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, 2020. This report includes income from dividends, interest, mutual funds, and rental properties.
Overview
April was a very solid month for our passive income, and this was especially good news given the general slowdown in the economy and the skyrocketing unemployment rate.
This shows one of the reasons I am more concerned with our passive income than our net worth – stock market valuation is volatile but our investment income is much less so.
Without further ado, here’s what our investment income looked like for the month:
Dividend & Interest Income
Total dividend income for the month was $2,848.15. This is up 40% from last April. This is largely due to our investments in Altria and Philip Morris.
Although our dividends for the month are down year-over-year, our cumulative dividends for the year through the end of April are still up 17%.
We plan for our dividend income increasing by 10% per year, so we are ahead of schedule so far.
Overall, a good month.
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.
February was an ok month for our rental income. Total rental income for the month was $1,822.47. This is up 128% from last April’s income of $799.63.
Our average rental income for the last 12 months is $2,268.30, which is the highest trailing 12-month rental income we’ve ever had.
For the year, our cumulative rental income through the end of the month is up 94% over last year.
As with the dividend income, this is a solid start to the month.
Total investment income this month
Total (dividend + rental) income = $4,670.62
Our trailing 12-month income hit a new high of $106,954.69. This means we are 89.1% of the way to our short-term goal of passive income of $120,000/year.
In the table above you can see that our cumulative total passive income through the end of April is up 32% over the same period in 2019. The growth has been slowing down over the course of the year, and I certainly don’t expect to end the year with this kind of growth.
Looking at our trailing 12-month total income, you can see that our passive income has been doing exactly what we want it to do – it’s showing slow but steady growth over time.
So far we are on track to hit our goal of $115,000 in passive income for 2020.
Changes
No changes to our portfolio this month. We are still holding $300,000+ in cash, waiting for an interesting investment at a reasonable valuation.
I’d like to deploy another $200k, leaving us with about $100k in cash. I’d like to keep $100k in cash at all times just out of an abundance of caution.
Recap
April was a great month. We hit a new high in trailing 12-month income and our passive income for the year is well ahead of 2019.
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?
Did COVID-19 impact any of your rental income or are most of your renters paying as usual?
Good question. Each month we collect about $8,000 in rent (most of which is then used to pay the various mortgages, insurance, property taxes, repairs, upgrades, and other expenses associated with owning rental property).
In April we collected all but $369. That money was from our single Section 8 tenant, and the remainder of the $900 rent was paid by the Section 8 housing authority. That means we collected roughly 95% of the rent in April.
I think things will be a bit worse in May, as one of our other tenants has notified us that he’s not going to be able to pay all of the rent. We’ll see how that turns out.
I am looking around the blog but I cannot find any information on how much money did you start with. Is it a secret? Did you invest slowly or you had a bigger amount of money when you started this blog?
I’m not sure what time period you’re referring to. Like everybody else, I guess you could say that I started with $0 when I was born, and I graduated college with a net worth of about -$25,000 due to student loans.
If you mean how much money I had when I started my blog, then you can go to my net worth reports and see my net worth when I started my blog and the growth over time.
Hope you can come back as I miss the monthly updates on your progress. Thanks