Every month, I write an article showing my passive income and life goal growth. Since this if the first article of the year, it’s my first change to state those goals while giving my progress for January.
January was a difficult month in the Lazy Man household. If you’ve caught the news over the last few weeks, there’s A LOT going on in the government. With my wife being a military pharmacist, there’s been drama almost every day.
With all that’s going on, I decided not to “nag” her for the totals from her bank and retirement accounts. In the past, I’ve been able to estimate her numbers using the general market growth. It’ll have to be good enough for this month.
Typically, this personal update would have a recap of all the awesome stuff our family did. This article is already huge, so we’ll skip it.
Setting Goals for 2025
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. I’ll explain what each one is in this article and give the results for January.
(Click it, and it 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.
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 do some other hourly work that isn’t passive income. That isn’t included here, of course.
In the past, I’ve written a whole monthly article on this passive income. I’m cutting out the fluff to give you the numbers. If this area seems off or confusing, perhaps the last full article will make more sense.
Dog, Blog, and Web Income
Because this is the first article of the year, I need to come up with a goal for the year’s earnings in this area. Dog sitting has been very steady over the last few years. The biggest variable is how much we travel we do. I can’t board dogs while I am away. Blog income has shrunk to almost nothing. I have a similar article to the one outlined for this year. Finally, I make a very little bit of 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.
All of these require some work, but a lot of it is fairly passive. I can work at another job from home while I am boarding a dog. I make a very little bit of money in my sleep from blogging and simply being available to do the website work. I consider income from these areas as half passive income.
My goal for the year is to make $25,000 in passive income. That’s $50,000 in real income from these sources. Last year, I made $28,368 in passive income. I’m reducing my goal to reflect the dying blogging business.
January’s Dog/blog/web Real Income: $3,268.40
January can be a slow month for dog boarding. People got all their travel out in December. Some are saving their vacation days for February school vacations. January just has the long weekend for Martin Luther King, Jr. This is very much on par with what I’d expect.
Rental Property Income
We have two rental properties. 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 $25,000 a year.
For the purpose of this report, I calculate their income using the following formula:
(Rents After Estimated Expenses) * (Equity Percentage Owned) = Income)
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 in Zillow. (Zillow is very accurate for our condos.)
The goal for the year is for this number to be $21,000. Last year, we finished with $19,006. This number usually doesn’t go up very fast. Typically, the only two ways it can increase substantially is if the rents/estimated change or if the market jumps and Zillow estimates our properties as worth more money.
In January, Zillow estimated our properties were worth a couple thousand more dollars. We paid off another thousand in mortgage principal. That meant that our EPO went from owning 82.00% of our properties to 82.23% of the properties. The rents after expenses are $2,218/month. Using the equation above, our income from this area would be $2,185.
Managing rental properties requires some work – a few days a year. For this reason, I only count 80% of this number as passive income.
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 into her TSP (government’s version of a 401k) account and give me the totals. I just assume we could invest the money into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV currently yields 3.7%
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.
Last year, we made an estimated $57,304 in dividends. I’m setting a goal for $63,000 this year. It’s trending towards $65,000, but I think the markets are expensive, and there could be a significant crash.
The markets have been doing very well. There have been a couple of short-term hiccups due to DeepSeek and tariffs, but those blips have faded away.
In December, we made an estimated $5,045 in dividends. In January, that jumped to $5,146. That’s some solid growth. I can’t do too much to control this area other than stick to my asset allocation. Time’s arrow marches forward.
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: $3,100.58 – Adjusted to $1,550.29
Rentals: $2,185 – Adjusted to $1,748.00
Dividends: $5,146 – Remains at $5,146
Dogs/Blogs Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line
Total Adjusted Passive Income: $8,444.29
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’m mostly focused on that red line. However, it hasn’t grown much in the last couple of years. That’s because I’ve done less dog boarding, and my blog income has gone down. Fortunately, real estate and stocks continue to appreciate to balance it out.
My wife continues to work as well. She has 26 years in the military and will be getting a pension that may double 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 grew 1.11% last month. We are just a little behind our all-time high set a couple of months ago.
Business and Other Money Goals
Personal Income ($80,000)
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.
This year, I’m going to aim for $75,000. I think earning income is generally going to head down for a while. That’s okay; our passive income is going up, so we’ll come out ahead.
In January, I made around $5,000, and I’m on a $60,000 pace. That’s not going to cut it for getting me to $75,000, but January is typically one of my worst months. It is early in February, but it is looking like I’ll gain ground on the quest for $75,000.
Complete Estate Planning
Last year, I made a huge effort to get an estate plan together. I got it about 95% done. In January, we sent the check to the lawyer to draw it up. This should be very easy to do this year.
Kid Wealth (Goal: 50,000 Page Views)
For the fourth year, I hope to get to 50,000 page views on Kid Wealth.
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. We’re on target to get to 50,000 page views towards the end of the year.
At some point, it would be great if it made some money. I’m not sure how to monetize it. Perhaps it is better if I don’t.
Professional Improvements
I feel like I need to seek out some new income opportunities. I should put some of my tech skills to use. They are too rusty for the general job market, but I might be able to use them for other projects.
One concrete goal would be to get a website showing off a portfolio of what I’ve done in the past.
I’ll be the first to admit that this goal is not well-defined at all.
Health
I’m putting such a huge emphasis on health these days that I wrote a separate article about it. My health goals for 2025 are here.
Weight and Body Fat (Goal: 164lbs / 19% BF)
For January, my average weight was 173.8lbs, and my body fat was 22.2%. My average for all of last year was 181.1 and 23.8%. I’m loving the progress. Semaglutide seems to be the miracle that counter-attacks the evils of the modern food and work environment.
Body and Brain Points (300 and 200 respectively)
I score myself from 1 (poor) to 5 (great) each week for diet and exercise. I then add them up for the month. I got 26 points for January, which puts me on pace for around 300 points. Most of the points came from diet. I wasn’t motivated to exercise because it was so cold.
I measure brain points on the same scale. They are based on doing the exercises that I gave you at the top of the Health section. For January, I averaged 15 brain points. I need to do a little more, or I will fall shy of 200.
Blood Pressure (Goal: 115/75)
I have a family history of high blood pressure. I had a little medical scare in the first couple of days of the year. I started taking my blood pressure and graphing it for my primary care physician. My blood pressure for the month averaged 138/92. My doctor saw the results and decided to put me on lisinopril 5mg.
I’ve also started to eat a banana a day. I asked ChatGPT for some tips on how the potassium in bananas may help. It’s low-lying fruit – LOL.
We’ll see how blood pressure goes in the next update.
Doctor Appointments
I had a teeth cleaning with the dentist at the end of January. The dentist shamed me for not flossing enough. (No matter how much health stuff you try to do, there is always more!) I told him that I didn’t know anyone who flosses at all, and he responded that he did. So, in case you didn’t know, dentists floss. Do you floss? Let me know in the comments.
It upset me and I couldn’t sleep, so I bought this water flosser (affiliate link) from Amazon at 2 AM. It was delivered at 6:15 AM. I was stunned. The water flosser is so much easier to use than regular floss and makes it much less of a chore. Let’s see how it goes.
I also had the aforementioned doctor’s appointment for my physical.
Longevity Research
I watched Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die on Netflix. He’s super crazy about longevity. It looks like every minute of every day is spent on it. I’ll look for whatever is easy and makes sense. I’m not going to go too crazy.
Also, I’m a few months older than Bryan Johnson, but I think I look a good deal younger. He’s got me beat in every other health category, though.
Hobbies
Boost AI Skills
Last year, I wrote that I wanted to become a very good prompt engineer. However, AI got so good that I didn’t feel it became a truly useful skill for me to learn. Instead, I decided to learn how to use different AI tools effectively. I have a ChatGPT Pro account and an Anthropic Claude Pro account. In hindsight, I don’t know if I needed to pay for both. I probably could just use ChatGPT. I also started to use Google Notebook LM, but I barely scratched the surface.
I want to explore creating AI human video avatars and other things like that. I’ll write more about this a little later this year.
I also want to explore coding using AI. It seems that’s the future, and it can help me refresh my rusty coding skills.
3D Printing
I had this on my list all last year as I have a 3D printer, but I haven’t been able to load the filament correctly. It feels like I should be able to carve out a half hour and move forward with this.
Journaling
I should be keeping a journal of some kind. Lazy Man and Money is my money journal. The goal is a journal for everything else.
Other ideas:
- Learn to fly a flight simulator
- Play a modern song on a ukulele
- Rubik’s Cube
Last year, I learned to solve the Rubik’s Cube and was able to do it in two minutes and 30 seconds. My 11-year-old can do it in 90 seconds because he learned a more efficient algorithm. There are even more advanced algorithms that can do it extremely quickly, which is how some speed cubers can do it in under 10 seconds. I’m a little interested in learning these to do it faster, but I might also decide that being able to solve it is good enough, so I will skip this one.
You may recognize the last two of these hobbies from my brain health goals for 2025.
Family
Declutter and Organize House
Every year, we aim to declutter and organize better than the year before. Stuff builds up over time. Much of it comes from stuff from the kids. Admittedly, more of it comes from me. I have difficulty getting rid of “good stuff with value” even if we don’t use it. It sounds easy enough to donate, but a lot of places near us won’t take it.
My kids’ old preschool teacher is now a professional organizer. We’ve hired her to help with some small areas, and so far, so good. She’s very good with the “good stuff with value” because she says that she has a group of organizations that will use it. I don’t think she’s lying, but even if she was, it would be a brilliant white lie.
Travel
My wife has to be “on call” every five months for deployment in case there’s any kind of disaster. This year, her months are March and August, the two months when the kids have school vacations and no summer camps that they like. We were going to plan some international travel, but now we’re grounded. We can still do some domestic travel because it is easy enough for my wife to deploy from vacation if necessary.
We are still trying to figure out where we are going, but so far I have:
- March – Orlando (but not Disney this year) and an Icon of the Seas cruise (a little risky with the deployment, but we have permission as of now.
- June – Annual trip to Block Island. It’s cheaper during shoulder season, and we can get there by short drive and ferry. I love to get away from technology for a little while.
- August – We’ve just started planning this, but it looks like we’re taking a road trip to Toronto and stopping at the sights along the way. None of us have ever been to Toronto, so it’s something new. We can stop by the Basketball Hall of Fame, the Baseball Hall of Fame, and Niagara Falls on the way. We can come back through Hershey, Pennsylvania, and American Dream in New Jersey, which are two of the kids’ favorite places. It’s still easy enough for my wife to deploy if necessary.
- December – Maybe we can go back Aruba. We skipped it in 2024. We’ve started to focus more on 2026 travel.
Kids
The kids continue to do their elite private school thing. It’s getting absurdly expensive, but my wife’s military discount gives us a big break.
Outside of that, the biggest things are summer camps and after-school activities.
After School Activities
They should have earned their black belts in karate by now. Unfortunately, their school has had some bad luck with management – just freak injuries and other complications. They’ve worked through a lot of it, and the final training starts this month.
The 12-year-old just achieved Tenderfoot rank in Scouts and is halfway to Second Class. The 11-year-old crosses over from Cub Scouts next month. It will be great having them back in the same group. It was hard to manage one kid in Cub Scouts and one kid in Scouts. We had to tell each of them that we were just going to do the bare minimum for a while.
The 12-year-old continues to be in any and every play. He just finished It’s a Wonderful Life for the school in December and has Alice in Wonderland coming up next month. Those were easy because they were with the school, and everyone got a part. However, he usually gets the best parts for his age. He auditioned for Hello Dolly in the local children’s theater, which is more competitive. He got a smaller role there, but it’s a good start.
The 12-year-old is swimming for a sport, and… he’s showing improvement. It’s better than it sounds, but there are kids who have been competitively swimming for years, and he’s mostly looking to meet the school’s sports requirements. My 11-year-old is playing basketball, but as a 5th grader, he doesn’t get in the games when other teams have a group of 8th graders. I hope the practices are going better.
I want to find some kind of art class for my 11-year-old. I feel like he needs to have his things, as his older brother has his plays.
We’ve done some Lego robotics for the last few years, but I’m not sure if we’re going to continue it. I can’t seem to get these kids interested in programming computers the way I was at their age. Actually, may I do a home class for my 11-year-old? He seems to enjoy stuff like that.
Summer Camps
With our June and August travel plans, we have about eight weeks of camps to plan.
Both kids are doing five weeks of the school’s theater camp. My 12-year-old is doing acting, and my 11-year-old is doing set design. In the past, they hadn’t gotten along well, so we had to separate them. Now, they can work together but choose to do things they are well-suited for.
The 11-year-old has a sailing camp that runs for two weeks. That leaves him with another week to figure out. My wife wants to send him to overnight Scout camp like his brother did last year. His brother got to go with his Troop last year, so he had some friends around. This year, the 11-year-old would have no one he knows because the Troop is going to the theater camp. If the Scout camp doesn’t work, there is likely to be an art camp or a cooking camp that we can do.
The 12-year-old has more flexibility as he doesn’t like sailing. He’s just old enough to take a cybersecurity camp, but it’s fairly competitive. It also typically doesn’t get announced until May, when the other good camps have long filled up. It’s a big gamble, but it feels like the only tech opportunity in the whole state of Rhode Island.
We’ll probably do at least one more cooking camp for the 12-year-old. I think he’s aged out of the animal shelter camp that we’ve sent him to for years. He gets more work with a variety of animals at our house.
Final Thoughts
It feels like we’ve either A) hit a good groove or B) are stuck in a rut. A lot of this stuff is very similar to the year before. Of course, that’s similar to the year before that.
I feel like the answer is actually: “C) a bit of both and neither.” It’s the second week of February, and the article is essentially my New Year’s Resolutions post. As you can tell, I often take on a few too many things and get a little behind. In making these goals, I didn’t spend a lot of time contemplating how I wanted the year to unfold.
It’s so much easier to just copy the template from last year and make small changes – evolutionary, not revolutionary. I’ve found that small changes over time add up to big things.
The other thing is that big changes sometimes find you throughout the year. You never know what opportunities are going to open up or what opportunities are going to go away.
