This report is coming in late. That’s not bad in the grand scheme of things, right? April was the first full coronavirus month. That means that we had no dog sitting income, no kids in school, no… well, you all all know the drill. We each have our things that we can’t do with the coronavirus and last April was the first full month of that for mostly everyone in the US.

To add insult to injury, it seemed to rain almost every day. We almost never got to go outside unless it was just in a car to get out of the house.

Every month I share some photo highlights. The highlights this month aren’t typical. Most are related to the kids and events in the house – just like your photo highlights likely are. Do you really want to see pictures of my blurred out kids doing work off a tablet? (Well, maybe you do. I feel like the bar of entertainment is low considering we’re in the same boat.)

That’s enough lead-in… let’s get to the Passive Income report. In the past, I called it the Alternative Income report, but it seems like that term didn’t catch on. 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. They way I calculate these numbers does require some explanation.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income – April 2020

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 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

The last month I reported, March, we had some dog sitting. Actually we had the most dog sitting of the year, even though we only had a 1/3 of a month of it. Those were good times. Today, I sent my dog over to my elderly neighbor who asked if she could pat him. Before COVID-19, I never let him off-leash. He’s slowing down a little at 11 years old and there are no cars, so it’s a good time to test his recall. He passed with flying colors.

Unfortunately, that’s the closest to a dog sitting story I can tell. With everyone sheltered in place, dog sitters are useless. For the first time in this report, dog income came in at zero.

Blogging income was a little better, but not great. As regular readers know, distance learning for the kids isn’t working. From 6AM to 8PM, I don’t even try to work. I’m setting up school, cooking food, doing laundry, washing so many dishes, doing all the school, walking the dog with the kids to get fresh air, and fighting through the bed time routine. After that I can try to manage a couple of emails and perhaps write a paragraph or two of a blog post. Some say it will be better in the summer, but I think I’m going to have to be even more involved in keeping them active and learning. I can’t depend on camps.

Sorry, I got off track there. What I meant to say is that no one is advertising nowadays. Also, few people are searching for information about retiring early. If no one is looking for content and advertisers don’t want to advertise, the income goes in the wrong direction.

In March, dogs and blogs combined for a total of $3,004.18. In April, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,067.93

In the olden days of pre-COVID-19, I would say that dog sitting is great because my kids are old enough to pitch in and help. I could pay them a legitimate earned income (a small percentage of the overall income). This allows them to save money in their kid Roth IRAs, money that they’ll never pay tax on. Now, I have to rethink that. They may play a more meaningful role in the blog going forward.

(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 estimated our rental properties were worth a good deal more than last month. I think Zillow hasn’t done a good job in factoring COVID-19, but I will use the numbers as I always do. So far, tenants continue to pay us. That’s a load off my mind, since we lose money on these properties every month. (We’re accidental landlords for the most part, making the best of the situation. However, we also have 15 year mortgages in hopes of turning them into an income stream in several years.) As with every month, we paid off a few thousand dollars of mortgage debt.

We now have 63.52% of the equity in our properties with a combined rent of $3,325 after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated maintenance. I use that number because it represents our net gain.

If you multiply $3,325 by 63.52% you get $2,112 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 39 months, we’ve seen the number grow $938/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $11,256 raise until the end of time. It’s a very nice gain from 3+ 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 above. I may need to update that $40,000 number as well – it’s looking closer to $30,000. In either case, it should be enough money for us to live on with our own home paid off (plus our solar panels, frugal shopping, and military healthcare.)

In the previous report, the rental property income was $2,065. This number always moves slowly as it only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent.

Total Rental Property Income: $2,112

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. For that we’ll look at making passive income with dividend kings. If I 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.

The last snapshot on April 5 had a big, big loss. This snapshot, on May 5th, saw the market return. Maybe the market loves the free money that the government is giving out. Maybe it’s looking forward to vaccines and opening up the country for business. I’m scared by all this, but I can’t deny the math. The market has done very well over the last month.

Last month, we continued to get a profit sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The business is still doing well. It’s actually almost ideally positioned 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: $2,612

Last month, it was $2,403. A couple of months ago, I wrote, “even in a bad-case scenario, we’d be north of $2500.” We weren’t obviously, but we are back there now, with some room to spare. The market has gone even further up over the last two weeks since I compiled the last numbers.

Hopefully we’ll beat COVID-19 and the economy gets fully back to normal. I expect that it will take at least 2 years and probably a lot longer. However, if that happens, this number will grow even stronger than before. We bought shares of companies at depressed prices throughout this.

Annualized, this monthly $2,612 is $31,346. If our mortgage was paid off, we might be able to scrape by on this by itself. However, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t use much of this income for now. (We can use the profit sharing check as it goes straight to our checking account.) We’ll let the rest of this income continue to compound for at least another 15 years, but hopefully a lot longer.

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 here. I’m too tone-deaf to have a rockstar music career, but maybe there’s room to have a book someday.

The stock market goes up and down fast, even more so nowadays. That makes the dividend calculation fluctuate a lot more than it normally would. We don’t even know if companies can reliably pay dividends anymore. Without customers, and profits, many companies have cut their dividends.

The rental property income typically 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. That housing crash may be coming, but for this month it hasn’t happened.

For a few years, I’ve been saying:

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 people 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 awhile. Of course a bad economy may impact both at the same time, but that’s what an emergency fund is for.

Here we are in an unfortunate economic event. Our stocks went down a lot, but then went back up. Our real estate has held steady. We’re just lucky because many tenants can’t pay rent. Zillow’s algorithm seems outdated.

While the stock market is doing well, the real economy is terrible. No president wants to see long food lines, six figure homeland deaths, and an unemployment rate balloon to ~15%. The best answer is a bailout of nearly everyone and everything at a cost of several trillon dollars… and it may go up from there. If only the people in political power believed that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, we’d be in much better situation. It would have, figuratively, saved our bacon.

We’ll see what next month brings, but for now we have a recovery.

Very Close to Passive Income: $4,724

Last month it was $4,468. We had lost $500 a couple months ago, and got nearly $250 back. All things considered, that’s not bad at all.

This “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354 in January 2017. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet (except for that profit sharing check). Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number could be real, non-fudged $100K/year. I’m especially looking forward to 7 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties (and our primary residence) are paid off. That’s going to be a huge financial swing for us.

Final Passive Income

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

Passive Income: $6,791.93

That’s reasonably good for a month of everything being shut down. We’re getting back to our frugal roots, so one could argue that this lower number overall could put us in a better long-term financial position. That all depends if we continue be frugal after coronavirus, which may not be likely.

This nearly $6800/mo income is $80K+ a year. That largely hypothetical annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs (not this month), and investing feels like a dream. In the long term, $80K would be a lot more income than we’d need. Here’s what our necessary expenses look like… for the next 45 years.

I always say that you never know what bad news is lurking around the corner, but this gives us the financial flexibility to fight it. With the coronavirus closing schools and my wife on the coronavirus response team, we need this flexibility to continue to educate our two kids.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last 18 months (which isn’t passive at all). That’s the fuel that drives the passive income engine.

As always, I’m still hoping to write a book someday. That would add some more passive income. My wife will probably get her book out first. She had an incredibly interesting life until she met me – I am so boring. I may tip my toe into self-publishing sometime next year. I would love to talk to a real a publisher, but I don’t want to take on the “job” of writing. That’s probably a deal breaker. If you know someone who I could talk to contact me.

My favorite thing about the graph below is that it doesn’t dip down too far. It’s been above $6,000 for awhile now. I thought that it may be tested with the coronavirus, but maybe it won’t be after all.

(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, I think.

Like most investors in April, our net worth did very well. After losing more than 10% in March, we gained 8.84% in April. For the year, our net worth is only down 1.74%. It’s almost like the coronavirus doesn’t matter to the markets. Since I’m reporting this so late in May, I can tell you that our net worth has gone up even more. We won’t count those chickens – they haven’t hatched yet.

Our real estate value seems to be staying steady. The lesson here is that diversification helps a lot in bad times. Even when the stock market was way down, we were still grounded with our real estate. We can’t control the market (especially now!), but we can be happy that the amazing river of compound interest has been working well for us over the years.

I feel it’s important to acknowledge that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 14 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back then, but it’s in the news all the time now. We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be beginning their journey. I hope you won’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above if you are just starting out. 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). I had a number of years where I was ecstatic simply to save ANY money for retirement.

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether to include a pension in your net worth. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned more direct monetary compensation 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. In the end, it seems my wife’s pension may be worth $2.3 million. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, this isn’t money we can spend right now.

Because the pension would ridiculously dominate our net worth, I’ll note two separate numbers in my personal spreadsheet. I don’t share the numbers anyway, aside from these hints, so I don’t think it should matter much to you. It’s not like I’m suggesting that you might want to make a financial based decision on a pension.

I always end this article by asking how your last month went. That doesn’t make much sense after the March that everyone had. Feel free to use the comments to vent – it doesn’t even have to be about personal finance.

We’re well into 2020, but I have to take one last look at 2019 to close it out. It always takes some time to get the final numbers together, especially when a tenant puts her rent check in the mail on the 11th. Usually, I can get this report together a little earlier, but at day 16, we’re having arguably our second day of health this year in the family. We’ve already been to the hospital 3 times, which was about 2 more times than 2019.

I’m sure that December is a busy month for everyone. For us, it’s no exception. My wife’s birthday starts the month and the rest of family’s follows. With the holidays happening in the middle of the week this year, it seemed like all the time before and after were days off. By the time everything was done, it seemed like the entire month was one week. And of course that week I had a mental breakdown. All this means that I have more pictures than usual this month.

That’s enough lead-in… let’s get to the Alternative Income report. I’ll mix in some personal pictures from the month throughout this financial update, because some people find numbers boring. (But not you or you wouldn’t be here!)

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. They way I calculate these numbers does require some explanation.

Lazy Man’s Alternative Income – Novemeber 2019

I categorize our alternative income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in my passive income pyramid. I ignore the bottom section of career/job – that’s not passive or alternative. I combine dog sitting and blogging into one section of “slightly active” income. I leave real estate and investment income as their own separate main sources of very passive income.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

The last month I reported, November, was the worst blogging and dog sitting month I’ve had since the start of the year. We traveled to Aruba and didn’t take dogs over Thanksgiving – one of the busiest dog sitting times.

December’s dog sitting was simply below average. I’ll take it because it was much, much better than November.

Blogging income for December rebounded as well and was just slightly below average for the year. Part of me feels like it should be easy to make money as the end of the year has a rush of advertisers spending money. Another part of me is realistic that website traffic takes a nosedive because people are living their very busy lives.

In November, these combined for a total of $1,570.39. In December, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,605.87

I’ll take the thousand dollar rebound. It brings things closer to the average that I expect. This kind of income jumps all over the place, which is why I include a 3-month average (in red) in the chart below.

2. Rental Property Income

Zillow estimated our rental properties were worth a little more than last month. We saw a lot of appreciation in 2019 – about 10%. As with every month, we paid off a few thousand dollars of mortgage debt.

We now have 60.20% of the equity in our properties with a combined rent of $3,325 after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated maintenance. I use that number because it represents our net gain. Very soon, I’ll need to update that number since we get more in rent now… but the condo fees are more.

If you multiply $3,325 by 60.20% you get $2,002 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 35 months, we’ve seen the number grow $828/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $9,936 raise until the end of time from where we were nearly 3 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 above.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $1,983. This number always moves slowly as it only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent. We had a change of tenant and raised rates, but I need to do the math to see if the $3,325 number is still accurate. To come up with that number, I make some assumptions in estimating after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated maintenance.

Total Rental Property Income: $2,002

3. Dividend Income

The stocks markets have been doing so well that even my wife has noticed. That has happened only about 3 times in the decade… and the stock markets had done very well overall. However, by the time was all said and done our investments were worth almost exactly what they were the month before. Of course we all knew the end of the year was going to do well. It certainly feels like the markets went up at least the 5% that was predicted.

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. For that we’ll look at making passive income with dividend kings. If I 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.

In December, we continued to get a profit sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. This investment income 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: $2,896.00

Last month, it was $2,813. So at $2,896, we’ve got a huge jump of $83. The stock market continues to hit new highs all the time. This can’t continue forever, but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

Annualized, this is $34,755. If our mortgage was paid off, this could cover all our necessary expenses by itself. Of course, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t use this income for now. We’ll let continue to compound for at least another 15 years, but hopefully a lot longer.

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, we’d include that here (but my rockstar career hasn’t taken off yet).

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.

I love having both types of income working together for us. I think everyone in FIRE should have stocks and real estate income streams. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most people 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 awhile. Of course a bad economy may impact both at the same time, but that’s what an emergency fund is for.

Very Close to Passive Income: $4,898

Last month it was $4,796, so it’s up $102. Most good months, this goes up $15-$30 a month. This is a huge, huge jump, especially in terms of passive income. I started Lazy Man and Money with the tagline of “Making my money work, so I don’t have to” and it is working overtime. A passive income of $58,773 is incredible. It’s about double what I estimate we’d need to live on.

This very close to passive income has grown from $2,354 in January 2017 – or an annual income of $28,252. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet. However, I’m looking forward to 7 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties (and our primary residence) are paid off. Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number could be real, non-fudged $100K/year.

Final Alternative Income

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

Alternative Income: $7,503.87

In November it was $6,366.39, so this is a solid step forward. Annualized, the $7,503.87 in monthly income is $90,046.44. I have been trying to get this number consistently over $100,000. It didn’t happen in 2019, but it’s great upward momentum heading into 2020.

That largely hypothetical annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, and investments feels like a dream. In the long term, $90K+ would be a lot more income than we’d need. Here’s what our necessary expenses look like… for the next 45 years. You never know what bad news is lurking around the corner, but this gives us the financial flexibility to fight it.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last year (which isn’t passive at all). That’s the fuel that drives the passive income engine.

As always, I’m still hoping to write a book someday – just to add some more passive-ish income. I may tip my toe into self-publishing sometime next year. I would love to talk to a real a publisher, but I don’t want to take on the “job” of writing. That’s probably a deal breaker. 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 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, I think.

Our net worth jumped 2.73% for the month. The stock market has been hitting new highs almost every day. For the 3rd or 4th months, Zillow gave our primary residence a big boost in value. After years of it feeling vastly undervalued to other areas locally, we’re starting see the gap close. Our primary residence has jumped over 11% for the year and about 6% in the last few months. Some people don’t count primary residence value much in net worth, but I believe it has value. We can always downsize or move to a cheaper place and pocket the difference.

Over the entire year our net worth is up 34.49%. That’s clearly banana pants crazy. At that rate we’d double our net worth every 2 years (rule of 69). And in fewer than 20 years, we’d be billionaires. These years are rare, so I’ll take it for what it is. Also, at age 43, I’m expecting to live long enough to witness more than a few crashes. When those crashes come, please remind me about 2019.

I feel it’s important to acknowledge that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 13 years. FIRE wasn’t a thing back then, but it’s in the news all the time now. We naturally may be further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be beginning their journey. Don’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above if you are just starting out. Pleaes try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances). I had a number of years where I was ecstatic simply to save for retirement. May the markets be forever in your favor (ummm… maybe not the best reference).

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether to include a pension in your net worth. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned more direct monetary compensation 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. In the end, it seems my wife’s pension may be worth $2.28 million. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, this isn’t money we can spend.

Because the pension would ridiculously dominate our net worth, I’ll note two separate numbers in my internal spreadsheet. I don’t share the numbers anyway, aside from these hints, so I don’t think it should matter much to you. It’s not like I’m suggesting that you might want to make financial based on a pension.

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

The decade is rapidly coming to a close. After this month’s report, I’ll have just one more, coming after the new year.

November started with a great friends’ son’s Bar Mitzvah party. Before the party started, my wife and I spotted Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey in the lobby of the hotel we were staying at. The party was even more interesting. There was a moment (which I can’t tell you about in full detail) that was about as jaw-dropping as Taylor Swift writing a custom song to congratulate the young man. Everyone in the audience was like, “Did we really see what we think we saw? That couldn’t have been real?” It was.

My wife took some time away with her friends over Veterans Day. That left me with the kids for a couple of days. They got to explore their first computer (a Kano that they built – pictures below). We had Happy Meals and Applebees dinners. We put together Pokemon Mega Construx. We watched classic Japanese Anime (My Neighbor Tortoro). We visited a nearly 100 year old tower that is a national landmark (also pictures below). We did a lot more as I tried to cram everything I could into the weekend.

November was also eventful because we vacationed in Aruba, using the timeshare that my wife bought long, long ago.

We originally booked the trip around Thanksgiving to limit the days the kids miss at school, but flights got too expensive. It was around $2000 more. We changed our trip go from Wednesday to Wednesday to save a lot of money. It’s probably obvious to nearly every reader that Thanksgiving travel is more expensive. We’ve never done it, so it didn’t occur to us. We are learning all the time.

We closed out the month with a Thanksgiving dinner with family… and me spending way too much money on Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping.

That’s enough lead-in… let’s get to the Alternative Income report. I’ll mix in some pictures from the month throughout this financial update, because some people find numbers boring. (But not you or you wouldn’t be here!) Usually, I have more pictures, but it was a light month with not a lot of variety.

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. They way I calculate these numbers does require some explanation.

Lazy Man’s Alternative Income – November 2019

I categorize our alternative income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in my passive income pyramid. I ignore the bottom section of career/job – that’s not passive or alternative. I combine dog sitting and blogging into one section of “slightly active” income. I leave real estate and investment income as their own separate main sources of very passive income.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

The last month I reported, October, was the worst blogging and dog sitting month I’ve had since the start of the year. Between the start of school, my travel for FinCon, my wife’s travel for work, we were busy.

November’s dog sitting was terrible – far, far below what it usually is. Last year’s November was one of our best months due to a busy Thanksgiving holiday. This year, we were traveling, so we missed almost the month’s entire business.

Blogging income for November was also down, but just a tiny bit. I can’t complain because it seems like half the month was preparing for vacation, having vacation, or recovering from vacation.

In October, these combined for a total of $2,476.44. In November, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $1,570.39

The months of June and July at $5000 are looking really good now. Fortunately December is looking better. We’ll have to see how it ends up though, because I’m not sure if we’ll sit dogs over Christmas and I know Internet traffic will be down then.

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

2. Rental Property Income

Zillow said our rental properties were worth a less than last month. We’ve seen a lot of appreciation this year, so it’s not surprising to give back some of those gains. As with every month, we paid off a few thousand dollars of mortgage debt. That helped us keep about the same of equity.

We now have 59.65% of the equity in our properties with a combined rent of $3,325 after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated maintenance. I use that number because it represents our net gain.

If you multiply $3,325 by 59.65% you get $1,983 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 34 months, we’ve seen the number grow $809/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $9,708 raise until the end of time from where we were nearly 3 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 mentioned at the beginning of the article.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $1,978. This number always moves slowly as it only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent. We’ve got a change of tenant soon, and we’ll be raising rents to match that. In January, I’ll revisit all the assumptions that go into that $3,325 estimate after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated maintenance.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,983

3. Dividend Income

The stocks markets have been pretty volatile over the last month. However, by the time was all said and done our investments were worth almost exactly what they were the month before.

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. For that we’ll look at making passive income with dividend kings. I’ll get Sure Dividend’s newsletter (this link has a special coupon code if you are interested) to try to get closer to a 4% average dividend yield.

In November, we continued to get a profit sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. This investment income 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 Income: $2,813.00

Last month, it was $2,789. So at $2813, we’ve got a modest jump of $24. The stock market seems to hit new highs all the time. I was briefly scared that the Tariff Man was going to temporarily torpedo this report like he did 4-5 times before this year. Fortunately, things recovered quickly and so far the tariff stuff has just been temporary fluctuations.

If this stayed steady it would be $33,756 in investment income a year. If our mortgage was paid off, this may cover our necessary expenses alone. Of course, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t simply use this income right now. It will have to keep on compounding another 15 years or so.

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, we’d include that here (but my rockstar career hasn’t taken off yet).

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.

It is great to have both types of income working together for us. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most people 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 awhile. Of course a bad economy may impact both at the same time, but that’s what an emergency fund is for.

Very Close to Passive Income: $4,796

Last month it was $3,767, so it’s up $32. That may not seem like much, but slow and steay wins the race. That $32 erases some of our smaller bills. This passive income now consistently over the average of my dog sitting and blogging. That’s the goal as more and more income moves to the top of the passive income pyramid. However, it would be better if dog sitting and blogging challenged it more.

This very close to passive income has grown from $2,354 in January 2017 – or an annual income of $28,252. Our passive income is now more than double that at $57,522. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet. However, I’m looking forward to 8 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties (and our primary residence) are paid off. Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number should be real/non-fudged $100K/year.

Final Alternative Income

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

November’s Alternative Income: $6,366.39

In October it was nearly $7250, so this is a step backwards. Annualized, the $6,366.39 in monthly income would be $76,396.66. I have been trying to get this number consistently over $100,000. It doesn’t look it’s going to happen this year. If I can finish above $80K, I’ll consider that a win. It’s going to be close and perhaps come down to the last month. Maybe 2020 is the year I can get that average over $100,000.

That largely hypothetical annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, and investments feels like a dream. In the long term, $80K+ would be a lot more income than we’d need. Here’s what our necessary expenses for the next 45 years roughly look like.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last year (which isn’t passive at all). That’s the fuel that drives the passive income engine.

As always, I’m still hoping to write a book someday – just to add some more passive-ish income. I may tip my toe into self-publishing sometime next year. I would love to talk to a real a publisher, but I don’t want to take on the “job” of writing. That’s probably a deal breaker. 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 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, I think.

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. For more full disclosure, I haven’t made a dollar from that suggestion this year so I’m not just suggesting it because I’m getting rich off it.

Our net worth jumped 1.21%. The big reason? The stock market has been hitting new highs almost every day. Also, Zillow gave our primary residence a big boost in value. If that sounds familiar, that was exactly the same reason last month. Our primary residence has jumped 5% in the last couple of months. Some people don’t count primary residence value much in net worth, but I believe it has value. We can always downsize or move to a cheaper place and pocket the difference and get real cash.

Over the entire year our net worth is up 30.92%, which is crazy. At that rate we’d nearly double our net worth every 2.5 years. And in 25 years, we’d be billionaires. This is probably a once-in-a-lifetime year though. Also, at age 43, I’m expecting to live long enough to witness more than a few crashes. When those crashes come, please remind me about 2019.

Finally, it’s important to remember that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 13 years. We naturally may be further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be beginning their journey. Don’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above if you are just starting out. Use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances).

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. It’s not easy, but I came up with some ways to figure out what a pension is worth. In the end, it seems my wife’s may be worth $2.3 million. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, it isn’t immediately spendable cash.

That pension would ridiculously dominate our net worth, so I’ll note two separate numbers in my internal spreadsheet. Since I don’t share the numbers anyway, except for these hints, it shouldn’t matter much to you.

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

There are a lot of holidays you usually say, “Happy” in front of, but Veteran’s Day isn’t one. Today, we solemnly reflect on all the people who served bravely to give us (Americans) the freedom we enjoy. Fortunately, my wife hasn’t been deployed into any kind of war zone, so she isn’t a veteran. She’s deployed for hurricane relief a couple of times and that’s stressful enough. I can’t imagine what it is like for soldiers and their families deploying into war zones.

On the topic of my wife and veterans, she’s away this weekend enjoying some time with “the girls” – some of whom are veterans.

So I get to celebrate Singles Day, the Chinese version of Black Friday. The boys and I are going to lunch at the Chinese buffet, which is everyone’s favorite. They like it because they get to see the food they are choosing. I like it because I can always find some foods they’ll eat without a fight.

Let’s get back to the month recap. After a lot of travel in August and the difficult transition to the new school year in September, October was relatively quiet. That doesn’t mean it was quiet overall. Our oldest joined the Cub Scouts and it was steep learning curve. Aside from that, there were community street parties, parades, harvest festivals, and at least four different Halloween events.

That was enough to fill the social calendar. At the end of the month, we had our best tenants move out. After four years they seem to have found their “forever house.” It’s sad for me, but I’m happy they are taking advantage of today’s low interest rates. We haven’t found new tenants yet, but hopefully we’ll have it occupied soon.

That’s enough lead-in… let’s get to the Alternative Income report. I’ll mix in some pictures from the month throughout this financial update, because some people find numbers boring. (But not you or you wouldn’t be here!)

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. They way I calculate these numbers does require some explanation.

Lazy Man’s Alternative Income – October 2019

I categorize our alternative income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in my passive income pyramid. I ignore the bottom section of career/job – that’s not passive or alternative. I combine dog sitting and blogging into one section of “slightly active” income. I leave real estate and investment income as their own separate main sources of very passive income.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

The last month I reported, September, was the worst blogging and dog sitting month I’ve had since the start of the year. Between the start of school, my travel for FinCon, my wife’s travel for work, we were busy.

October’s dog sitting mirrored September – it was bad. The busy summer tourist season of Newport, RI is over. Families are back in school, so they aren’t traveling and leaving their dogs behind with me.

Blogging income for October was also down. If I want to grow blogging income, I need to spend more time blogging. The good news is that I have a number of articles that I want to get out there. The bad news is that we’re going on vacation soon. The holidays at the end of the year are terrible for blog traffic as people are (rightly) spending time with their families. I might have to start focusing on 2020.

In September, these combined for a total of $2,390.35. In October, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,476.44

So essentially there’s no change there. I wish I could tell a story about how the money is growing and growing and share a special secret so you can do it too. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

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

2. Rental Property Income

Zillow said our rental properties were worth a little more than last month. As with every month, we also paid off a couple thousand of mortgage debt. That helped us gain more than $5,000 in equity. Too bad it isn’t liquid, because then the blogging and dog sitting side hustles wouldn’t matter much.

We now have 59.50% of the equity in our properties with a combined rent of $3,325 after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated maintenance. I use that number because it represents our net gain.

If you multiply $3,325 by 59.50% you get $1,978 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 33 months, we’ve seen the number grow $804/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $9,648 raise until the end of time from where we were nearly 3 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 mentioned at the beginning of the article.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $1,958. This number always moves slowly as it only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent. We’ve got a change of tenant soon, and we’ll be raising rents to match that. In January, I’ll revisit all the assumptions that go into that $3,325 estimate after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated maintenance.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,978

3. Dividend Income

The stocks markets have been pretty volatile over the last month. However, by the time was all said and done our investments were worth almost exactly what they were the month before.

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. For that we’ll look at making passive income with dividend kings. I’ll get Sure Dividend’s newsletter (this link has a special coupon code if you are interested) to try to get closer to a 4% average dividend yield.

In Ocober, I got the first profit sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. This investment income 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 Income: $2,789.00

Last month, it was $1,732. So at $2789, it’s a huge jump. Most of that comes from the new investment. However, the stock market has been doing extremely well hitting new highs almost every day.

This would total $33,463 in investment income a year. If our mortgage was paid off, this may cover our necessary expenses alone. Of course, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t simply use this income right now.

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, we’d include that here (but my rockstar career hasn’t taken off yet).

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.

It is great to have both types of income working together for us. 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 the stock market crashes. We’ll still get dividend checks if a tenant is late paying for awhile. Of course a bad economy may impact both at the same time, but that’s what an emergency fund is for.

Very Close to Passive Income: $4,767

Last month it was $3,691, so it’s up $1056. It’s now consistently over the average of my dog sitting and blogging. That’s the goal as more and more income moves to the top of the passive income pyramid.

This very close to passive income has grown from $2,354 in January 2017 – or an annual income of $28,252. Our passive income is now more than double that at $57,204. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet. However, I’m looking forward to 8 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties (and our primary residence) are paid off. Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number should be real/non-fudged $100K/year.

Final Alternative Income

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

October’s Alternative Income: $7,243.44

In September it was a hair over $6000, so this is a nice gain. Everything was a little better this month, plus the new investment income helped a lot.

Annualized, the $7,243.44 in monthly income would be $86,921.28. I have been trying to get this number consistently over $100,000. It doesn’t look it’s going to happen this year. If I can finish above $80K, I’ll consider that a win. Maybe 2020 is the year I average over $100,000.

That largely hypothetical annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, and investments feels like a dream. In the long term, $80K+ would be a lot more income than we’d need. Here’s what our necessary expenses for the next 45 years roughly look like.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last year (which isn’t passive at all).

As always, I’m still hoping to write a book someday – just to add some more passive-ish income. I may tip my toe into self-publishing sometime next year. I would love to talk to a real a publisher, but I don’t want to take on the “job” of writing. That’s probably a deal breaker. 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 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, I think.

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. For more full disclosure, I haven’t made a dollar from that suggestion this year so I’m not just suggesting it because I’m getting rich off it.

Our net worth jumped 2.92%. The big reason? The stock market has been hitting new highs almost every day. Also, Zillow gave our primary residence a big boost in value. Some people don’t count primary residence value much in net worth, but I believe it has value. We can always downsize or move to a cheaper place and pocket the difference and get real cash.

Over the entire year our net worth is up 29.36%, which is simply unbelievable. At that rate we’d nearly double our net worth every 2.5 years. This is probably a once-in-a-lifetime year though. Also, at age 43, I’m expecting to live long enough to witness more than a few crashes. When those crashes come, please remind me of this article.

It’s important to remember that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 13 years. We naturally may be further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be beginning their journey. Don’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above if you are just starting out. Use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances).

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. It’s not easy, but I came up with some ways to figure out what a pension is worth. In the end, it seems my wife’s may be worth $2.3 million. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, it isn’t immediately spendable cash.

That pension would ridiculously dominate our net worth, so I’ll note two separate numbers in my internal spreadsheet. Since I don’t share the numbers anyway, except for these hints, it shouldn’t matter much to you.

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