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 November, 2018. This report includes income from dividends, interest, mutual funds, and rental properties.

Dividend & Interest Income

Our dividend income in November was both solid and an increase over the previous year. That’s exactly what I expect from our dividend paying investments.

Related: Why I’ve switched from index funds to individual stocks

The second month of the quarter is always a mixed blessing. The income is usually pretty good, but it’s uncomfortably concentrated in just one stock – OHI. This one stock was 62.7% of our dividends for the month (although it’s a much smaller percentage of our passive income for the year). 

Of course, I don’t see the problem as having too much income from a single source. I see the problem as not having enough income from other sources. We are still sitting on a pile of cash and I’m eagerly waiting to deploy it. Once we do that our non-OHI income should increase substantially.

Total dividend income was a solid $2,798.53. Dividends for the month were up a massive 33.1% from November, 2017. 

However, through the end of November our cumulative dividends for the year are up 33% over the same timeframe from last year, and we are now ahead of our dividends for all of 2017.

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.

7 of the 8 properties performed great, but unfortunately we continue to pay the remodel/repair costs associated with the 8th property. For the last few months we’ve been asking the property manager to just hold on to the monthly rent payment and use that to pay down the outstanding remodel bill, but in November they finally asked us to pay off the total outstanding amount (just over $3k). As a result, this month ended up being miserable from a rental property perspective.

Total rental income was -$2,798.53. Our rental income for November, 2017 was $1,568.96, so we are continuing the trend of underperformance for our rentals. In fact, by looking at the numbers it appears that we are down 80% from the same time period last year.

Total investment income this month

Total (dividend + rental) income = -$69.52

Our cumulative total income through November, 2018 is up 8% from last year. 

Trailing 12-month investment income

Since I only started tracking these numbers in Sept, 2016, I only have actual 12-month totals starting in August, 2017. This graph is doing exactly what I want it to do – it’s trending up and to the right.

Actual investment income over the last 12 months was $66,625.22.  This is down significantly from last month, but in general this number should continue to rise each month as dividends and rents are increased and new money is put to work. My goal was is to have this number hit $75,000 by the end of 2018. I think that’s going to be virtually impossible to hit this year.

Our goal is eventually have $120k/year in investment income.

Recap

November was a very disappointing month. As with much of the year, dividends were great but rental income sucked. Of course, that’s what you get when you have a diversified income stream – you hope that your strong performers balance out the disappointing performers.

The good news is that December is traditionally an awesome month for our passive income, and I’m hoping that holds true for this year as well. Last year we had almost $12k in dividends and almost $1,500 in rental income. Hopefully we can surpass those marks this year!

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?