is:

Total Dividend Income: $1,372

Last month, it was $1417, so we lost $45 of theoretical monthly money from theoretical dividends. In the last three months we’ve lost $150/mo. That’s a lot, but it’s still just a drop in the bucket compared to what the stock market has given us over the last 9 years. It’s already bounced back a bit over the last 10 days since I captured these numbers.

Very Close to Passive Income

Most people consider rental property income fairly passive income. It’s not, because you have to deal with tenants. However, when things are going well, there might only be “work” every couple of months. For sake of argument, I think we can agree it is “more” passive than writing blog posts and sitting dogs. I spend a lot more time on the later than the former.

Of course dividend income is completely passive, so I don’t need to argue much there.

This “very close to passive income” category is a combination of “rental property income” with “dividend income.” (Yes, that’s a lot of quotes.)

At the start of the year, the dividend income was slightly ahead ($48) of the rental property income. It’s like the stocks vs. real estate debate, but for our personal finances. Now the difference is $393 in favor of the “real property income.” Real estate has decisively won the battle in 2018.

Jake loved his Christmas duck. He would have liked the real thing a little more, but he can never catch them.

The stock market goes up and down which makes the dividends fluctuate as well. The rental property income keeps going up, because the mortgages are always getting paid down every month. The stock market can move a lot faster than the housing market. In any case, I like having both of them working for us.

December’s Very Close to Passive Income: $3,137

Last month it was $3,159, so it’s down $22. It didn’t go down for the first 18 months of reports and now it’s gone down each of the last three months. However, it has grown from a combined $2,354 in January 2017. Since then, this has gone from an estimated annual income of $28,252 from these two sources to $37,645. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet. However, I’m looking forward to 9 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties are paid off. Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number could reach $80K a year.

I have ignored some minor (but important) details. Details such as our investments being in retirement accounts.

Final Alternative Income

Adding up “dogs and blogs” to the “very close to passive income”, this month we on the investment stuff had $5,505.44 in monthly “alternative” income. That would be $66,065.28 a year. Last month it was $81,436.44, so the lack of dog sitting really hurt the projections. The short term fluctuations are just noise of how well “dogs and blogs” did in any particular month.

That largely hypothetical ~$66K a year on investments, writing on a blog, and taking care of dogs feels a little like a dream (probably because it is). In the long term, we can get by on less than half of that income. That doesn’t include any of my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her potential military pension if she retires next year, or any of that freelance work I’ve been doing over the last several months.

This is the part of the article where I mention that I’m still hoping to write a book to boost my alternative income. I had always planned it to be an eBook, but if any readers out there know a publisher, I’d appreciate the hook-up. Seriously… it seems everyone in personal finance is getting a book deal except for me. I think I can make a compelling argument for a book that you’d see in a bookstore… that is if bookstores still exist by the time I’m done writing it.

Net Worth Update

Since I don’t share real numbers of our net worth, this isn’t very exciting. That’s why it’s just a footnote.

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, I think? (Let me know in the comments.)

I use Personal Capital to track my net worth and it makes everything easy. It’s free and you should give it a try. For full disclosure, I might make a few dollars if you do.

In December, our net worth went DOWN 0.43%. Ouch! That’s 4 consecutive months of going backwards. Don’t the markets know that they always have to go up so I write nothing but positive, encouraging articles?

In 2018, our net worth was up 7.31%. It’s easy to feel negatively about that after seeing it going up an average of 17% for a large number of years. However, with stocks down for the year, it highlights the power of diversification in real estate and saving overall. I seen other bloggers report losses of the net worth over 2018.

I always have to remember that percentages can be weird… Imagine with someone with a net worth of $100 finds a $100 bill on the ground. Instantly it doubles his net worth. As our net worth grows larger, the percentage of growth will come down too. You’d rather have 10% growth of a million dollars than 20% growth of a hundred thousand, right?

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