My Passive Income and Life Goals Update (August 2025)

At the start of summer, I made up a bucket list. I had the kids make one up, too. My 12-year-old took it seriously and came up with a few legit ideas. My 11-year-old wrote down “Exist.” I had a good laugh at that one because of the literal background of the term “bucket list.” I don’t think he knew that.

Anyway, we mostly accomplished everything on the 11-year-old’s list and not too much more.

Personal Update

My wife spent the month singing Taylor Swift’s August because of the line, “August slipped away into a moment in time, ‘Cause it was never mine.”

Around the middle of the month, she got deployed for Hurricane Erin preparation in Puerto Rico. Fortunately, they didn’t need to prepare for much as it moved north of the island. They kept her for another few days because there was a storm coming behind it, but that fizzled out. This meant that we had to cancel some of our vacation.

We knew it was hurricane season and this could happen, so we were careful to do a driving vacation and get vacation insurance. This way, there were no flights to miss. We were able to catch up to where we’d be and still got six of the ten days of vacation in.

Here are some of the highlights (with pictures scattered throughout the article):

• The big thing was our vacation. I have a whole section below in the Travel area about it.
• My kids earned their black belts in karate, finally! The dojo was having some staffing problems, and finally got it together for them to take the test. It was a strenuous two hours, but they really needed that.
• I fixed a trampoline in our yard that had been broken for a while. It was a small thing, but it annoyed me. I couldn’t come up with an easy fix for a metal safety bar that caved towards the center. Then it hit me that I could secure it by tying it to the fence.
• My youngest son built a bookcase that my wife ordered online. He mixed up some of the instructions and put a shelf in backwards, and learned a valuable lesson as we had to take a lot of it apart to fix it.
• The kids and I took our dog to the dog park. It’s a very basic-sounding thing, but we have so many dogs boarding here that she doesn’t get out much. We had some days where we had no dogs because we were supposed to be on vacation. Also, it was specifically an item on my 12-year-old’s bucket list. It was great having these unscheduled days with no expectation of work or school.

Let’s get to the rest of the month.

My Goals for 2025

I put all my goals in a spreadsheet. Here’s what it looks like for this year. I’ll explain what each one is in this article and give the results through June.

(Click it, and a bigger version will open in a new tab.)

Steal this idea and make it yours. I make an absurd number of goals 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. As always, I’m pretty crazy, so do what works for you.

Passive Income

I have three side hustles with a passive component: a dog-sitting business, this blog, and I manage a website for a non-profit. They all require some active work. However, I can get paid by all three even while working a full-time job. I make a very little bit of money in my sleep from blogging and simply being available to do the website work. The same is true for dog boarding. I have to feed the dogs, but it’s a lot different than getting an hour wage. I consider income from these areas as half passive income.

(I do some other hourly work that isn’t passive income. That isn’t included here as there is no passive component to it.)

In the past, I’ve written a whole monthly article on this passive income. I’ve cut out the fluff to give you the numbers with minimal explanation. If this area seems off or confusing, reading the last full article will help it make more sense.

Dog, Blog, and Web Income

Dog boarding income in August was virtually tied for the 2nd best of the year with June. The summer months are always the top-performing months.

Blog income continued to be terrible. At this point, it’s not coming back unless I sell a product or come up with something else.

[The view from the Skylon (“Space Needle”) restaurant.]

Finally, I make a very little bit of money by running a website for a non-profit. I get a set amount every month, and most months, I don’t have to do too much. A couple of months this summer, I had to work a couple of hours.

In August, I made $5,168.01 in income from these sources. In July, I made a lot more ($8,169.09) because we didn’t go on vacation. I’m still very happy with that August number.

Rental Property Income

We have two rental properties. Perhaps we should only have one? We still have mortgages on them, so the rental income is around $700/mo. We will pay off one mortgage 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 $30,000 a year after all expected expenses, including maintenance.

Six months ago, one of our tenants broke the lease and moved out suddenly. We renovated the property, which took three months longer than it should have, and have it on the market to be rented. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten any bites yet. We lowered the asking price significantly, and still nothing. There are properties that are far worse deals out there, so it’s very confusing to me. I haven’t seen anything like this in 20 years of being a landlord.

For the purpose of this report, I calculate the rental property income using the following formula:

(Rents After Estimated Expenses) * (Equity Percentage Owned) = Income)

Estimated expenses are insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and condo maintenance. Equity Percentage Owned (EPO) is our total equity divided by the property value on Zillow. (Zillow is very accurate for our condos.)

In August, Zillow estimated our properties were worth about $7,000 less than last month. That’s a big loss. As usual, we paid off about one thousand dollars in mortgage principal. That meant that our EPO went from owning 83.54% of our properties to 83.51% of them.

[Anyone have a spare $60,000 for a glass ball? Found this in the gift shop at the Corning Glass Museum. Any kid could have fairly easily knocked it over. You’d think they would put it in a glass case or something for only serious buyers.]

Last month, I decided to make the assumption that we’re going to get close to the price we’re asking for rent. That was a BAD idea, as we had to lower the price significantly. We still haven’t gotten any bites, but I’ll keep using the lower number until I get a final number or have to lower it again. The rents (with that assumption) after expenses are $2,806/month. Using the equation above, our income from this area would be $2,343. That’s a drop of about $200 from last month, so lowering the rent is a significant difference. Usually, the number moves very slowly, about $5 or $10 a month.

Managing rental properties requires some work. We did that recently for the first time in a few years. For this reason, I only count 80% of the $2,546 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. It’s a win if I can get my wife to log into her TSP (government’s version of a 401k) account and give me the totals. Instead of tracking dividends, I assume we could easily invest the money into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV currently yields 3.41%. I DO track dividends in our main brokerage account that isn’t a retirement account. We average about 2.7% dividend there.

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.

The markets are still doing well. I’m quite surprised. There seem to be a lot of signs that this economy isn’t in great shape. The stock market is priced at its highest peak since the Dot Com bust, with a crazy high 39+ Shiller P/E. The jobs report that came out last weekend was extremely disappointing again. Inflation, which is already higher than the Federal Reserve would like, is going even higher. We have the President threatening the Fed, the Supreme Court, private companies, and declaring war on a great American city (Chicago). It’s hard to expect much from the financial markets with all the chaos and uncertainty.

Yet, here we are with all-time highs.

Last month, the dividend income number was $5,428. This month it is $5,550. That’s an amazing move of almost $75.

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/Blogs: $5,168 – Adjusted by 50% to $2,584
Rentals: $2,343 – Adjusted by 20% to $1,874
Dividends: $5,550 – Remains at $5,550

Dogs/Blogs Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $10,008.41

Last month it was $11,554. The lower dog boarding numbers are the big difference.

It’s our fifth month ever in 5 digits, and it looks like we’ll be seeing more of them. We’ll probably head down for a little bit, but next year we might be consistent there as long as there isn’t a recession.

Here’s a graph of the adjusted passive income since 2017, when I started keeping track of it:

The blue line represents the monthly total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the 12-month average. The point of doing the 12-month average is that dog boarding has some seasonality, and some months are always busier than others. Using those 12-month averages, we’re at all-time highs in passive-ish income. Our mostly pure passive income (rentals and dividends) is still great at $7,424.40. If I retire from dog boarding, that money would go a long way.

My goal for this passive-ish income is to reach $109,000 for the year. It’s up to $74,849 and on pace for $112,273. We may pass the $109K goal, but I expect the pace to come down now that the busy dog-sitting month is over.

My wife continues to work as well. A couple of months ago, it looked like she’d choose to retire with the craziness of Musk. Things got a little smoother when he left. However, as a pharmacist working with public health, she has problems supporting RFK Jr.’s disinformation campaign. She’s set a retirement date, but it’s more than a year away.

She has 26 years in the military and will be getting a pension that would double all this passive income. That pension grows a little each month, and now we’re keeping track of it precisely.

I can’t think of anywhere else to put this information, but our net worth went up 1.39% last month. That’s a very good month. For the year, it is up 8.28%. That’s really good. Our liquid cash went up a huge 15%. I sold some stock in our brokerage account to help fund our real estate bank account. It felt really good to sell stock and have the cash available. The brokerage account is still up a lot from the beginning of the year.

Business and Other Money Goals

Personal Income ($75,000)

Three years ago, I made over $98,000 in side hustles. Two years ago, I made $88,000. Last year, I made a little more than $81,000. I see a trend, and it is not great. That’s okay; overall, our passive income is going up, so everything is going as planned.

This year, I’m aiming to make $75,000.

Through August, I made $54,573. I’m on pace to make almost $82,000. I’m excited!

Complete Estate Planning

I got the estate planning documents from the lawyer back a few months ago. This is done. Yay!

Kid Wealth (Goal: 50,000 Page Views)

For the fourth year, I hope to get to 50,000 page views on Kid Wealth. I thought something would go viral and I’d get most of them in one day.

In 2022, I launched Kid Wealth and wrote a lot of articles. It had 4,200 page views that year. In 2023, I got involved in other projects, but I tripled traffic to 13,708. Last year, traffic continued to grow to 16,352, even though I only wrote a couple of articles.

At the end of August, Kid Wealth had 46,418 lifetime views. It’s going to be close to 50,000 page views by the end of the year.

I could really use a partner or some motivation to make it into a business. Any readers interested? I simply don’t believe the money is in blogging anymore. I still believe in the value of the written word, but I think it needs to be something else. My interest has moved on to other projects for now.

[The view from our hotel room. They had a fireworks show and illuminated falls.]

Maybe it could be a non-profit and receive some kind of grant money. It’s a good brand and cause, and I’m sure it can be valuable with time to move it in the right direction. I’ve invested enough money and set up a good foundation, but I doubt anyone buying it will give me any kind of ROI. It was never about making money, so selling it at a loss isn’t worth it to me.

Professional Improvements

My plan for this now is an idea to create a new application. Making an application has me learning a lot of new things. However, with the travel over the last month, I haven’t worked too much on it.

Health

I’m putting a large emphasis on health these days. It’s so big that I wrote a separate article about it. My health goals for 2025 are here.

Weight and Body Fat (Goal: 164lbs / 19% BF)

At the end of August, my average weight was 170.2 pounds, which was a loss of half a pound from last month. My body fat was 22.6% which was a gain of half a percent. I might be able to hit the weight goal, but I don’t think the body fat goal is going to work. These are averages over a whole month using my Fitbit Aria scale.

This is my lowest weight since April of 2016. Even then, my average weight for a whole year since 2014 has always been a little above 170. That’s as far back as my Fitbit data goes. It’s about 25lbs off from when I decided that I really needed to make changes about 18 months ago. In 2023, my average for the year was 189. In 2024, it was 181. Now it’s at 172.

I’d like to say that I’ve developed some kind of amazing weight-loss secret, but it’s just the generic GLP-1s that you read about everywhere. I take a low dose, because my BMI at 26 is just a little overweight. When I tell people that I take it, they are shocked because they say that I don’t need it. That’s kind of the point.

Body and Brain Points (300 and 200 respectively)

I score myself from 1 (poor) to 5 (great) each week for diet and exercise. Then, I add them up for the month. In July, I did well with exercise. The weather is nice, and I’m getting my steps in. I’m not putting in much strength training, though, and that needs to change. My diet has been pretty mediocre. I feel like the semaglutide is doing most of the work on that side.

At the end of August, I had 186 body points. It’s a pace of 279 for the year. If I get my butt into gear, I might have a chance at 300.

I measure brain points on the same scale. They are based on doing things like the daily Wordle and New York Times Connections. I also do Duolingo, but I’ve been taking the easy way out and doing math instead of Japanese.

At the end of August, I have 133 brain points. That’s a pace for only 170 points for the year. While that looks bleak, my new productivity system has really helped form a habit. I think I’ll get to 200.

Blood Pressure (Goal: 115/75)

I have a family history of high blood pressure. I had a little medical scare in the first couple of days of the year. I also had one at the end of the month. Fortunately, my wife is a pharmacist, and she’s coming to my doctor appointments now. It might be orthostatic hypotension, and I’m reading that it can low blood sugar could be a cause. That might make sense with the semaglutide that I’m taking.

My blood pressure in January averaged 138/92, which is high. I’m taking lisinopril 10mg, which costs around $3 for a 90-day supply. Such a bargain!

[Spotted National Lampoon’s Vacation while we were on vacation. This is Niagara Falls.]

Last month, I bought this Omron Blood Pressure Monitor on Amazon on a Prime Day deal. That’s an affiliate link, so I might make a couple of extra dollars if you click on it and buy it. I’m impressed as it creates great averages and graphs. I can have it email me a report so I can print it out and give it to my doctor. Because a lot of doctors use Omron products, I suspect she’ll be able to read it well. It’s fairly straightforward, though.

In August, my blood pressure averaged 137/81. That’s too high. With about a week to go in the month, I met with my doctor and she increased my lisinopril up to 15mg. I’m actively tracking it, and we are making adjustments, so that’s a step in the right direction.

Doctor Appointments

I met with my PCP as mentioned above. I’m due for a dental cleaning as my dentist wants me to have them cleaned every four months. However, they didn’t have any appointments. I’m trying to get in when a cancellation happens, but have so far been unsuccessful.

While I was at the doctor’s, I got a Cologuard kit because I haven’t been able to find time for a colonoscopy. It came while I was on vacation, and I haven’t had time to work with it yet.

Longevity Research

Another month and I have made no progress in getting a DexaFit scan scheduled. The dog boarding schedule and travel made it too difficult.

I did read an interesting article about exercise that I really liked: I’m a doctor. This is how I transformed my ageing body at 50. Do they spell aging differently in England? This article is more geared towards women, but I think it can be helpful for men too.

Hobbies

I haven’t been doing well in developing hobbies over the last few years. I say that I want to get into flying drones or something else, but I never seem to have the time. With my new productivity system in place, I think I’m making better progress in this. Let’s find out:

Boost AI Skills

My pet AI project in August was cloning my voice. The idea is that I can train a computer to speak for me. I simply have to type something out, and it will create the audio. Here’s the start of this blog post that I just cut and pasted into their generator. What do you think?

Most of the people reading this have no idea what my voice sounds like, so it probably sounds decent enough. I used a company called Eleven Labs. They have a free plan that can duplicate your voice with 30 seconds of training. It’s not as good as the audio that I included here. I used their “Creator Plan” to create a better voice clone. You can get started for just $11.

This voice isn’t great, though, because I’ve only trained it for the bare minimum recommended time of 30 minutes. With two hours of training, it is supposed to get a lot better. I simply didn’t want to sit down and record my voice for two hours, though. I’ll break it down and improve it a little over time.

Why would anyone want to clone their voice? I feel like I will always have a snippet of myself in September 2025. Maybe I’ll include audio in more blog posts. Would you like that?

3D Printing

The kids and I spent three hours with the 3D printer this month! After a couple of years, it was on the “to-do” list. The bad news is that we haven’t successfully printed anything yet.

The good news is that I successfully took apart many of the internal pieces and cleaned out some filament that had clogged things. The manufacturer’s website said that it can come with clogs because it was tested in a factory before shipping. What the hell?!?! Anyway, there is still a clog inside the main tube, and I have to either get a new tube or heat it up in some boiling water and try to get it out that way.

I have no idea how average people use 3D printers. The three hours of de-clogging it were maddening.

Journaling

I like the idea of journaling, but I don’t think I’ll get to it.

Here are some other ideas of things I want to work on this year:

• Learn to fly a flight simulator
• Play a modern song on a ukulele
• Rubik’s Cube – I can solve it, but I am thinking about learning an advanced algorithm to do it faster. Update: This is unlikely to happen

You may recognize the last two of these hobbies from my brain health goals for 2025.

I didn’t do much on any of the above. I picked up a Rubik’s Cube and realized that I forgot some of the algorithms, so I guess it’s not the kind of thing that I can just put away for a couple of months.

I signed up for Masterclass, which I think can teach the ukulele, but I haven’t moved forward on that either.

With the voice cloning and work with the 3D printer, this is a big step forward.

Family

Declutter and Organize House (80% done)

“We” did a huge cleaning of the kids’ rooms before the school year. The “we” was almost entirely my wife after she got back from her deployment from the Hurricane. I had spent the day before her arrival getting them to clean it enough so it was possible to see the bottom of the floor of the room. While she was packing up years of garbage, I was busy with a bunch of other stuff. A lot had backed up over the two weeks that I was a single parent and then away on vacation.

We have so much trash that we had to store extra full trash bags in the garage because we can fit only so much in the container the town gives us. We usually only use half the bin, so it will take a few weeks for us to get it all out of the house.

Travel

The plan was to drive from Rhode Island to the New York State Fair, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Corning Museum of Glass, Hershey (PA), and back home. My wife’s deployment cut out the Fair and Toronto, so we went straight to Niagara Falls and did the rest of it.

In Niagara Falls, we stayed at the Marriott Fallsview Hotel, which had a tremendous view of the falls (as you expect from the name). We had a room on the top floor. It was amazing when they illuminated the falls at night. We spent part of one day on the US side and one whole day on the Canadian side. On the US side, we parked at Goat Island and walked to Terrapin Point, Three Sisters Islands, and did the Cave of the Winds tour, where the falls literally drenched us.

On the Canadian side, we did the Journey Behind the Falls (the Cave of Winds was better) and the Hornblower cruise (Canada’s version of the Maid of the Mist). We did a tour of the Niagara Parks Power Station & Tunnel as well as the White Water Walk, which had class 6 rapids. (I guess class 6 rapids are a thing.) We had a sunset dinner at the rotating restaurant at the Skylon Tower. It was like the Space Needle. We also spent time at Clifton Hills doing smaller stuff like a hall of mirrors, other mini mazes, and fun houses.

After that, we went to the Corning Museum of Glass. That’s a strange stop, but my wife had a friend who worked at Corning who clued us into it. Glass seems like a very simple thing, but it was much more complicated than I thought. We took a class where we each made our own glass pendant.

[My kids getting a lesson in crafting a glass pendent. My wife and I went after.]

Finally, we went to Hershey Park. Many people associate Hershey with the chocolate, but it has a tremendous amusement park. The roller coaster collection is second in the United States after Cedar Point (according to most enthusiasts). We only had a couple of days there. Staying at the hotel gave us three free preview hours the night before we used the ticket and one early hour the day of. That gave us plenty of time to do the whole park in one day. Typically, you want to plan two days, especially if you are going to the zoo. We’ve done Hershey several times before, so it was okay to skip the zoo and some of the rides designed for younger kids.

We almost did the roller coasters exclusively. This was a significant change from when the kids were super little and didn’t go on any. I had never been a roller coaster person, but I decided that if they can handle it, then I can. Pennsylvania students were back in school, so there were almost no lines. We did many roller coasters multiple times.

As for the rest of the year, we’re still looking to go to Puerto Rico in November for a few days and probably a long weekend skiing in Vermont in December.

Kids

The August travel was the kids’ first visit to Canada. It was barely Canada, though, as they cancelled the Toronto part and just went a little over the border. My older kid had said that he wanted to see a waterfall when he was five, and there really aren’t any in Rhode Island. By the end of Niagara, he never wanted to see a waterfall again.

Summer Camps

They finished up their summer camps in August. My youngest son had his fourth year of sailing camp. He and his best friend did 420s for the entire two weeks. Fortunately, in this context, 420s are a sailboat, not a drug reference.

[My son building a bookcase. He can build almost anything.]

My other son did a cooking and golf camp. His team won the cooking competition at the end of the week. He liked golf enough that he’s going to continue it this fall because it’s being offered as a school sport. He even has the same teacher as his camp.

Final Thoughts

Phew, you don’t need any more thoughts, do you? If you are still reading this, you are probably thinking, “Just make this end.”

So I will.

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