Every month since 2017, I have written an article that shows the growth of our passive income. Over the last couple of years, I’ve added some of my annual goals (New Year’s Resolutions).
This is usually where I add some personal stuff. My wife was on work travel for two weeks, so my time was focused on being able to get the kids to camps, karate, etc. while managing the busiest month of dog boarding of the year.
Goals for 2026
I put all my goals in a spreadsheet that I stole borrowed from Retire By 40. Here’s what it looks like for this year:
(Click it, and it will open in a new tab.)
Steal this idea and make it yours. I always make a bunch of goals that I know I’ll never complete. It gives me the flexibility to fail on some things as long as I’m making progress on others. Most people would do the opposite, focus on fewer goals, and aim to get them all done. It’s much less overwhelming. I’m weird.
Passive Income
Dog Boarding/Website Income
I used to have three side hustles with a passive component: a dog-sitting business, this blog, and a website I manage for a non-profit. They all required some active work. However, I could do them all even while working a full-time job. I considered those partially passive income. This blog and the retainer for the non-profit website are minimal, so I consider it almost all dog boarding.
This section is the least passive of all incomes. I only count this as 50% passive (I’ll adjust it for the 50% later).
Dog business in July was the best of the year. It was almost double the other top months. That’s normal for the business, though. We typically don’t travel, and Newport, RI is a huge seasonal tourist town. I had to turn away potential customers at times because we had too much business.
July’s Dog/Web Real Income: $5,217.96.
Rental Property Income
We have two rental properties. Both still have mortgages, and the rental income is around $1,100/mo. One mortgage is due in 2027. The other one is a small loan, but it has another 15 years on it. If they were both mortgage-free, we’d make around $32,000 a year.
For the purpose of this report, I calculate the rental property income using the following formula:
(Rents After Estimated Expenses) * (Equity Percentage Owned) = Income)
The idea is that we only own a percentage of the equity, so I only count that percentage of the rent after expenses. When we own everything, the equity percentage will be 100%, and it will be the entire rent after expenses.
Estimated expenses are insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance. Equity Percentage Owned (EPO) is our total equity divided by the property value on Zillow. (Zillow is very accurate for our condos.) When the mortgages are paid off, we’ll have an EPO of 100% and be able to keep all the rent after estimated expenses.
In July, Zillow estimated our properties were worth nearly $6,000 less than the month before. However, we paid off $1,000 in mortgage principal. That meant our EPO went from owning 85.46% of our properties to 85.47%. Yay, 0.01% is the smallest gain ever. Weird stuff like that makes the journey interesting (yes, I’m weird). The rents after expenses are $2,900/month. Using the equation above, our estimated income from this area would be $2,519. That’s the same as June, as it was a round-off error.
I feel like real estate prices are near their highs. It’s no secret that there’s an affordability problem with housing. Owning real estate can grow a ton when leverage helps multiply gains. However, since we own 85% of the properties, we aren’t taking much advantage of leverage.
Managing rental properties requires some work – a few days a year. For this reason, I only count 80% of this number as passive income. One of our new tenants has had a lot of needs, but they are mostly legitimate. I’m thinking of getting out of the rental property business. We’re probably going to sell one property next spring.
Dividend Income
My wife and I have been nearly maxing out our retirement accounts for a couple of decades. The markets have done very well over that time. Overall, we have a nice retirement nest egg.
I don’t track dividends from all the accounts. I’m doing well to get my wife to log in to her TSP (the government’s version of a 401 (k)) account and give me the totals. I simply assume we could invest the money into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV, a high-dividend ETF, currently yields 3.42%.
I also have profit-sharing income with a private company in which I own a small stake. I get a check each month that behaves like a dividend – it’s just taxed a little differently.
July’s estimated dividend income was $6,498. In June, it was $6401. The nearly $100 gain in the stock market makes me wonder why we even bother with real estate anymore. I have to tell myself that the stock market can be crazy, and it feels very overpriced right now. For a while, I had been putting more and more money into bonds and treasuries to try to protect these gains. Recently, I’ve started to redeploy those into more risky assets that have the potential to gain more. I’m only doing it in small amounts though. I like risk, and it feels like there are opportunities for some stocks to grow a lot. (More on this in my next article.)
Unlike the previous two sections, this income is 100% passive. For this reason, I don’t have to adjust the numbers.
Total Passive Income
Dog/Etc.: $5,054 – Adjusted to $2,527
Rentals: $2,476 – Adjusted to $1,982
Dividends: $6,498 – Remains at $6,498
Dogs/Etc – Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line
Total Adjusted Passive Income: $11,006.60
That’s a great number and the top since… last July. In fact, that’s the first time I’ve cleared $10,000 this whole year.
Here’s a graph of the adjusted passive income since 2017, when I started keeping track:
The blue line represents the monthly total adjusted passive income. The red line represents the 12-month average. This removes some of the seasonality of dog boarding. I focus on the red line more.
In July, the number dropped a tiny bit. For one of the first times in the last 18 months, the red line didn’t go up. While dog boarding and blogging have made less and less money, investments continue to grow. Those most passive components (real estate and dividends) totaled $8,479.60, a new record. This is almost $200 above last month’s new record. For the year, that’s a little more than $100,000 annual income.
My wife continues to work as well, though she’s seriously considering retirement for the 34th time. I’m encouraging her, but it hasn’t worked. She has 27 years of high-level military service, which yields a vested pension that essentially doubles all this passive income. I also earn some income that falls outside of the areas listed above. It’s not passive, so I don’t mention it here.
I can’t think of anywhere else to put this information, but our net worth gained 0.38% over the last month. For the whole year, our net worth is up 9.42%. It keeps going up, and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Business and Other Money Goals
Personal Income ($80,000)
My income has been dropping over the last few years, going from $98K to 488K to $81K. Last year, I stayed mostly the same at $80,593.
Now that I’m 50 and we’ve got a good set of assets, I don’t feel the need to push this. Income feels more for self-worth than anything else, I guess.
In July, I made 7,205.21. For the year, I’m at $34,079. That pace would bring me to around $58.4K. I’m going to fall short of my goal, but it’s an improvement from last month.
Improve My Dog Boarding Website and Operations
In July, I started to work on getting some shirts made advertising my dog boarding. In addition, I’m getting some notepads (for personalized thank you messages) and some stickers (to go with take-home bags as a tiny gift).
Unfortunately, it’s been slow going, and we’ve each dropped the ball a couple of times.
AI Everything
Last month, I noted that I was looking into getting my own desktop AI set up. I found and bought my AI Computer. The first wrinkle was that it didn’t come with a licensed Windows as it was supposed to. MSI (the company that makes it) says that the license is shipped in the BIOS, but I ran commands to show that, for some reason, they didn’t put it in the BIOS on this one. It’s probably because it was refurbished.
They fought me for days and days. They wanted me to send the machine back to them. It’s 40 pounds and not easy to box back up – and who knows when I would get it back again. All they needed was to give me the 25-character license key that is tied to my serial number. I got frustrated with them and just looked into buying my own. Turns out that Stack Social sells a Windows 11 Pro license for $10. With thousands and thousands of reviews and it being a company I heard of, I decided to take a chance. It worked perfectly.
My next project was to set it up so that I can use it from my laptop. My wife is often working in the office, and my hope was that I could just do the big projects in the background much of the time. I got Parsec set up on it, and my laptop mirrors it with almost no lag. It was easy to set up, and I’m quite impressed. Now, I can click an icon on my laptop, and it will wake up the office computer and log into it. This only works with the wifi I have at home, so there isn’t a remote option. I can work on that later.
Long story, but I haven’t gotten to doing any AI with it yet.
Health
I got old and turned 50 several months ago. For my health goals, I’m mostly using this separate article about health goals from last year.
Weight and Body Fat (Lean-(fat*2) mass >60)
My goal this year is to add lean mass while losing fat mass. It took me a long time to figure out how to create a formula for that. I settled on the formula: lean mass minus 2×fat mass. This penalizes me if I add weight that’s a bunch of fat.
My weight for July averaged 178.4 lbs. I still have 3 extra pounds from the Alaska cruise in June. My body fat averaged 24.5%, which was a small improvement. That means my lean mass was 134.7 and my fat mass was 43.7 lbs. This is a score of 47.3 using my formula. That’s an improvement from the even 46 last month.
Higher is better, and this is the first time I’ve gone in the right direction. I averaged 2025 at 55.9 and started the year at 52.6.
My goal of getting this number to 60 could be achieved by losing 169 lbs and having a body fat of 21.5%. I’ve got a ways to go, and it’s not looking great.
Body and Brain Points (300 and 225 respectively)
I haven’t been tracking body and brain points the last couple of months. I still think it’s a good idea, but I had to declare bankruptcy. I’ve got too much other stuff going on.
(Also, I’m feeling like my body is covered from the above. My brain is another topic. On one hand, I feel like AI is giving me a shortcut so I don’t have to think as much. On the other hand, I’m exploring and learning new things (often with AI) almost every day.)
Blood Pressure (Goal: 115/75)
Last year, I found that I had high blood pressure. I was measuring it daily and putting it in a spreadsheet. Now I have this blood pressure monitor and it tracks it over time in an app, which is much better. (That link to the device is an affiliate link, by the way.)
Whenever my doctor takes my blood pressure, it’s normal. So from her perspective it’s fine. When I present the graphs, she seems to appease me by raising the medication a tiny amount. We’re on the third increase now, and I felt like I’ve pushed it as far as I can. I’ve deprioritized taking my blood pressure now, and with travel, I have fewer data points.
Over the last two months, it has been 130/80. That’s not great, so I’m going to try to measure it more often. I’ve been feeling very stressed lately with scheduling the kids to camps and such while the number of dogs checking in and out of boarding just seems to grow.
On this topic, the new Google Pixel Watch 5 is able to measure blood pressure. I don’t expect it to be incredibly accurate, but it’s a useful tool to have.
Doctor Appointments
No doctor or dentist appointment this month.
Longevity Research (40 hours)
I finished the CNN series Kara Swisher Wants To Live Forever, and it is clearly a misnomer – she spends the entire series advocating for death. It is entertaining though as she visits with lots of people trying to cheat death.
It’s not much of a spoiler, but at the end she does one of the projects that I had hoped to get to last year or this year. A company built an avatar of her using the many, many hours of video and writing she has done over her extensive career. I thought it looked like a poor implementation of the technology until I realized that it was doing it in REAL TIME to have a conversation with the real Kara Swisher. It’s one thing to have AI text be accurate, but generating a realistic face in video instantly is next level. I would have liked to see a version with a cartoon representation where it would have been smoother.
In the end, it impressed Ms. Swisher a lot, and she’s hard to impress. She said in ten years, it would be perfected. I’m giving it five, but it may only be for the one-percenters.
I also read this article on a professor who did a “study” (it IS peer-reviewed) where he was able to show a 15-year improvement in biological age. Unfortunately, he was the only subject, and it was extremely strict, involving fasting for 20 hours a day and sometimes 48-hour spans. I don’t know how believable it is, but it may be worth a read to learn about all the steps he took.
Hobbies
Most of my hobbies are related to AI nowadays. I can come up with infinite ideas and go down the rabbit hole. I already wrote what I’m doing with AI, so I won’t repeat that here.
Here are a couple of others that I am working on.
3D Printing
The kids haven’t printed anything with the 3D printer in a couple of months.
Play a modern song on a ukulele
I got out the book to learn the ukulele and put it in my view. Unfortunately, that hasn’t motivated me to start. The time that I would put into that is going to AI stuff.
Family
Declutter and Organize House
In July, my wife sold some items, and I cleaned up my computer desk for the new computer. That’s actually a very good month.
Travel
We used July to plan our upcoming trip to the Tuscany region in Italy in August. AI helped a lot. At first I just had it come up with stuff near our timeshare. Later, I layered on that I’d like to go to UNESCO and Atlas Obscura places if they make sense. It was able to modify the days slightly to put in the Atlas Obscura spots. For the UNESCO, it decided that one day visiting two was actually worth being a big highlight of a full day.
Kids
The kids are at the age now (12 and 13) where they either love each other or hate each other. They are either working well together or getting into big fights.
In July, they continued theater camps. My oldest does acting, and my youngest makes the sets. My oldest went to a Broadway show (yes, in NYC) for a LONG day-trip with the local theater company. He loved that.
Their karate dojo added a demo team, which is like a combination of gymnastics and karate. They did that and found that more fun than the regular karate classes. They are also doing those. So on some weeks the kids are at karate 5-6 days. It keeps them off phones.
Final Thoughts
I haven’t got a post out in a long time, so let’s just get this out and move on. I have another article already prepared for either the end of this week or early next week.
