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 July, 2019. This report includes income from dividends, interest, mutual funds, and rental properties.

Overview

July was a good month for The Money Commando family. Summertime is a great time in Santa Barbara. There are multiple free concerts in parks around town, there’s a free outdoor movie series at the courthouse, and the weather is pretty much perfect every day. My wife and the kids have been having all sorts of fun and spending as much time outside as possible.

Without further ado, here’s what our investment income looked like for July, 2019:

Dividend & Interest Income

Total dividend income for the month was $3,043.09. This is up 78.25% from last July’s total of $1,707.23. That’s awesome growth, and is due to a combination of organic dividend raises plus new investments (primarily our new investment in Disney, which only pays dividends 2x/year).

Our cumulative dividends through the first half of the year are up 15% from last year.

Obviously a 15% annual growth is very solid and would put us on pace for about $64,406.89 in dividend income for the year.

Our dividend income was pretty diversified. Our single largest payer was Disney, followed by some tobacco companies (Altria and Philip Morris Intl.) Other sources include beverages (Coke), industrials (Illinois Tool Works), and apparel/sporting goods (Nike). We also had a small amount of interest from our cash holdings.

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.

July was a poor month for our rental income and we made just $864.99 in profit from the rental properties. Two of the properties needed some repairs. The result was that the properties we own with my mom were in the red for the month. Thankfully the other properties performed well so we were still overall in the black.

Our rental income is up 370% compared to the same period last year. That’s due to two things. First, our rental income was terrible last year. One of the properties was not only vacant for many months, but also required quite a bit of repair and improvements to make it rentable. Second, the addition of two new properties and the paying of one of our mortgages has resulted in additional cash flow going forward.

Total investment income this month

Total (dividend + rental) income = $3,908.08

It is just fantastic to see our passive income continue its upwards march.

In terms of total cumulative income through June, we are up 44% from this point last year. Look 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 been trending up and to the right.

My goal for the year is to generate $85,000 in passive income, and we are currently on pace to hit $87,475.61. Whether or not this happens is almost totally dependent on how our rentals perform for the rest of the year.

Changes

No changes this month. We are still holding a bunch of cash, waiting to deploy it when we can find interesting opportunities.

Recap

July was a solid month. We are on pace to easily hit our passive income goal of $85,000 for the year, and I think we have a very good chance of hitting $100k in 2020.

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?