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 January, 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

January was a poor month for our dividend income.

Total dividend income for the month was $2,345.01. This is down 25% from January, 2020. The drop is because 2 of our investments didn’t pay dividends this month:
– Disney – suspended dividends during the COVID lockdown due to the shutdown of their theme parks
– Nike – previously paid its dividend during the end of the first month of the quarter but has now shifted to paying during the beginning of the second month of the quarter

In January 2020 Disney paid a dividend of $760.67 and Nike paid a dividend of $197.41. Combined, that’s a serious hit to our dividend income and not a great way to start 2021.

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).

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.

One of the properties was vacant for part of the month – that obviously hurt our income quite a bit. The good news is that I just received notice that the property has been rented, so next month we should be back on track.

Over the last few years our rental profits have been erratic. This is unsurprising, given the number of rentals we have.

Total investment income this month

Dividend + rental income = $3,835.84

Total monthly income was down about 40% from January, 2020. Definitely not the way we wanted to start the year.

The good news is that the Nike dividend income will show up in February’s report, and our rental income will (hopefully) get back on track now that all the units are rented again.

Changes

None

Recap

It wasn’t a great start to 2021, but I am cautiously optimistic that we can hit our goals for 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?