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!)

This report includes income from dividends, mutual funds, and rental properties.

Here is our investment income for May:

 

Every month I’ve been tweaking (and hopefully improving) the format of my income report. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on how I can make it even better.

Dividend & Interest Income

Our dividend income is very lopsided in the second month of each quarter – just over 50% of our total investment income came from OHI (a healthcare REIT). The stock hasn’t performed especially well over the last few years, but the yield is prodigious and that’s helped our dividend numbers quite a bit.

You can see that we received a very small dividend from American Express. AmEx is one of the companies we’d acquired small positions in through monthly Loyal3 purchases. I’ve decided to liquidate all of these small positions (they were all <$3,000) to simplify our portfolio and because I am starting to take small steps to reduce our equity exposure.

Total dividend income was $2,390.17, which is up 64.4% from last May’s dividend income of $1,453.98. Our dividends were 73.57% of our monthly investment income.

Overall, a solid but unspectacular month for our dividend and interest income.

 

Rental income

This category includes net income from the 4 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 our properties remains vacant, bt the good news is that it looks like we’ll be putting a tenant in the property this month. Thankfully, the rest of the properties continue to perform well. This meant that even without any income from one property we still had a net positive rental income for the month.

Rental income was $858.54, which was 26.43% of our monthly income. This is pretty similar to our rental income from May, 2017 of $962.07

 

Total investment income this month

Total (dividend + rental) income = $3,248.71

Our total income for May, 2017 was $2,965.76. This means our investment income for May 2018 was up 9.5% from May, 2017.

Our total investment income for January-May, 2018 is $21,351.87. Last year our income from January-May was $20,460.02, which means our passive income is up just 4.3% from last year. This is certainly better than being down for the year, but clearly a few months of vacancy in one of our rental properties has really hurt our income.

 

Trailing 12-month investment income

Here’s what our trailing 12-month income looks like. Since I only started tracking these numbers in Sept, 2016, I only have actual 12-month totals starting in August, 2017. I’ve annualized numbers before that date (that is, if I had 6-months of income data then I would double it to get a projected 12-month number). In 2016 I only had a few months of data to work with, so small fluctuations would cause my projected 12-month number to jump around. I think this number will start to stabilize now that I have 12 full months of data to use in the calculations. And, in fact, if you look at the graph after August, 2017 you see a much smoother line.

 

 

Actual investment income over the last 12 months was $63,754.65.  I would expect our income over the next 12 months to be higher as new investments are made, dividends and rents are raised, etc. Just putting our cash reserves of $750,000 to work should result in another $22,500/year of income (assuming a 3% dividend).

Our goal is eventually have $120k/year in investment income, so we are 53.1% of the way there! Unfortunately, this number has been trending down for the last 2 months due to the vacant property. Not only are we losing rent of about $850/month, but we are paying to make some repairs/improvements to the property. As I mentioned, this problem has hopefully been addressed and we will start getting some rental income in July from the property. In addition, June is always a great month for our investment income – last year our total investment income in June was $10,624.43.

 

Recap

May 2018 was an ok month for our investment income. Our dividend income was good but our rental income was poor.

I’m really, really hoping we will see a serious market correction soon, as I’d love to put some of our cash to work. Absent a market correction I’m also investigating some foreign investments – valuations overseas are significantly more reasonable that valuations in the US market.

 

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?