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 August, 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 $1,898.89. This is up 19.4% from last August.

This is solid dividend growth, driven primarily by a 46% increase in our Lowe’s dividend (although all of our dividends were up from last year).

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 but we had some significant repairs required this month. As a result, our cash flow was -$1,240.53 for the month.

Although our rental income was negative for the month, there was one big positive. After reviewing the rent we are charging for each of the properties I’ve realized that we are significantly under market rent in 6 of the 10 properties. I’m hoping to increase all of them by $100 within the next month or two, which should lead to about $600 in additional profit.

In addition, we’ll likely be raising the rents by another $100/month in 12 months, and again after that until we are at market rent. We could just raise the rents now (we are $600 under market on at least 2 of the properties) but they have been good tenants and we don’t want to do that to them.

Total investment income this month

Dividend + rental income = $823.92

Total monthly income was poor, but still above the -$1,422.33 we lost last August (also from poor rental results).

Changes

No changed this month.

Recap

Looking at our cumulative income through the end of the month, you can see that we have finally caught up to last year. Hopefully the rest of the year will continue to improve and ew can perhaps reach $100,000 in total passive income 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?