Passive Income and Pageviews – March 2014 Update

Passive Income and Pageviews - March 2014 - Marching Bird

Aggressively pursuing the dream of growing a stream of passive income to obtain financial freedom and independence is a joyous pursuit. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is how much I love tracking that growing stream of income! It feels like every month it grows in size and strength as compounding takes over and becomes a bigger part of that rolling snowball of financial goodness. With that, let’s dive right in and check out how my passive income looked in March!

Passive Income and Pageviews:
 
March
Year-to-Date
2014 Goal
Percentage of
Annual Goal
Lending Club
$83.72
$352.82
$1,950
18.09%
Prosper
$34.89
$66.18
$400
16.55%
Dividends
$124.37
$373.01
$1,650
22.61%
Total
$242.98
$792.01
$4,000
19.80%
Blog Pageviews
7,094
14,847
100,000
14.85%
Unique Visitors
2,392
4,699
20,000
23.50%

Blog Pageviews: After February was more than double the number of pageviews than January, I wasn’t sure what to expect with March. Fortunately, things continued to trend upwards with March, setting a new pageview record of 7,094 here at WYOR. My appreciation and thanks go to everyone who stopped by during the month, read my posts, commented, and to those who have linked my articles and shared my posts. My average daily pageviews for March was approximately 229 per day, an increase of 42 over February.

My secondary traffic goal for 2014 is to receive greater than 20,000 unique visitors. This stat must be looked at cumulatively, and for the year to date I’ve had 4,699 unique visitors.

Below is a snapshot of my March blog metrics from Google Analytics.

Passive Income and Pageviews - March 2014 Blog Pageviews

Lending Club: And I thought February was disappointing… March ended up being my toughest month to date since becoming fully invested in my Roth IRA Lending Club account almost a year ago. Just last month I touted my year-long streak of triple-digit net interest amounts, and that has come to an end just one month later with only $83.72 earned in March. Looking a bit further into the details, my taxable account had a phenomenal month, hitting $20.44, which is the highest it has been since I’ve tracked the account here on WYOR. Given the age of my Roth IRA, which contains the bulk of my Lending Club dollars, I am sure there will be further challenges ahead as my returns mature. This is entirely normal with peer to peer lending and completely expected given my risk tolerance.

As the end of March, my weighted average interest rates were 17.86% and 15.38% in my Roth IRA and taxable accounts, respectively, giving me the potential for high returns over the course of the next few years. Based on the notes I’ve been recently able to select, I would expect that those two averages continue to trend down as most of the notes I’ve been able to select are averaging in the 14-16% range.

For the month of March, my overall internal rate of return (IRR) was 7.48% across both accounts. Since inception, my IRR for both accounts are 11.60% and 10.79%, respectively. Lastly, since the start of 2013, my accounts have an IRR of 12.69% combined. Not bad for an alternative, passive income producing investment! Feel free to check out my detailed first quarter Lending Club update.

Important to understand, I calculate my monthly net interest amount to be interest received less any charge-offs, defaults, and services fees in the given period. If you haven’t yet, check out my full December and Year-End Lending Club update.

Prosper Marketplace: Unlike my Lending Club accounts, March was an exceptional month for my Prosper account after I experienced my first default account in January. After a record month in January, the dip in February, my Prosper account brought in $34.89 of net interest for the month. Ever increasing at this point, it is great to see that my account is now large enough to overcome a default and stay in the positive earnings category. One more reason staying diversified in any investment strategy is important.

At the end of the March, my average interest rate of the notes invested in is 20.37%. Since opening the account in May of 2013, my IRR has been 15.18% with the month of March alone returning 21.80%. It goes without saying, but a close to 22% return is not feasible, and I expect to be in the 13-14% return on an ongoing basis. Feel free to check out my detailed first quarter Prosper update.

Dividends: While March is typically the strongest month in a dividend growth portfolio, mine comes in second behind February. This is slowly changing as my portfolio mix changes over time, and I would expect March to ultimately be the largest month going forward. During March, I received dividend payments from eight of my holdings. Those holdings were Aflac (AFL), American Realty Capital Partners (ARCP), Digital Realty Trust (DLR), Lorillard (LO), McDonalds (MCD), Prospect Capital (PSEC), TAL International (TAL), and Target Corporation (TGT). My dividends received for the month totaled $124.37, an increase of $61.77 over the previous year and $8.27 over December’s total. The details can be found below:

  • AFL: $11.30, reinvested into 0.178 shares
  • ARCP: $14.91, reinvested into 1.011 shares
  • DLR: $25.64, reinvested into 0.478 shares
  • LO: $25.85, reinvested into 0.473 shares
  • MCD: $2.12
  • PSEC: $19.28, reinvested into 1.782 shares
  • TAL: $25.14, reinvested into 0.595 shares
  • TGT: $1.13

As with previous months, I am directly reinvesting all my dividends until my annual dividend income falls between $2-3,000 per year, allowing me to reinvest more selectively a few times per year. This of course is always subject to change. For the dividends in my Loyal3 Portfolio, they will be selectively reinvested and combined with additional contributions monthly.

After starting a no-cost dividend growth portfolio with Loyal3 in January, I’ve made $300 purchases each month and plan to continue this through the end of the year. This past month, my March contributions were invested in two positions, Coca-Cola (KO) and Unilever (UL).

When factoring in the dividend reinvestments mentioned above and my additional investments, my forward 12-month dividends increased to $1,455.71 from $1,438.31, an increase of $17.40! I’ve added the below chart to show the both the dividends I’ve received each month and the increases in forward 12-month dividends. I’ve changed the chart below to track the growth since the start of 2013, and will return to a rolling chart once I have two years of data.

Passive Income and Pageviews - March 2014 - Dividends Received and Foward 12-Month Dividends

Passive Income Summary:

I like to examine the cyclical nature of my passive income due to timing. Smoothing out the trends of income is important to me, so finding a good means of doing this was something I worked on before deciding to do a three-month moving average. This will allow me to see my growing passive income stream while helping to erase the swings in timing from dividends and the somewhat choppy nature of peer to peer lending. Of course, this won’t insulate me completely from swings, but should smooth things out nicely!

As with the dividend chart above, I am going back to showing this chart from the beginning of 2013. Once I get two years of data, I will then showing it on a rolling basis. The chart below shows both my three-month moving average and the individual income from each of the underlying investments:

Passive Income and Pageviews - Passive Income Since January 2013 - March 2014

I like to compare my “quarterly average” of passive income to reflect my growing stream of passive income. For March, this means comparing my three-month moving average to December’s three-month moving average. For March, I had a three-month moving average of $264.00, which is unfortunately a decrease in passive income by $11.97 over December’s $275.97. The primary reason for this decrease is my peer to peer lending accounts come down from an extremely productive fourth quarter in 2013. As my accounts mature, the income received is getting offset by late notes and defaults. Fortunately, this should smooth out over this course of the year and things should go back to increasing as the year goes on.

And with that, we’ve reached capped off another passive income update. Without a ton of time or energy my investments earned $242.98 of total passive income for me during the month of March!

Don’t hesitate to look around; you can find details on the various aspects of my passive income pieces under their respective pages, Lending Club, Prosper, and Dividend Growth. Additionally, you can find all of my monthly updates under the Passive Income Updates page, and all my monthly updates and incremental progress towards my 2014 goals on the Goals page.

Flickr: ramnaganat

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Comments

  1. Great work WYOR. It’s a shame your lending club income has dipped a little, but you’re on your ways to meeting your annual goals. By the way, I think it’s great you have a line item for each of your goals in these updates.
    -Bryan

  2. WYOR,
    Great looking month, and very detailed report as always. When I see your LC interest dip I feel like I am seeing my future. Not looking forward to that. I also like that you are reinvesting dividends until you get to a certain dollar amount in your holdings, that’s how I’m also building positions too. But I’m at the point I think I need to not reinvest all of my dividends for certain holdings and move them to my broker.
    -RBD

    • Haha I hope I am not your future, as I think you have a really solid filter! My 2014 investment criteria are much stricter and should reduce defaults over the long-haul, however it is just a matter of time for other criteria to be compensated for with additional loans and payment reinvestments.

      As for the dividends, later this year is when I will probably start transitioning away from directly reinvesting everything to being selective. I should be able to regularly commit fresh capital to my dividend growth portfolio, thus incorporating the cash already being generated by the portfolio.

      Appreciate you commenting and stopping by RBD!

  3. Nice going, W2R. Thats a high number of unique visitors for the amount of total pageviews you have. Always good to see numbers like these from other bloggers.

    Keep it up
    regards

    • Definitely feels good to have the readership increase, as it certainly makes blogging all that more rewarding. As for the unique visitors, that is a year-to-date number since I don’t want to double count someone for March and February per se.

      Appreciate your support R2R!

  4. Great job with almost $250 in passive income for the month! It’s good to see your pageviews/unique visitors increasing each month. I know it took mine forever to pick up steam but it’s really started to hum along quite nicely now. One question though, why are you comparing the 3 month rolling average for March to December? Shouldn’t it be to February since the rolling average should be smoothing out the passive income sources? Keep up the good work!

    • You’re absolutely right, and make a good point about comparing the three month moving averages on a quarter over quarter basis. However, the reason I do that is to provide a level of quarter over quarter growth, a common twist on the year over year growth that most dividend growth investors use. Although, going forward, I will certainly considering adding both to the mix.

      Thanks for the support and comment JC, definitely appreciated.

  5. W2R,

    Great job. $250 in passive income is no joke, and you’re right on target to hit your passive income for the year. Fantastic!

    And great job growing the blog as well. I hope it continues for you! :)

    Keep up the great work, my friend.

    Best wishes.

    • At this point I’m a little behind where I want to be, but hopefully things can really kick into a higher gear over the next couple of months as life sorts things out a bit and my cash flow/capital become available. As for the blog, I am thankful for the continued success and hope I am providing some level of inspiration or knowledge to those reading.

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting DM!

  6. Cool site. Looks like we have the same dream. Just a different approach to get there. I actually prefer your method of dividend investing better than my trading approach. I would sleep a lot easier at night than I currently do! :)

    • Thanks Ryan! Feel free to leave the trading behind and come over the dividend growth approach! :) Being able to sleep well at night is crucial when it comes to investing and growing a portfolio, of any kind, that will provide financial freedom.

      As for being and active trader, it seems you’ve mostly been dealing with an incredible bull market. How do you think you will fair if you were investing during the 2008-09 timeframe?

      Best of luck with the trading, and feel free to join those sleeping well at night with dividends!

      • Exactly. I have a whole array of economic data and leading indicators I track now. We will see if they give me enough of a window into the future once the next recession hits. Even with these, the other half of the battle is a mental one and making the right moves at the right time.

  7. Way to go – growing your passive income stream and getting one step closer to hit your passive income goal for the year, and also one step closer to FI!

    Also, good job growing your blog…Any advice for a new blogger on how to grow my blog. I’m averaging 20-30 views per day…It’s only been approx. 5 weeks though..

    • Thanks FFJ! I appreciate your support. As for growing your blog, just maintain a solid posting consistency of good content, interacting with other bloggers, and your reach will grow quite organically.

      Best of luck and thanks for stopping by!

  8. Wonderful progress you made in March, and I’m most stoked for the all time highs you are seeing on the blog in terms of pageviews. The hard work is paying off so keep at it! :)

  9. Great progress W2R! Its an inspiration for lot of other bloggers.

    Best wishes,
    Passive Income Mavericks.

  10. Great job W2R. Looks like you are making solid progress in all of your accounts and with the blog!

    That is awesome.

    I hadn’t thought about using a rolling three month average. I normally compare quarter to quarter, but that could still be skewed by the companies that pay fewer that 4 times a year.

    Thanks for the idea!

    • I love the rolling three-month average as it provides a completely different prospective for the size of your income stream, especially if it comes from different sources that fluctuate. If tracking just dividend income, it can still be a great tool to show the growth of your investment on a quarterly basis.

      Thanks for stopping by ILG!

  11. Good job on the passive income and continued popularity on your website. Thank you for your very informational posts on P2P lending. I’m really close to jumping in with a few hundred to get a feel for it.

    • Feel free to let me know if you have any questions, Richie. I would recommend you invest at least $2,500, if not right up front, but shortly thereafter, as that will help insure proper diversification in your account.

      Thanks for stopping by Richie!

  12. I like your site! It is organized and easy to follow. it is a motivation to keep going for someone just starting out. I hope to be hitting the $200/ month in passive income sometime in 2015. It is fun to see the numbers grow each month!

  13. My March is weak in terms of dividends. I happen to own stocks which pay in other months.
    Looks like you are doing great job. You should get 79.2% of your goal at the end of the year if nothing changes. But with some contributions and more compounding on the way you seem to be on track with your goal. let’s see what April results you have. Keep up your hard work.
    I already pulled all my LC cash out, even 500 bucks. I am now fully into options and dividend income.

  14. Nice job with those dividends and forward estimates. I notice you got some UL. I was looking into it as well but can’t figure out the difference between UL and UN. I know both are the same company but one based in UK and one based in the Netherlands. I know there is a difference between the two regarding taxes but need more info why one Unilever or the other. Just wondering how you made your choice.

    • Thanks DivHut! I am a fan of UL, and the reason UL was picked was for two reasons. One, UL is the only ticker of the two available on the Loyal3 platform with which I made this investment. Two, UL provides US citizens the ability to invest without tax being withheld on the dividends, while that is not the case for UN.

      Hope this answers your question!

  15. I have not seen any new posts. I hope all is well to you and your family.

  16. Hey! Great job! I like how you track your page views as well!

Trackbacks

  1. […] Passive Income and Pageviews – March 2014 Update Writing 2 Reality shared his progress on both the passive income front as well as traffic to his blog during March. It looks like he’s been making some tremendous progress on both sides of the coin, and at almost 20% of his passive income goal completed after one quarter, he’s in great shape to catch up near the end of the year and finish strong! […]

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