I always love reading blogs about other investors’ investment income. Watching other people’s investment income rise is my second favorite thing (the only thing better is watching MY investment income rise!)
Here is our investment income for April, 2021. This report includes income from dividends, interest, mutual funds, and rental properties.
Overview
Without further ado, here’s what our investment income looked like for the month:
Dividend & Interest Income
Total dividend income for the month was $2,968.97. This is up 4.24% from April of 2020. This is a small improvement, but the good news is that every one of our investments paid higher dividends this month than they did a year ago.
Our long-term goal is to have our dividend income increase by 10% per year, and unfortunately we came up short in 2020. My goal for 2021 is to receive $88,000 in dividend income (vs. $80,396.95 in 2020). Through the first 3 months of 2021 we are on track to receive just $61,860.24 in dividend income for the year.
Rental income
This category includes net income from the 6 rental properties that my wife and I own, plus 50% of the income from 4 rental properties that we own with my mom. This number does not include appreciation of the properties or the decrease in the mortgage balance (those numbers show up in the net worth report).
However, this income is net of all mortgage, tax, and insurance payments. That is, this is a true cash flow report for our rental properties.
All properties are rented and our cash flow was $1,273.54 for the month. One of the properties needed a few repairs, and an annual inspection found some issues on another property, so there will be some costs in May as well.
Over the last few years our rental profits have been erratic. Pretty much every month there’s some “unexpected” surprise – a vacancy, a repair, etc. This is unsurprising, given the number of rentals we have.
Total investment income this month
Dividend + rental income = $4,242.51
Total monthly income was down 9.17% from March, 2020, primarily due to lower rental income.
Year to date our total income is 21% lower than through the same point in time in 2020. Our dividend income is down just 7% from 2020, but our rental income is a brutal 54% lower than Q1 of 2020. The good news is that both of those numbers are improved from last month.
Changes
The S&P puts I purchased and the remaining Tesla options have been doing pretty well in the last few days. The Tesla puts expire in 2 weeks, but the S&P options are good for about 6 more weeks. Hopefully they won’t expire worthless like the previous puts did.
Recap
Last year and this year have been pretty disappointing for our passive income. It looks like our passive income peaked in 2019 at just under $100k and was down to $90k last year. So far we are on pace for roughly $74,500 in passive income in 2021.
How did everybody else do with their investment income this month?
Are there any investments out there trading at reasonable valuations that I should be looking at?