My Passive Income and Life Goals Update (August 2026)

Every month since 2017, I have written an article about the slow and steady growth of our passive income. Several years ago, I added some of my annual goals (New Year’s Resolutions) in a separate article. In the last couple of years, I’ve combined them into one monthly post.

I often use this space to look back over the last month and highlight what’s been going on with the family. The big event for us was travel to Italy and, accidentally, Switzerland. I saved that for the travel section below.

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 to be partially passive income. It’s impossible to make money with a blog nowadays, and the retainer from a non-profit website is minimal. It is best to consider this almost all dog-boarding income.

This section is the least passive of all incomes. I only count this as 50% passive. I can make money dog boarding while doing other jobs (or not working at all). It does require some work, though.

Dog business in August was very, very good – especially since I missed the last third of the month. That’s typical for summer in Newport, RI, which is a huge seasonal tourist town. September is still pretty busy with Labor Day, and then it drops off for the shoulder season and the off-season.

July’s Dog/Web Real Income was $5,217.96. August’s Dog/Web Real Income was $4,107.93. I’ll take that for only 20 days of the month, any time.

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 remaining. 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 August, Zillow estimated our properties were $4,000 less than the month before. However, we paid off $1,000 in mortgage principal. That meant our EPO went from owning 85.47% of our properties to 85.52%. The rents after expenses are $2,980/month. Using the equation above, our estimated income from this area would be $2,548. That’s about $30 more than June. The gain came from a lease renewal with raised rents.

Managing rental properties requires some work – a few days a year. For this reason, I only count 80% of this number as passive income. Our newest tenant has had a lot of needs, but they are mostly legitimate. I’m hoping to sell a property next summer. It is way under market, and we know the tenant who has been there for years can’t afford market rates. Even at market rates, we can probably do better in some other assets.

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.

August’s estimated dividend income was $6,504. In July, it was $6498. That’s barely a nudge, but it’s fine because the markets have gone up forever. 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 (such as quantum computing) to grow a lot.

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.: $4,108 – Adjusted to $2,054
Rentals: $2,548 – Adjusted to $2,038
Dividends: $6,504 – Remains at $6,504

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

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $10,596

That’s the fourth-highest month of all time.

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 August, the red line went up a tiny bit. Dog boarding has made a little less money, but investments continue to grow. Those most passive components (real estate and dividends) totaled $8,542.40. This is a new record… the fifth straight month of new records. It would be around $102,000 of annual income in real estate and dividends.

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 0.51% over the last month. For the whole year, our net worth is up 10.21%.

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 August, I made $6,107. For the year, I’m at $40,190. That pace would bring me to around $60K. I’m going to fall short of my goal, but it’s moving in the right direction.

Improve My Dog Boarding Website and Operations

In August, I continued to work on getting some shirts made to advertise. In addition, I also tried to get some notepads (for personalized thank-you messages) and some stickers (to go with take-home bags as a tiny gift).

Unfortunately, with the travel at the end of the month, it hasn’t advanced.

AI Everything

In August, I started working on my AI Computer.

Long story, but I hadn’t gotten to doing any AI with it yet. (Spoiler note for September, I’ve been doing every.

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 August averaged 179.8 lbs. My body fat averaged 25.2%, which is slowly not moving in the right direction. I didn’t get a lot of measurements in due to travel. That means my lean mass was 135 and my fat mass was 44.8 lbs. This is a score of 45.5 using my formula (higher is better). That’s very narrowly the lowest score of the year.

In 2025, I averaged 55.9 and started the year at 52.6. This isn’t going well. I’ve got another spoiler for September. I got a gym membership, and I’ve been regularly going (albeit for a small sample size of 4 times in 8 days).

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 stopped tracking body and brain points a couple of months ago. I still think it’s a good idea, but I’ve got too much other stuff going on.

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.)

Last month, I realized that I take my blood pressure first thing in the morning… and then take my blood pressure pill. My thinking was that my blood pressure should be lowest in the morning and not impacted by any kind of daily stress. However, I realized it’s also the longest possible amount of time since I’ve taken the medication. I’ve started to try to remember to take it around 2 PM or so.

That hasn’t gone so well. I took my blood pressure only four times last month. Part of that was due to 12 days of travel, but I still should have measured it more.

On the bright side, it was 126/79! That’s the best it’s been in over a year. I think I’m in a good place with this.

Doctor Appointments

I had an annual physical. I’ve been reading a lot about testosterone diminishing with age. Since I’m 50 now, I asked to have mine measured. When the bloodwork came back, it was very much in the middle of where it should be.

Longevity Research (40 hours)

I didn’t do anything with Longevity research in the last month.

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 all summer. Last month, I pointed it out, and they said that the thing they wanted to print wasn’t in the right library or something. They never asked me about it.

I told them that they should be making their own 3D designs from TinkerCAD anyway. They’ve used it before, but that did little more than create another barrier to printing.

Play a modern song on a ukulele

Same as last month, “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

We didn’t do too much to declutter or organize in August. However, we made progress on two major house renovations:

1\. Our central air compressor has died after 12 years. They really should last much, much longer for the huge amount of money we paid. I got a quote on a new one from a company whose owner I know well. However, now that it’s almost fall, I’m going to delay the work a little bit to match their quiet season.

2\. Our basement is getting some puddles leaking about half the time in the rain. We can mop it up with about a half dozen towels, then wash and dry them. However, that’s a temporary fix, so we got some basement experts, and they found a lot of issues. I guess sump pumps are another of the things that should be checked annually. It came with the house, and we never had it looked at.

We got quotes for each of them within 24 hours. We’re probably looking at $40,000. Ouch!

I’m going to have to create a master list of things that need to be checked and put it on the calendar. This seems like the kind of thing that AI can help me out with.

I’m going to count these as organizing the house, because it’s significant adulting.

Travel

We went on our Tuscany vacation!

We flew into Florence and had a couple of days. We did all the Ninja Turtle stuff. We saw Michelangelo’s David and a couple of other sculptures. We even saw one of his rare paintings. I learned that he HATED painting. He only did the Sistine Chapel because the Pope coerced him. We also saw paintings by Donatello, Rafael, and Leonardo. We paid for a private tour, which was great, because we learned a lot more than we would have if we had just done the Uffizi museum on our own. We also did Galileo’s museum, because I’m more of a science guy than an art guy.

Our timeshare was in Cortona, which is a walled city. The movie, Under the Tuscan Sun, was filmed there. We spent a day in Arezzo, where there was an incredible Cathedral. Every town had churches and cathedrals – so many that we got bored with them, but Arezzo’s was next level – maybe 2-3 times the size of the others. The movie Life Is Beautiful was largely filmed there. We also went to Montepulciano, where a few scenes of the Twilight movie New Moon were filmed. Finally, we went to Pienza, where parts of Gladiator were filmed. It’s better known for being designed as the “ideal city” by a Pope. It was one of the two UNESCO World Heritage Sites we saw. (The other was the surrounding cultural landscape of Val d’Orcia.)

One day we went on a truffle hunt. I was disappointed that they use dogs now instead of pigs. I wanted to walk around a pig. The dogs found more truffles than usual, and the place made them into a wonderful pasta lunch for us. My oldest son said it was the best meal he’s ever had. He said this at least five times on the trip, but this was near the end of the trip. Later that same day, we took an Italian cooking lesson and made pasta from scratch for our dinner. That beat out the day’s earlier best meal in his life.

On the way back, our connection in Zurich got canceled due to weather. The weather shut down many flights and caused delays for reportedly ten thousand people. They could only reschedule us 36 hours later. So we spent a day touring Zurich. We just caught a general tour because there was really no time to plan. I was most excited by Einstein’s college, but we just drove by it.

Zurich was extremely expensive if you don’t plan ahead. The cheeseburger at our hotel was $45 USD. My wife is very much a “Well, it is what it is,” but I thought that was just too crazy. We found some grocery stores and ate like kings for around $10 total.

Since we had no luggage, we needed some toiletries. My wife was going to buy 4 toothbrushes at $5 each to be used for one day. That was at a place called The Coop Beauty (or something similar). The Coop was the main supermarket, so it seemed like this was just like a drugstore version of that. On a hunch, I said, ” Let’s pause this and just go into the actual Coop right next to it. We found toothbrushes in packs of two for 75 cents. Instead of spending $20 on toothbrushes, we spent $1.50.

That kind of crazy pricing seemed to be the case with everything in Zurich. A $60 taxi ride was a $20 Uber. It reminded me of the difference between making your own popcorn at home and getting it at the movies – or buying a case of beer at a liquor store vs. buying 24 beers at a baseball game. (Not that you’d buy 24 beers, but you get the idea.) I can’t recall seeing anything like that anywhere else.

Kids

In August they finished up their camps. The oldest (13) was in a 3 Musketeers production and did a cooking camp that he’s done nearly every year. My youngest (12) continued the sailing camp that he has done every year for the last 5 years or so now.

The travel had its own educational component to it.

That was enough for August to close out the summer.

Final Thoughts

The Earth keeps spinning faster and faster. Even my kids are noticing it. They said that the Alaska trip at the start of summer went by really slowly, but that the whole summer went by fast. During this discussion, my youngest son said, “Time is an illusion that helps things make sense.”

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