Wow, 2025 wrapped up a long time ago. I’m late in getting this out. This can be a confusing article for me to write because it also has December’s monthly totals. I’ll do my best to make it clear.
Personal Update
The holidays always go quickly with so much going on. This past December, we:
- Went to the local boutique movie theater twice. We saw The Sound of Music and The Muppet’s Christmas Carol – two of my wife’s favorites. We had just stayed at the Von Trapp Lodge in Vermont at the end of November, so it was a priority to introduce the kids to The Sound of Music. The big cinema in town shut down a few years ago, so support this small one as much as we can.
- My wife took the kids skiing for a couple of days. I had dogs to watch at the house. They had a lot of fun, though.
- My oldest son was a big character in the school’s production of The Grinch. Their rotation is set to do a Christmas Carol next year, so he’s got his eye set on Scrooge. My youngest is in stagecraft and they were working on the Grinch set since September.
(My kids’ are Kings of the Hill with these sleds. They are each $178 now on Amazon, but we got them for $100 last year.)
We went to a bunch of other stuff, but that’s enough for now. Let’s get onto the goals and financials:
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 so far.
(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
For years, I had three side hustles with a passive component: a dog-sitting business, this blog, and the last full article will help it make more sense.
Dog and Web Income
In December, we had a full month of dog bookings, a change from all the travel we did in November.
(My wife got Christmas presents for the dogs we are boarding)
For completeness, the blogging income was minimal once again. It didn’t even pay for the cost of hosting.
In December, I had income of $4,938.13 from these sources. That was a good deal better than November’s $1,956.19. For the full year, this added up to $55,003.05. Last year, it all added up to $55,918.63, so it went down about $900. That’s remarkably consistent for self-employment income.
Rental Property Income
We have two rental properties. Perhaps we should only have one? We still have mortgages on them, so when they are fully rented, we make 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.
Way back in March, 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 then put it on the market for rent. It has sat unrented for many months now. We lowered the price by 20%, and that didn’t help. We thought it would be best to start in December, but they needed three parking spots, and the condo association couldn’t help make it work. They backed out at the signing, and we are back to square one. We had another agreement to rent it mid-December, but they also backed out and went for another place. Neither of them seemed like they would be good tenants, but we were willing to compromise because it’s been vacant for so long.
We’ve had a couple more “almost rents” in the last couple of weeks, but nothing has been fruitful yet.
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 December, Zillow estimated our properties were worth about $4,000 less than the month before. As usual, we paid off about one thousand dollars in mortgage principal. That meant that our EPO went from owning 83.97% of our properties to 83.99% of them. That’s the downside of the properties losing value.
A few months ago, I decided to make the terrible assumption that we’re going to get close to the price we’re asking for rent. I had to adjust that as we have lowered the asking price. The rents (with that assumption) after expenses are $2,823/month. Using the equation above, our income from this area would be $2,371. That’s $1 more than last month – not worth the time it took to type this. We’ll probably do better when it’s summer, and the demand is through the roof.
For the year, this number was $27,499, which was better than last year’s $23,760. That would pay a good number of bills in retirement.
Managing rental properties requires some work. With the recent renovation, we’re doing more than we have in a few years. For this reason, I only count 80% of this as passive income.
Dividend Income
My wife has been maxing out her retirement accounts for a couple of decades. I haven’t done quite as well, but I still have over 30 years of Roth IRAs and a lot of years of 401(k) investments. The markets have done very well over that time. That leads to a sizeable nest egg.
I don’t track exact dividends from all the accounts. (It’s a win if I can get my wife to log into her TSP account and give me the totals.) Instead, I assume we could easily invest the money in the accounts into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV currently yields 3.30%. I DO track dividends in our main brokerage account that isn’t a retirement account. We average about 2.5% 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.
(My kids trapped themselves trying to move this gigantic Lovesac. To hide my son’s face, I used Google’s Magic Eraser and it removed his head. Somehow that makes me laugh even more!)
The stock market gained a tiny bit in December. The stock market value is very high now, so I am surprised by any gain. Last month, the dividend income number was $5,803. This month it is $5,838 – a gain of $30.
For the year, dividend income would be $64,278. That would cover all of our necessary expenses if you don’t count the kids’ private school. Also, those expenses would largely be a mortgage that will be paid in full in the next 18 months or so. Last year, dividend income was $57,304.00, so that $7,000 growth would more than fight inflation. If only we could count on the stock market doing what it did last year.
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: $4,938.13 – Adjusted by 50% to $2,469.07
Rentals: $2,371 – Adjusted by 20% to $1,897
Dividends: $5,803 – Remains at $5,838
Dogs/Blogs Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line
Total Adjusted Passive Income: $10,203.87
Last month it was $8677.10. I went on vacation then and didn’t do much dog boarding. If I only count the stocks and real estate, it would be $7,735, which is a record for me.
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.)
My goal for this passive-ish income was to reach $109,000 for the year. I got to $114,399, so that’s a big win. I can’t take too much credit, though; it’s the market doing its thing. If I gave up the dog boarding and just used real estate and dividends, it would be $91,777 for the year. That would be pretty good to retire on, I think.
My wife continues to work as well. However, as a pharmacist working with public health, she has problems supporting RFK Jr.’s disinformation campaign. She set a retirement date about a year away. She’ll have 27 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 0.26% last month. For the whole year, it was up 11.53%. That’s a great gain considering that our real estate didn’t do too much – except be a money pit.
Business and Other Money Goals
Personal Income (Goal: $75,000. Actual: $80,593)
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 aimed to make $75,000. With the very good dog boarding month in December, I made $80,593. Woo-hoo! Goal achieved. Since this is just a little less than last year’s, it looks like I should set a goal of around $80,000 going forward.
I had counted on blogging to go to essentially zero, but I hadn’t counted on growing the dog boarding. I also picked up some other side-work.
Complete Estate Planning
I got the estate planning documents from the lawyer back near the start of the year. 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 in the first year, and I’d get most of them in one day. That hasn’t happened.
It’s taken all those years to get to 50,000 lifetime views. It’s at 50,562 to be exact. Um, yay, I reached this goal. Since blogging is mostly dead now, this is like crossing the finish line when the crowd has already gone home.
I’m still looking for 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 the brand needs to be something else. My interest has moved on to other projects for now.
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 it probably wouldn’t sell for anything much. It was never about making money, so selling it at a loss isn’t worth it to me.
Professional Improvements
I really didn’t do any real professional work. I did quite a bit with AI, but nothing that is probably going to move the needle long-term. For the year, I feel like I did a good amount of professional development. I’d like to see it translate into paying gigs.
(These lights were 50% off at Home Depot last year. I went near Christmas when there was a sale this year, to look for a Santa. I didn’t find one, but I did find two dogs, perfect for our dog business.)
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 Actual: 172.1lbs/22.5% BF)
My average weight in December was 172.9 pounds. It was largely skewed from the Thanksgiving weight at the beginning of the month. The month that I weighed the most was April at 175lbs. The month