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 May, 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 $1,736.40. This is up 8.93% from May 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.
I looked at each individual source of dividends and all 5 companies are paying higher dividends this year than last. That’s a result of dividend reinvestment combined with the companies raising their dividend payments over the last 12 months.
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 $460.38 for the month. One of our properties has been completely paid off (which means so escrow account) and the property tax bill was due this month, so that was a $2,000+ plus hit to our rental income this month. Our rental income this month was down 52.5% from last May.
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. Overall, our rental income has been far less predictable than our dividend income.
Total investment income this month
Dividend + rental income = $2,562.15
Total monthly income was -14.3% from March, 2020, primarily due to lower rental income.
Year to date our total income is 20% lower than through the same point in time in 2020. Our dividend income is down just 6% from 2020, but our rental income is a brutal 54% lower than Q1 of 2020. The good news is that these numbers are slowly improving, but it’s hard to see us catching up to 2020 by the end of the year.
Changes
No changed this month.
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 $64,896 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?