Several days ago my second son turned one year old. What a cool event in my life! Also several days ago, this blog turned one year old! Also very cool!


Passive Income Dude was launched on 01 July 2016, and it is great to have one year now fully completed in the books!  Since the start of this blog, a lot has happened in my own life and in my passive income journey, and since I sometimes share details about my own life in addition to my investments, etc., I thought it would be interesting to share a relatively comprehensive list of highlights that have happened since this blog was first created one year ago.  I’ll stick to only the most important things from three categories: my Passive Income, my Investments, and my Personal Life.  Here we go!

Passive Income

1) Since the site’s launch on 01 July 2016, I have earned $8,971 in passive income (from July through the end of June of this year), equating to a monthly average of roughly $748 each month.  Awesome! But, one thing I like to do in addition to knowing my monthly average is to look at this figure in a ‘per day’ average by simply taking my annual total of $8,971 and dividing by 365.  Doing this equates to $24.58 per day of completely passive income, each and every day, of the entire year.

Sometimes I am amazed at that number.  Can you imagine someone handing you $25 cash EVERY day for the rest of your life and not having to do anything for it?  To me, this exercise illustrates the very real power of money working for you, not the other way around.

2) Growth. Since the site’s launch, my passive income has an average growth rate of 32%. This excites me the most I think.  Getting over 20% annual growth suggests that the power of exponential compounding and massive wealth possibility really opens up.  Take this easy math example:  e^5 = 148. Okay. Not that big, but decent.  e^(10)?  Well e^(10) = 22,026.  Not bad, I suppose, and clearly much bigger than the first example.  But e^(20) = 485,165,195.  A HUGE difference.  485 million vs only 22,000. I mean, what an astronomical difference between e^10 and e^20!  This is the power of exponential growth above around 18%.

And what about 32%, the growth I had in YR 1 (which, in year one is much easier to do than in year 10 or something, I get it!).  Now e^(32) = just incredibly huge. I think like 13 zeros huge, where e^20 is only 8 zeros.  Anyway, my bottom line point in going through this exercise is that you and I have to maintain super high levels of growth each year somehow!  Over 20% growth at least.  20% is the clear long term goal.  The reasoning is clear in the math above.

3) My highest recorded one month total thus far for Passive Income Dude was in December 2016, with a one month total of $2,658. That month’s per-day average was over $85!  My goal this year is for December to be over $3,000. We’ll see.  Also interesting, however, since the site’s launch I have only had 2 months of 4-digit passive income ($1k or more): December, as mentioned above, and this last June, where I barely squeaked in at $1,058.  My point I suppose, is that it doesn’t take massive months each and every month, to have large totals overall.

That’s it for this section. My primary takeaway is simply this: stick to your plan, have patience, and be persistent. Now I know that that advice does not sound incredibly enlightening, but how often is this simple advice not put into practice consistently over time?  And that is what I have done (for YEARS now) to slowly, but steadily, achieve the results I mention above.

Personal Life

1) Graduated from Duke Business School. I have always wanted an MBA and my two years at Duke (…the 3rd ranked MBA in the country, if I can brag about my school for a second) were filled with amazing experiences. Incredible instructors, great family time, and very smart peers. Overall I learned a lot and am very thankful for this two-year break from the Army!

2) Celebrations – This past 365 days also had some awesome celebrations! My first son celebrated his 2nd birthday; my second son celebrated his first birthday; and in addition to that, my wife and I celebrated our 6 year anniversary!  Remember, life is lived in the moments and as such I believe celebrations are important!

3) Moving – we moved again, this time from NC to NY (our 4th move in 6 years of marriage….anyone see why I have a natural bend towards real estate?). Moving is always a challenging, and adding two toddlers to the mix only increases the complexity! Glad to have this done for awhile, but I know in just three short years we’ll be doing it all over again. Yes, we will be moving again in 3 years! Not sure where we’ll be next; what an adventure.

Investments

Now to the highlights of my investments…mostly just the big moves, since this is a one-year recap.

1) NC Rental Active – my North Carolina property finally went active.  It is fun, but also requires some serious patience, to live in your investment for two whole years, waiting, and waiting for it to finally start paying off.  Anyway, I’m excited to share the results and details of this purchase on a monthly basis from now on, and you can see more about this particular property with all of the details listed here.

2) 2nd NC Rental Property Purchased, and Active – It was crazy when this opportunity arose, literally out of nowhere.  I wrote about it in depth here, and I now that we have officially closed on this property, I have a page dedicated to sharing all of the details, like the tabs from all of my other properties, here.  In sum, this was an incredible “chance-event” that I thankfully (at least up to this point!) think will be a great investment that I was able to take advantage of.

3) Asset Allocation On track – I’ve continued my strategy that I will only invest in equities, bonds, and real estate. Within equities and bonds, I have around a 90/10 split, which I am comfortable with. I also continue to have around a 75/25 split between mutual funds and individual stocks.  I talk about the reasoning behind my portfolio here, but I don’t think I’ll go higher than that with individual securities.  As for my split between stocks/bonds and real estate, I think I am now significantly overweight on real estate. In fact, I’m levered around $1 million in real estate now, and so I probably need to start de-leveraging and adding all new capital to stocks/bonds for awhile.

Well I think that’s it!  In the past 12 months, I’ve published 68 posts! I’m very proud of that fact! 🙂 I wish I could publish more frequently, but the payoff to be honest is essentially zero, so I selfishly (but rightly, I think) need to focus elsewhere most of the time for now.

Finally, in this 1st year I also received 15 likes on Facebook.  Please take the time to like my page -you can do so easily right at the top-right of this post) and I would really appreciate it!

Thanks as always for reading! I greatly appreciate all of you for stopping by and for your support! Seeing comments and following your sites and getting to know you better is one of my favorite parts of having a blog.

Dan