How is everyone’s summer going? It’s too quick for me. For example, this article covers July, which is Really, the first month of summer, but I’m writing it while stressing that the last week of summer is almost here. Personal Update July was a BUSY month for us – in a good way. We were […] The post My Passive Income and Life Goals Update (July 2025) appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

How is everyone’s summer going? It’s too quick for me. For example, this article covers July, which is
Really, the first month of summer, but I’m writing it while stressing that the last week of summer is almost here.

Personal Update

July was a BUSY month for us – in a good way. We were always doing something. That’s just what our tourist town of Newport, Rhode Island, is like in the summer.

Here are some of the highlights (with pictures scattered throughout the article):

• We saw a special show with Sam Waterston at the Rosecliff mansion. You might know him as Jack McCoy from Law and Order over a span of 30 years. He was there for the anniversary of The Great Gatsby, which was filmed there in 1975. He played Nick Carroway opposite of Robert Redford’s Jay Gatsby. Nowadays, you might know Rosecliff more for The Gilded Age on HBO. We paid extra to have dinner with him, which felt like a wedding. The Today Show covered the event.
• The next night, we saw Jay Leno do a comedy set for charity. He lives in Newport and sometimes does a surprise show. This time, I found out in advance and jumped on the chance to get tickets. I never really watched his show, but he was really funny. I was generally surprised because I thought he was just enjoying retirement with his classic cars and show.


[Jay Leno performing at local small brewery for charity. This probably isn’t the most flattering photo, but that’s what the organizers get when they say that we can’t take photos. I’m always going to take a photo because otherwise, I won’t remember it later.]

• A few nights later, we went to a clambake event to support a local land conservation charity. We knew the organizer and wanted to help make their event a success. We met some interesting people, but most just spend the summer here and go back to Florida or Colorado in the winter. I don’t know if we’ll do it again.
• The very next night, we went to The Breakers mansion to see Jessica Vosk perform a show. She sang a few songs and told some stories in front of about 200 people. She’s perhaps best known as playing Elphaba in the Broadway version of Wicked. She did not sign Defying Gravity, which seemed like a missed opportunity. She sang a lot of other great stuff that I actually knew. That’s significant because I don’t know show tunes. That’s my wife’s thing. The Breakers mansion would be worth $500 million today if it went on sale. The most expensive home ever sold in the US was less than half that.


[Jessica Vosk at the Breakers. Same deal as Leno with the “no photos”.]

• A couple of days later, I got up at 4 AM to head back to Rosecliff to watch “Sunrise Meditations.” It sells out every year, and my wife and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. My wife was too tired to get out of bed as she was doing all these events, PLUS some other ones that I wasn’t invited to. It turned out to be a harpist playing one song for an hour and 20 minutes. I had enough after about the first ten minutes. Maybe I need to work on my meditation skills.
• The next day, I ran a 5k that was part of a craft beer festival. This is my 3rd year doing it, and I’m 41 seconds slower every year. It’s the perfect storm of dehydration: running, alcohol, and mid-day summer sun. Quite a few people made necklaces of pretzels to go with their electrolyte drinks.
• Yes, the very next day was a charity to support the local animal rescue. At this point, I had enough of charity events, but with my dog boarding business and love for dogs, it’s a no-brainer. This one was at a mansion that is privately owned next to Marble House, so that was a unique experience. I also got to hold a bunch of small puppies, which is always fun.
• Several days later, my wife and I went to the first public viewing of the Kenny Loggins biography, Conviction of the Heart. He was there and did an interview before the movie. He said he hadn’t seen the movie yet and was nervous to see how another person might view his life. The filmmaker spent five years covering his 50-year music career. Wow, it was a lot.
• About a week later, we finished up the summer with a beach party to support a local wildlife sanctuary. No famous people or mansions were involved.

I had a whole summer bucket list planned. I was disappointed that I was making no progress on it, but now I see that I couldn’t plan on things like “dinner with Sam Waterston.” At least some of these things were on the list.

Let’s get to the rest of the month.

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, perhaps the last full article will make more sense.

Dog, Blog, and Web Income

Dog boarding income in July was my third-best month of all time. It was also my best month in three years. It was a perfect storm of everything falling into place, and us being at capacity almost the whole month. There was one weekend when I had to turn away at least a half-dozen dogs. That’s a lot because we only host a few dogs at a time.

[We watched the Kenny Loggins movie on the video screen. Here I caught the interview before the movie. I felt it was a better picture than zooming in on them from where I was sitting. Ironically, I had watch polo at Newport Polo on my bucket list and haven’t been able to do that yet. At least I got to the polo fields, right?]

Blog income continued to be terrible. At this point, it’s not coming back unless I sell a product or something like that.

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.

In July, I made $8,169.09 in income from these sources. Dog boarding is great in the summertime. In “June”, I only made $5,043.35 because summer hadn’t really gotten going, and we went on a few days of travel. One of the issues with dog boarding is that if I take one day off, it means I can’t host clients who are going on weeklong vacations. That’s good money since I don’t have to deal with vacancies, drop-offs, and pick-ups.

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 $30,000 a year after all expected expenses, including maintenance.

Five months ago, 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 have it on the market to be rented. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten any bites 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 July, Zillow estimated our properties were worth about $300 less than last month, barely a change. As usual, we paid off about one thousand dollars in mortgage principal. That meant that our EPO went from owning 83.47% of our properties to 83.54% of them.

This month, I’ve decided to make the assumption that we’re going to get close to the price we’re asking for rent. It makes more sense to use that number rather than the old number from before the renovation. The rents (with that assumption) after expenses are $3,048/month. Using the equation above, our income from this area would be $2,546. That’s up about $330 from last month. Usually, the number moves very slowly, about $5 or $10 a month. This time, it moved a lot more because we invested $40,000 in the renovation. That naturally means we’ll be able to rent it for more.

[This was the dinner with Sam Waterston. He’s receiving some gift from the Newport Historic Society in this picture.]

Managing rental properties requires some work. We did that recently for the first time in a few years. For this reason, I only count 80% of the $2,546 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. It’s a win if I can get my wife to log into her TSP (government’s version of a 401k) account and give me the totals. Instead of tracking dividends, I assume we could easily invest the money into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV currently yields 3.33%. The non-retirement brokerage account that we have pays about 2.7%, so I’m comfortable with the 2.5% estimate.

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.

The markets have continued to do well. I keep feeling like we are in a bubble. Everything is being driven by AI… and much of it from big tech companies spending on AI. I have been slowly selling off stock and buying bonds. When a correction comes, I should be ready to buy low again.

Last month, the dividend income number was $5,381. This month it is $5,428. That’s a very solid move of about $50.

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: $8,169 – Adjusted by 50% to $4,084
Rentals: $2,546 – Adjusted by 20% to $2,037
Dividends: $5,428 – Remains at $5,428

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

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $11,554

This is a huge increase from last month’s $9,677. The tremendous dog boarding numbers and the real estate assumption are making a huge difference.

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 (includes dog boarding) and mostly pure passive income (rentals and dividends).

My goal for this passive-ish income is to reach $109,000 for the year. It’s up to $64,841 and on pace for $111,155. In the last few months, we’ve caught up some ground. Things will start to slow down with the dog boarding after the summer, so this may still be a challenge.

[Once again we weren’t supposed to take pictures of the harpist. Seriously? It’s a picturesque sunrise! Well it could have been if they had positioned the event on the grass below, where we could see the sunrise. Instead it was obscured by the trees on the left. Hey, but I’m just a guy who blogs on the internet. What do I know?]

My wife continues to work as well. A couple of months ago, it looked like she’d choose to retire with the craziness of Musk. Now that he’s gone, things have gone a little more smoothly.

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 we’re keeping track of it precisely.

I can’t think of anywhere else to put this information, but our net worth went up a tiny bit. It was up just 0.16% last month. That’s better than losing money. For the year, it is up 6.80%. That’s not bad, all things considered.

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 July, I made $47,711. I’m on pace to pass it by $350. I didn’t expect my prediction to be nearly this accurate.

Complete Estate Planning

I got the estate planning documents from the lawyer back a few months ago. 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 July, Kid Wealth had 45,530 lifetime views. It’s getting around 1,000 views a month now that it’s summer. I might reach the 50,000 page view goal this year.

I could really use a partner or some motivation to make it into a business. I simply don’t believe the money is in blogging anymore. I still believe in the value of the written word, but I think it 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.

Please reach out if you have any ideas.

Professional Improvements

To start the year, the goal was to create a website showing off a portfolio of websites I can make. However, I got an idea to make a productivity application and I’m starting to learn a lot of new things.

I’ll have more to say about the productivity app later in this article.

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 July, my average weight was 170.7 pounds, which was a loss of 0.3 lbs from last month. My body fat was 22.1% which was a gain of 0.1%. It’s hard to be more consistent than that. These are averages over a whole month using my Fitbit Aria scale.

This is my lowest weight since April of 2016. It’s about 25lbs off from when I decided that I really needed to make changes. In 2023, my average for the year was 189. (It’s 173 for this year.) 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 isn’t too bad.

I’m not sure I’ll reach either goal this year, but I’m close enough that I don’t feel too bad about it.

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.

[The running group my wife is in adopted me for the 5k event. We won an award and they passed around a boot of beer. It’s a good thing that alcohol kills germs, right?]

At the end of July, I had 161 body points. It’s a pace of 276 for the year. I didn’t think I had a chance here, but maybe I do.

I measure brain points on the same scale. They are based on doing things like the daily Wordle and New York Times Connections. I also do Duolingo, but I’ve been taking the easy way out and doing math instead of Japanese.

At the end of July, I have 93 brain points. That’s a pace for only 159 points for the year. It’s a big improvement over the start of the year. My new productivity system has helped me put time aside for this, and it’s paying off.

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 also had one at the end of the month. Fortunately, my wife is a pharmacist, and she’s coming to my doctor appointments now. It might be orthostatic hypotension, and I’m reading that it can low blood sugar could be a cause. That might make sense with the semaglutide that I’m taking.

My blood pressure in January averaged 138/92, which is high. I’m taking lisinopril 10mg, which costs around $3 for a 90-day supply. Such a bargain!

Last month, I bought this Omron Blood Pressure Monitor on Amazon on a Prime Day deal. That’s an affiliate link, so I might make a couple of extra dollars if you click on it and buy it. I’m impressed as it creates great averages and graphs. I can have it email me a report so I can print it out and give it to my doctor. Because a lot of doctors use Omron products, I suspect she’ll be able to read it well. It’s fairly straightforward, though.

In July, my blood pressure averaged 127/79. That’s a little elevated, but not too bad.

However, I had another medical scare. I go to an annual event where everyone runs a 5k followed by a beer tasting of local drafts. This is all done around noon, which is always a hot summer day. It’s a perfect storm for dehydration, but everyone knows that going in. So there are lots of electrolytes and salt. On the drive home, my leg started to go numb, and my wife had to take over the last mile of driving. I got upstairs and took my blood pressure – 82 over 55. That’s extremely low. I took a nap and was back to normal when I woke up.

I was going to ask my doctor about it at our appointment a few days later, but she cancelled the appointment. She went on medical leave herself. We rescheduled for mid-August.

Doctor Appointments

None, see last sentence above.

Longevity Research

Another month and I have made no progress in getting a DexaFit scan scheduled. The dog boarding schedule made it too difficult. The appointment takes half a day, and I have dogs checking in and out a lot. So overall, I did nothing.

Hobbies

I haven’t been doing well in developing hobbies over the last few years. I say that I want to get into flying drones or something else, but I never seem to have the time. With my new productivity system in place, I think I’m making better progress in this. Let’s find out:

Boost AI Skills

With my last two articles about artificial intelligence, I have certainly done a lot in this area. I practiced making music with Suno.

I used it a lot more to find a productivity app that works like my spreadsheet. Except that nothing like it exists, so I used it to create a set of features and a bunch of specs, logos, plans, etc.

One day, I had an idea that I thought could be a good book. In about five minutes, I felt like I had almost everything in place. I’ll probably not go too far forward with it because no one needs more AI slop, but I was really impressed. I showed it to my wife, who doesn’t use AI at all, and she was impressed and thought it might really be a good book. So who knows? For now, I don’t have time for that.

[This is the sunset from the Navy Base before the fireworks on July 4th. I feel like I have to include one of these Navy Base sunset pictures in every year.]

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. Yet, here we are, and it’s still on the list…. month after month.

I tried to assign it to my kids, who are good with YouTube, but they failed me.

Journaling

I like the idea of journaling, but I don’t think I’ll get to it.

Here are some other ideas of things I want to work on this year:

• Learn to fly a flight simulator
• Play a modern song on a ukulele
• Rubik’s Cube – I can solve it, but I am thinking about learning an advanced algorithm to do it faster. Update: This is unlikely to happen

You may recognize the last two of these hobbies from my brain health goals for 2025.

I didn’t do much on any of the above. I picked up a Rubik’s Cube and realized that I forgot some of the algorithms, so I guess it’s not the kind of thing that I can just put away for a couple of months.

I signed up for Masterclass, which I think can teach the ukulele, but I haven’t moved forward on that either.

With everything that I did for AI, I’m going to count this as a big step forward. It wasn’t just AI, but also the projects.

Family

Declutter and Organize House (65% done)

In July, I did a good job of decluttering my clothes. It’s a good step forward.

Travel

In July, we didn’t travel. It was great for dog boarding!

Upcoming trips:

August – We’re taking a road trip to Toronto and stopping at the sights along the way. None of us has ever been to Toronto, so it’s something new. We are planning to stop by the New York State Fair and Niagara Falls on the way. We’ll come back through Hershey, Pennsylvania, which is one of our favorite places.

We’re looking at adding another couple of trips this year. There’s one in November to Puerto Rico. My wife has a pharmacist thing there, and it’s a good opportunity to visit a place we haven’t been in a few years. The kids’ school transitioned from teaching French to Spanish, so this is a chance for them to show off what they’ve learned.

In December, we’re looking at taking a long weekend and going up to Stowe, Vermont, to go skiing. I went skiing a couple of years ago for the second time in my life and first time in over ten years, and it went well after a lesson. We’ll see if I remember anything. I’d like to go dog sledding while we are there.

[Same July 4th sunset, but this picture is taken a little later. I couldn’t decide which picture one better. What do you think?]

Kids

July was mostly about the summer camps for the kids. They did some stuff like karate that they do year-round. We did some things on the weekend as well, but nothing stood out to me.

Summer Camps

The kids finished up their theater camps in July. The 12-year-old acts, and the 11-year-old does the stage crew. In July, they created their own original musical at the camp, and I’m always entertained. After that, they switched to Shakespeare learning and performing As You Like It. They kept the same roles as they did in the musical – acting and stage crew. My kids are supposed to read two books over the summer of their choice, and I’m thinking that counts for one, right?

After that, my older son did a Cybersecurity Camp. It was free and run at a local community college. I found out on the last day of camp that it’s part of a nationwide program with the Air and Space Force. It typically costs $1200 to go to this camp from the website. It goes all the way to high school, and my son (youngest at the camp) partnered with a smart 10th grader and won the competition. They scored 8th best in the country. I think it’s out of about 60 teams, but I’ll take it.

My other son took an art class and made so much stuff in one week. I felt like I should have rented a U-Haul to bring it all back. I’ll try to get him into the Cybersecurity Camp next year when he becomes eligible.

Final Thoughts

July was just jam-packed. It felt like we were busy, but I thought it was just with the dogs. I knew we had a few evening events, but I thought it was about 3. It wasn’t until I scrolled through my pictures that I realized it was more than twice that.

I realize that some of the celebrities are D-list and no longer in their prime. Nonetheless, it’s very cool when they come to our small island of 60,000 people and put on a show for a couple of hundred. It’s nice not to have to go to a big city with a million people. It’s better to see them in a picturesque mansion or by the beach.

The post My Passive Income and Life Goals Update (July 2025) appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

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