A view from the harbor cruise. I was having too much fun to take a better picture.
With September in the books, we are now 3/4s done with the year. Realistically, this next month is the last chance to get the goals set at the beginning of the year done. We’re already through a good part of October. November is cut short by planning and doing Thanksgiving. December is going to be all about the holidays.
We’ll be onto 2026 before you know it.
Personal Update
The kids have finished up their first month of school and are mostly settling into a good rhythm. Our oldest kid turned 13, so we officially are parents of a teenager. However, he’s been acting like a teenager since he was 7, so he’s more like a young adult now.
Here are some of the things we did during the month:
- A Harbor Cruise – My small business networking group went on a harbor cruise. It was excellent. Our family should get out on the water more often.
- CatVideoFest 2025 – Why watch videos of cats doing something stupid on YouTube, when you can do it in a movie theater to support local animal shelters? We do this every year, and it’s such a ridiculous tradition, which is what makes it so wonderful.
- A Day at the Beach – We live only five minutes away from the beach, and the local hospital had a fundraiser there. Supporting our community and hospital is a win-win. Here, my son is knocking down some milk bottles.
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 September usually seems to stay equal with June and August, and a good deal behind July. The summer months are already peak seasons, but we take a week (or more) off to go on vacation during June and August. July is peak season, and we usually don’t travel. September is the shoulder season, and business starts to slow a bit, but we are around all month.
My dog (grey) and another dog in a play battle. Looks like a fight to the death, but it’s quite friendly.
Blog income continued to be terrible. My website hosting contract is up, and I’m going to have to look for a new company. If I renew at their new price, I probably wouldn’t even make $5 a month.
Finally, I make some 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. I’m able to do a little more by experimenting with AI. It falls under the hobby and professional development sections, though.
In September, I made $5,291.55 in income from these sources. In August, I made almost exactly the same $5,168.01. Our current October bookings are within $50 of last year’s, so this number should go up.
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.
About two billion months ago (actually 7), 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 put it on the market to be rented. Everything is the same as last month, when I wrote: “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 September, Zillow estimated our properties were worth about $7,000 less than the month before. That’s the second month in a row of a 7k loss. As usual, we paid off about one thousand dollars in mortgage principal. That meant that our EPO went from owning 83.51% of our properties to 83.48% of them. That’s the smallest sliver of a drop, but it’s not great seeing two weeks in a row.
A couple of 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’m going to keep going with this number because it’s too difficult to create a new system. 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 exactly the same as last month.
Managing rental properties requires some work. We did a little of that recently for the first time 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 good deal of 401 (k) investments. The markets have done very well over the last 30 years. 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 (government’s version of a 401k) 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 3.41%. 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.
These stock markets are banana pants crazy. I recently argued that the stock market is in the biggest bubble in 50 years. I keep on getting more and more conservative with my asset allocation. The new highs just keep on coming.
Last month, the dividend income number was $5,550. This month it is $5,717. That’s an amazing move of $167. If you think about it, an extra $167 a month can cover a decent-sized bill.
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: $5,291 – Adjusted by 50% to $2,645
Rentals: $2,343 – Adjusted by 20% to $1,874
Dividends: $5,717 – Remains at $5,717
Dogs/Blogs Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line
Total Adjusted Passive Income: $10,237
Last month it was $10,008. The big difference was the stock market.
It’s our third straight month (and fifth ever) in 5 digits. I’m expecting that to fall off as dog boarding goes into the offseason and/or a market correction happens.
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 at an all-time high of $7,591.40. If I end the dog boarding gig, that money could sustain us for quite a bit.
My goal for this passive-ish income is to reach $109,000 for the year. It’s up to $85,085 and on pace for $113,447. It looks like we’ll exceed this goal – I didn’t expect the market to continue to grow as well as it has.
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’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 2.04% last month. That’s a huge month. For the year, it is up 10.49%. That’s so much better than I expected. Our liquid cash went down about 2%. We don’t keep a lot of liquid cash, so this isn’t a big deal.
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 September, I made $62,566. I’m on pace to make $83,421. Things are going great, but we have some travel coming up in November, so this may still be close.
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 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 September, Kid Wealth had 47,588 lifetime views. It’s going to be close to 50,000 page views by the end of the year.
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 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
A few months ago, I got really excited to create a new application, but I haven’t done anything with it in a month or two.
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 September, my average weight was 170.7 pounds, which is half a pound more than last month. My body fat was 22.7% which was about the same. 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 170.
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 exactly 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 September, I had 217 b