Every month since 2017, I have written an article that shows the growth of our passive income. In the last few years, I’ve included a monthly update on the year’s goals. I had gotten later and later with these goals until the May one, when I just skipped it altogether. At the start of the month, I was finishing up taxes and preparing for travel. The travel was 11 days, and by the time I got back and caught up, it was already almost June.
Then I figured that I’d get this combination of an article out early at least. Unfortunately, my wife recently got deployed to the West Coast for a week. I had to take care of the kids at the same time that my dog boarding business does 50% more business than the next busiest time of the year.
Phew, the other thing of note is that this update covers the first half of 2026. It’s a good milestone to stop and see how your progress on goals has gone.
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 consider it almost all dog boarding.
This section is the least passive of all incomes. I only count this as 50% passive. Dog business in May was about 40% lower than last year. June was even worse as we traveled for nearly two weeks.
May’s Dog/Web Real Income: $2,697.45
June’s Dog/Web Real Income: $2,054.84
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 the last two months, Zillow estimated our properties were worth $12,000 more than the month before. We also paid off $1,000 in mortgage principal. That meant our EPO went from owning 84.91% of our properties to 85.46%. The rents after expenses are $2,900/month. Using the equation above, our estimated income from this area would be $2,476. That’s up from $2,460 in April.
That’s an average of $8 a month, which has been how it’s going lately. Real estate prices are near their highs, and I don’t see them rocketing up again for a while. Real estate works well when leverage can multiply gains. However, since we own 85% of the properties, we aren’t taking much advantage of leverage.
One of our properties is worth about $800/mo. than what we are charging the tenant. However, we know that they can’t afford it, and my wife likes that they never call about anything. Unfortunately, it’s not sustainable, because we are going to have to renovate it at some point, and it’s barely breaking even. I’m trying to convince my wife to sell it next year.
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 2.93%.
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.
May’s estimated dividend income was $6,314, and June’s number was virtually the same ($6,318). In April, it was $6,218. The $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. I have been putting more and more money into bonds and treasuries to try to protect these gains.
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.: $2,054 – Adjusted to $1,027
Rentals: $2,476 – Adjusted to $1,981
Dividends: $6,318 – Remains at $6,318
Dogs/Etc – Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line
Total Adjusted Passive Income: $9,326
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 May and June, the number continued to climb. That important red line mentioned above has hit another new high, as it has for 14 of the last 17 months. While dog boarding and blogging have made less and less money, investments continue to grow. Those most passive components (real estate and dividends) passed $8,200 for the first time and landed near $8,300 (two dollars short!). That’s a minor rounding away from an even $100,000 annual income.
My wife continues to work as well, though she’s seriously considering retirement for the 34th time. I’m trying to encourage 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 3.01% over the two months. That’s a great gain! For the whole year, our net worth is up 9.01%. I’m not sure if I can expect more gains this year, because it’s already gone so well.
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 May, I made $4,697. In June, I made $4,055. For the year, I’m at $26,849. That pace would bring me to almost $54K. I’m very likely to fall short on this goal. That said, July looks like a top month for dog boarding, and I have a standing order for some contract work that pays a decent hourly wage. It won’t be enough, but it’s in the right direction.
Improve My Dog Boarding Website and Operations
With travel, I haven’t been able to get much of anything in this area. However, I have made progress in July that I’ll get to next month.
AI Everything
I got to the point where my guide for young men on how to live the best life is done. I sent it off to a couple of friends who either thought it was so bad that they decided to say nothing, or got so busy they missed it. It’s likely the latter, because it was a text message to a Google Drive file without a description besides, “This is something that I’ve been working on.”
I’ve been following Get Rich Slick, who has transformed his blog from personal finance to mostly AI. It’s great! He’s doing things with AI agents that are very cool and explaining how he does it. I’m trying to carve out the time to do some of the things he’s doing.
He’s noted that it can get expensive, possibly $100/month, but there are ways to save money by using cheaper AIs developed in China. Also, I’m looking into getting my own desktop AI set up. It took some time to figure out what specifications I want, but I’ve got it all down now. There was recently a deal, and I missed it. Since I have a number of other projects to do, I can wait for a killer deal. Unfortunately, there are few deals because the Nvidia GPUs and RAM necessary are limited.
Health
As I mentioned above, I got old, turning 50 a few 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 this month was 175.9 lbs, and my body fat was 24.7%. That means my lean mass was 132.5, and my fat mass was 43.4 lbs. This is a score of 45.6 using my formula. Last month, my average weight was 173.3lbs, and my body fat was 23.6%. That was a score of 50.6. It turns out that I added 2.5 pounds of straight fat – almost no lean mass. That’s why my score dropped 5 points.
Higher is better, and I’ve been going in the wrong direction for a couple of months now. The vacation in March really set me back. I haven’t been able to get back to where I was. I’m making progress, but it takes time to lower the whole average.
My goal of getting this number to 60 could be achieved by losing 169 lbs and having a body fat of 21.5%. Wow, those numbers don’t seem likely at all right now.
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 just had to declare bankruptcy on it for now. 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. However, now I have this blood pressure monitor and it tracks it over time in an app. (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 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.
Doctor Appointments
For the third month in a row, I didn’t have a doctor appointment. This is weird because before this, I had a doctor, dentist, or something else for the previous roughly year and a half.
Longevity Research (40 hours)
I can’t remember doing any longevity research.
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.
Family
Declutter and Organize House
In June, just before our travel, my wife booked the organizer that we’ve used in the past. I didn’t know until the last minute, and I had some other plans for some of it. However, I realized this would be a good thing because I’m the packrat.
They were more productive without me than they would have been with me. They cleaned up 85% of the garage. That is one of the two major areas that needed the most work. The other is the basement.
Travel
We went to Alaska. My mother-in-law has been wanting to go for years. My wife decided that she isn’t getting any younger and now was the time. I don’t think Alaska would have been on our top ten locations, but we had a great time.
The big thing she wanted to do was see Denali National Park. Well, you can’t do that from a normal Alaskan cruise that she wanted to do. We found that Holland America and Princess had a combination tour that had a few days in central Alaska and Denali along with a cruise. Unfortunately, Holland America was the only one that would get the kids back in time for the music camp that they love. It’s not that they are a bad cruise line; it’s that they are geared to the 55+ crowd. Our family felt like the youngest people on the cruise.
On the Denali part, we got to see all the rare things. A bear practically came up to the bus to give everyone a high five and thank us for coming. I’m exaggerating, but he was maybe 10-15 feet away, eating berries. I got a 3-minute video that is pretty incredible. A lot of people don’t see bears or just see them off in the distance.
We also saw a couple of moose. They were walking along the road, perhaps looking to hitchhike to their next destination. I didn’t get as good video as they were at the front of the bus. By the time we were able to safely pass them, they had mostly ducked into the woods.
Finally, we got to see the top of Mount Denali. I didn’t know that was a rare thing, but it seems like only 30% of people get to see it because it can often be obscured by clouds. That wasn’t the case with us.
The rest of the Alaska cruise was fine. We saw some glaciers. I suppose it was good for the kids to see them before they are gone. The Mendenhall Glacier has a video that showed how far it has shrunk over the years.
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 June, they finished up school. The last month of May and June had a lot of activities that I won’t get into. They also started summer camp, which starts with a musical production. My oldest does acting, and my youngest makes the sets. After four years and a couple of shows per year, they both can take on big roles now.
I also bought them their own MacBook Airs just in time. They were $680 each (refurbished) for the M4 chip. Now the cheapest 13-inch is $1099, but it has an M5 chip. I still like saving $800 total on the two chips. They’ve gotten a little use out of them, but not as much as I had hoped.
That’s enough with the travel. In fact, it might even keep them too busy over the summer “break.”
Final Thoughts
I’m finding myself making fewer and fewer updates and writing fewer and fewer posts for this website. I don’t think it’s time to quit, but it’s certainly not just a passing phase.
The post My Passive Income and Life Goals Update (May & June 2026) appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.
