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 December, 2020. 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

December is always the best month of the year and this was no exception.

Total dividend income for the month was $17,767.26. This is down 6.9% from last December. The drop is due to reduced dividends from all of our mutual funds, plus lower payouts from some of our bank and financial stocks.

Our cumulative dividends for the year through the end of December are up 5% over 2019.

Our long-term goal is to have our dividend income increase by 10% per year, and unfortunately we came up short this year. Frankly, I’m surprised our dividend income was up at all, given how crazy 2020 has been. Only one of our investments totally eliminated its dividend (Disney), but many of our oil and bank stocks reduced their dividends. Thankfully the cuts were more than made up for by dividend increases in our other investments.

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.

We had a number of repairs and move-out expenses, so our rental income for the month was mediocre (though positive).

Cumulatively through December, we have only generated about 44% of the rental income that we did at the same point last year.

As you can see in the table above, our rental income started strong in 2020 but has disintegrated in the last few months. Our 2020 rental income ended up about $12,700 less than it was in 2019.

Total investment income this month

Total (dividend + rental) income = $18,668.22

We ended the year down 9% from 2019, and that’s due entirely to the underperformance of our rental properties.

I’ll do a full yearly review/analysis in a separate post.

Changes

None

Recap

It sounds a bit weird to say I was a bit disappointed by December, given our total passive income of almost $19k, but it was down from last year, and that IS disappointing.

However, it was still a solid month and I’m hoping that things will continue to improve over the course of 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?