Every month, I write an article that shows my passive income and my growth toward my life goals. The end of March and the beginning of April have flown by me. It seems like every day I get some new task that eats up a day of my life.
For example, my son lost a lens of his glasses while we were traveling. His backup pair got cleaned up somehow, so tracking down a company that can make the unusual prescription was quite the hassle. So much for decades of hearing “LensCrafters… glasses in about an hour.” They, like nearly everyone else, could only promise 7-10 business days.
In the past, I’ve done some personal/family updates, but I’ve started writing this over a week after I would like to have it published. I’ll quickly mention that I turned 50 in March, then get to the numbers.
Setting Goals for 2025
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 unusual.
Passive 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 consider it almost all dog boarding.
Dog Boarding/Website Income
This is the least passive of all incomes. I only count this as 50% passive. Dog sitting has been very steady over the last few years. It’s been close to $50,000. The biggest variable is how much we travel. I can’t board dogs while I am away.
March’s Dog/Web Real Income: $2,601.67
The bad news is that the dog business is down around around 30% this year. The good news is that March was a little better than previous Marches since we took a shorter vacation.
Rental Property Income
We have two rental properties. Both still have mortgages, and the rental income is around $1,100/mo. One mortgage is done 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 should only count that percentage of the rent after expenses. When we own everything, the equity percentage will be 100%, and the rent will be 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 March, Zillow estimated our properties were worth $6,500 more. We also paid off almost $1,000 in mortgage principal. That meant our EPO went from owning 84.14% of our properties to 84.48%. The rents after expenses are $2,900/month. Using the equation above, our estimated income from this area would be $2,448. That’s up from $2,438 in February. This number almost always moves slowly, so this is actually a nice gain.
Managing rental properties requires some work – a few days a year. For this reason, I only count 80% of this number as passive income.
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 401k) 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 3.01%.
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.
March’s estimated dividend income was $5,897. In February, it was $5,949. The war in Iran, with crazy oil prices, has been making it hard for the market to do much. I actually expected it to be a lot worse. It may be several months or longer to move on from this, but when we do, I expect the market to jump significantly.
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.: $2,601 – Adjusted to $1,300
Rentals: $2,448 – Adjusted to $1,958
Dividends: $5,897 – Remains at $5,897
Dogs/Etc – Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line
Total Adjusted Passive Income: $9,156
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. That’s the important one.
Even though the month’s numbers were very average, that very important red line above continues to hit new highs. In the long run, dog boarding will be nothing, but in the meantime, investments are supporting an increasing share of the income.
My wife continues to work as well. She has 27 years of high-level military service. That means she’s vested in a pension that would double 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 lost 0.51% last month. For the year, our net worth is up 0.98%. The stock market has moved more in a few days this year than in the past few years combined.
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.
As I get closer to retirement, I’m more than happy to keep pursuing the same goal.
In March, I made around $4,581. For the year, I’m at $13,071. It’s around 52K. That won’t get me to $80K. Fortunately, dog boarding ramps up in the summer months. I don’t know if it will be enough, though.
Improve My Dog Boarding Website and Operations
I can’t remember doing anything to improve the website or operations. I have a whole list of stuff to do, but I was too busy to get to most of it.
AI Everything
I’ve been reading Notes on Being a Man by Scott Galloway (affiliate link). A friend recommended it to me, and it is great. I highly recommend it if you are a young man or the parent of a young man. My wife is interested in reading it. It covers the life lessons the author has learned, including many of his own faults. Most people don’t talk about that stuff, and it’s very blunt and straightforward.
For the AI aspect, I’ve been working with Claude and ChatGPT to distill the main ideas of this book and several others into a consolidated guide to a “best life.” I want to set aside 20 minutes a day to go over one aspect with my own kids. For example, one topic could be the importance of grit. I have no grit, so I’m going to take the Galloway approach and be honest that it’s something that I need to work on myself.
Little projects like these that pop into my head and lead to the above section being, “I can’t remember doing anything to improve the website or operations.”
Health
I hit the big 5-0. 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 this month was 173.3 lbs, and my body fat was 23.6%. That means my lean mass was 132.4, and my fat mass was 40.9 lbs. This is a score of 50.6 using my formula. Last month, my average weight was 172.9lbs, and my body fat was 23.2%. That was a score of 52.6.
Higher is better, and I moved in the wrong direction. I am not surprised, though. My kids’ school break is in March, and we usually travel then. We went to Aruba, and I ate about 5 cows’ worth of steak. I was more active, but it wasn’t enough. I’m spending most of April making up for it.
My goal of getting this number to 60 could be achieved by losing 169 lbs and having a body fat of 21.5% . That might not be too ambitious, but changing one’s body composition is hard!
Body and Brain Points (300 and 225 respectively)
I rate my diet from 1 (poor) to 5 (great) each week. It’s mostly a gut feel for how the week went.
I used to do the same for exercise, but I’m switching that up to use Heart Points from my Pixel Watch. This is more honest than my gut feeling and just as easy for me to use.
I add both scores for the month to get Body Points.
With the weather improving, I’m getting a little more active. My diet has been just average, though. I have 32 diet points and 24 body points, for a total of 56 points.
I measure brain points on the same scale. They are based on doing things like Duolingo (Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, and Chess), and the NY Times puzzles (Wordle, Strands, and Connections). I want to include more creative stuff, such as drawing and/or music. Until I add those, I’m likely to max out at 4 points per week by doing all the previous stuff.
I haven’t had time to add anything else yet, so it’s still 4 a week because I have these down pretty well.
Blood Pressure (Goal: 115/75)
I started measuring my blood pressure every day (sometimes twice a day) last year. It was too high. However, it was never high in the doctor’s office, so my doctor gave me the lowest dose of medication. I got this blood pressure monitor and it tracks it over time in an app. I brought this to my doctor, and she upped my medication by a tiny bit. That link to the device is an affiliate link, by the way.
In March, my blood pressure was 135/81. In February, it was 138/83. That’s a little better. At the beginning of April, my doctor approved a slightly higher dose of my medicine.
Doctor Appointments
I had a cleaning at the dentist, which concluded a string of four straight monthly visits. After the appointment, they tried to book me six months out, but realized that they had no appointments left in 2026. They wouldn’t give me one in 2027, so they just put me on an emergency cancel text list that starts in October.
I’d switch to a different dentist, but my last three dentists didn’t know how to bill military insurance and would end up sending bills to my house. I had to mediate them for hours after every visit, which shouldn’t be my job.
Longevity Research (40 hours)
I didn’t do much longevity research in March. I put in one hour as a default, because I’m sure I came across some news stories. They obviously made an impact, since I can’t remember them.
Hobbies
Most of my hobbies will focus on the AI idea above. Here are a couple of others that I am working on.
3D Printing
The kids keep 3D printing, but it’s the same old stuff. I want them to create some new stuff with TynkerCAD or something.
Play a modern song on a ukulele
So far, no work on the ukulele. It sits tucked away under a table. I would bring it out so that it would be in view, and I’d be encouraged to play it. If I did that, it wouldn’t be long before my wife hid it back under the table to eliminate the clutter.
Year-to-Date Progress
I’ll give myself a few points for getting the 3D printing back working (it’s been broken a few times).
Family
Declutter and Organize House
I didn’t declutter much, but I’m counting another household upgrade in here. Our wifi has been having issues with dead spots throughout the house. I didn’t understand why it would suddenly not work. The mesh network had great coverage in the past.
Turns out that we’ve added too many devices that compete for wifi in the house. The wifi 5 standard simply wasn’t good enough. I upgraded to 7, and it’s been excellent. Hopefully, this will future-proof us for another 7-10 years.
Travel
We are still planning our trips; we do that throughout the year. In March, we went to Aruba for my 50th birthday. Aruba is easy for us because we own a timeshare. It wasn’t our week, but we had sold off the right to use it last year, so we could just use that money. I had only been in the October to December season, usually late November. It was much busier in March. All the cheap car rentals were sold out, so we just skipped the car and took a taxi everywhere. I estimate that we saved a couple of hundred dollars.
I had originally planned to go to Japan for my 50th, but I was only 70% prepared, so we’re going to try it next year. Ironically, we still have to flesh out a couple more trips this year, so I may be too late on Japan again.
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.
This past month, my oldest decided that he’d just ride his bike to play practice across town without telling us. It’s probably normal for many 13-year-olds, but he just started learning last year and only went around our dead-end cul-de-sac a few times.
For a little backstory, I never learned to ride a bike. Well, I could do some basic circles, like around a track on a smooth surface. I didn’t trust myself on the streets with traffic. I’ve let my wife take the reins on teaching the kids, and a few years ago, they went out a few times, but nothing in the last couple of years.
It was fairly annoying to have lost a kid, but he’s pretty responsible and loves play practice, so we were able to put it together quickly.
In March, I also finished signing the kids up for camps. I also spent a lot of time filling out a scholarship application to a four-year private high school. It was like applying to college. It’s super competitive, but you miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take.
Final Thoughts
Life is just a whirlwind now. I’ve been struggling to find the time to get this out, and I have to turn around and write my annual Earth Day article. I don’t know how people with real jobs do it.
