Passive Income and Pageviews – August 2014 Update

Passive Income and Pageviews - August 2014 - Ocean Waves

Ride the wave of passive income…

Who doesn’t love passive income? I mean, really? “Hey buddy, do you want a perpetual money making machine working for you while you sleep?” “Nah, seems foolish,” said nobody ever.

As I develop my own streams of passive income, I am continually looking for new and different ways to diversify this income. Part of this means expanding existing holdings through purchases, affecting the relative weights of investments in my portfolio, and in other ways this means adding new positions or entirely different forms of income. Some folks keep track of credit card rewards, savings account interest income, and random side hustles (but are those really passive) that might kick out some income. While I haven’t jumped into any other passive income sources just yet, I do experience utilize the first two mentioned, I just don’t track them actively on the blog. Perhaps something to consider for 2015…

In any case, let’s dive right in to what I do track, my passive income from Lending Club, Prosper, and dividends.

August Passive Income and Pageviews:
 
August
Year-to-Date
2014 Goal
Percentage of
Annual Goal
Lending Club
$140.55
$972.54
$1,950
49.87%
Prosper
$39.75
$206.30
$400
51.58%
Dividends
$114.93
$929.62
$1,650
56.34%
Total
$295.23
$2,108.46
$4,000
52.71%
Blog Pageviews
3,520
35,633
100,000
35.63%
Unique Visitors
1,370
11,935
20,000
59.68%

Blog Pageviews: My blog saw a very slight uptick in pageviews as I return to posting, albeit somewhat irregularly. Given my return to posting several times per month, I should see this number begin to increase again in the near future. A very short-term goal would be to hit 5,000 pageviews in September. Going to be a stretch given my overall slower posting schedule now, but why not reach for the stars?

My secondary goal was to hit 20,000 unique visitors, users now as Google calls them, for the year. Thus far, I’ve hit 11,935 for the year to date, measured only in total for the year-to-date, given that some pretty spectacular folks like to read more than one month of the year! A snapshot of my August Google Analytics dashboard is below:

Passive Income and Pageviews - August 2014 - Google Analytics Blog Pageviews

Lending Club/Prosper: Combining my two peer to peer lending accounts for simplicity and brevity, August was another really strong month, pulling in my second highest combined total of the year at $180.30. While I am still nowhere near where I wanted to be when I set my annual goals, I understand this is mostly a result of two things: 1) my lack of additional capital invested for the year, and 2) overzealous goals not taking my maturing accounts into consideration. Even with that being said, I am still earning a return in the double figures for all my accounts.

Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled with the progress my peer to peer lending accounts have made, and am anticipating hitting just shy of $2,000 of total net interest between the two for all of 2014. My plan is to continue to add some capital to these accounts, hopefully another $1-2,000 or so before the end of the year, which should set me up to exceed the $2,000 mark in 2015.

Dividends: My dividend growth investments are continuing to blossom nicely as I’ve been able to consistently invest each month with Loyal3 while the bulk of my cash has been tied up with other investments, life expense, etc. Going forward, I am anticipating that in addition to my $500 monthly investment in Loyal3, I will be able to make at least one purchase a month in my traditional account as well. While it is extremely unlikely I will hit my goal of receiving $1,650 of dividends in 2014, I will come fairly close, and will absolutely blow last year’s $1,005.94 out of the water.

Speaking of my dividends, in August I received dividends from four different holdings of mine. Those positions were American Capital Realty (ARCP), Kinder Morgan (KMI), Omega Healthcare Investors (OHI), and Prospect Capital (PSEC).

  • ARCP: $15.39, reinvested into 1.177 shares
  • KMI: $54.16, reinvested into 1.336 shares
  • OHI: $25.05, reinvested into 0.663 shares
  • PSEC: $20.33, reinvested into 1.862 shares

As with previous months, I am directly reinvesting all my dividends until my annual dividend income falls between $2-3,000 per year in a particular account, 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 as earned or combined with additional contributions monthly. You can read about the dividend reinvestment options with Loyal3 in my Snowball City – Loyal3 Dividends post.

In addition to the dividends being reinvested above, I also made $700 worth of purchases in my Loyal3 account. The details of those purchases can be found here: Trades – August No-Cost Dividend Growth Portfolio Purchases

When factoring in my dividend reinvestments, any dividend increases, and the stock purchases during the past month, my forward 12-month dividends increased to $1,548.04. This represents an increase of $31.50 from July’s mark, and an increase of $360.74 from a year ago. The below chart reflects my dividends received, as well as my forward 12-month dividends since the beginning of 2013, when I started tracking things on the blog. Up and to the right, the best chart in the world for anyone focused on growing their passive income streams.

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

Passive Income Summary

During August, I received a total of $295.23 of passive income, well diversified across my two investment types, dividends and peer to peer lending. Overall, my year-to-date passive income earned is $2,108.46, which is just $535.02 away from exceeding last year’s total. Given how little I’ve been able to invest in these accounts this year I am thrilled that I should pass 2013’s passive income total sometime in early October. You can find below my updated passive income chart showing my overall passive income for the last 20 months, since January 2013.

Passive Income and Pageviews - August 2014 - Passive Income since January 2013

Well that does it, August is in the books and the passive income machine continues to chug along!

Don’t hesitate to look around; you can find details on the various aspects of my passive income pieces under their respective pages, Lending ClubProsper, 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: Sunova Surfboards

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Comments

  1. Man you’ve even got Forward 12 month dividends and Trailing 3 month averages on your graphs – need to get some more technical stuff on mine!

    Great progress – love reading these!

  2. Very nice looking month. My two passive income streams right now are high yield bonds and dividends. Next year I will get more into peer lending. Eventually a rental or two would be nice as well. I am getting a little nervous having so much just in the stock market, even though I know over the long run the markets will be fine.

    Keep up the great work!

    MDP

    • Thanks MDP! Are you at all concerned with the impacts of changing interest rates on those bonds? And let me know if you have any questions as you expand your peer to peer lending activity. I’ve been fortunate to have done well over the last five years.

      Appreciate your support!

  3. Thanks for sharing your income and blog updates with us. I have to admit my other interest besides dividend investing is seeing the stats of my blog and how many people I am reaching etc. It’s fun to know that your words are potentially reaching hundreds if not thousands of people on a weekly or monthly basis. Keep fighting the good passive income fight and look forward to other blog updates as well.

    • Glad to see someone else who enjoys tracking their blog’s progress! Perhaps next year you can give yourself some blogging goals in addition to your dividend goals.

      Thanks for your support!

  4. Looks like another solid month and a really solid increase from May 2014. Keep plugging away. I should start to receive dividends in Loyal3 later this month which is pretty cool.

    • Thanks JC! I am glad you will start to see the dividends in your Loyal3 account this month. I am anticipating approximately $25 worth over the September time frame (including the first couple days of October). It is nice that they are now coming in at a level where I can reinvest them without additional capital. The snowball is growing!

  5. Almost hit the $300 mark! Great month and year to date. Your snowball is starting to pick up size and speed.

    I like how you track your progress as a percent of your annual goal.

    Regards,

    ~ISP

  6. W2R,

    That’s a solid month right there, my friend.

    And I love the picture. That’s the kind of passive income wave I wanna be riding! :)

    Looks like you had a great P2P lending month there. What kind of yield/return are you seeing on your accounts there, if you don’t mind me asking? Looks like that’s providing some pretty serious income for you.

    Keep it up!

    Best regards.

    • Haha I want to be riding that wave as well!

      I will be doing a really in-depth analysis in a few weeks after the end of the month on all of my P2P accounts, but ultimately I am earning in excess of 10% in every account. That level of returns has consistently been above the double-digit mark for over five years now since I first started investing in LC.

      Thanks for your support!

  7. I’m impressed that you’re tracking several accounts the way you do. I don’t think I have the stomach/time to do that! Nice recent uptrend in passive income you’ve got there!

    I have a Lending Club account with a $10k deposit earning about 10.4% annualized. That’s adjusted for past-due notes. What I particularly like about Lending Club is the Automatic Investing feature. Are you using that?

    I have another question, about Google Analytics. I currently have a “Total Pageviews” counter on my blog and I’m wondering if Google Analytics “plays nice” with that? Does Google Analytics start counting from zero when activated?

    • It has never been a burden for me given my passion for spreadsheets, investments, and tracking things in as many ways as possible. The uptrend over the last couple of months is nice, given the couple of really poor months for P2P income this past spring.

      No, I am not currently using the Lending Club automated feature, and instead utilize Nickel Steamroller. From others I’ve discussed with, the Automated Investing tool is a significant improvement over PRIME, and does pretty well. As long as you are happy with it, it should work well in the long run.

      Given you are on a Google product (Blogger), I am not sure if there is any crossover, but it certainly increases the odds of being one. Doesn’t hurt to set up an Google Analytics account and see if they pass the data back and forth. If not, you will start getting real time information through Analytics from the setup point forward. Keeping track of your pageviews since inception might just be a matter of combining the two metrics should they not crossover initially.

      Thanks for stopping by!

  8. Great progress and love the diversification with the passive income streams you’ve got going on.

    Good luck to 20,000!

  9. Excellent to see how your passive income has grown over time, and particularly encouraging for someone like me who’s just starting out. Thank you.

  10. Great month of passive income. Those dividends keep piling up. As a newbie, I’m not to familiar with P2P lending, so I’ll be on the lookout for the future post that you mentioned to Dividend Mantra. Thanks for sharing.

    • Indeed they do keep on piling up. While I won’t hit my desired mark this year, and I am really looking forward to the next 16 months or so as I should really see some nice improvements in my portfolios as I will be able to allocate more resources towards them.

      Appreciate you stopping by and commenting!

  11. A picture of a wave is a perfect analogy for building passive income =)

    Awesome progress, a little bit higher every month!

    Keep it up! Little by little!

    Take care!

    • It is a perfect analogy. While the “snowball” concept is widespread (I’ve used it myself), waves are great visual examples as well. Big, never ending, continuing to crash into the coast of Financial Independence, providing a wealth of riches.

      Thanks for the support ILG!

  12. I know its not much but I contributed to your goal of hitting your pagehit goal for the month! haha
    nevertheless its very impressive to see you have other streams of passive income than just dividends. I hope one day I can get on that level, but for now i suppose ill just keep clocking in to work.
    thanks for sharing W2R

    Ace

  13. Hi W2R,

    I really love the graphs on here. I’m something of an Excel junkie at work, but I haven’t gotten around to making anything for my blog. Seeing how good they look here, I may have to rethink that ;-)

    Also, I’m very interested in the Loyal3 program, particularly its (at least as far as I understand) willingness to let you use a credit card to purchase the securities. With a 1-2% rewards card, redirecting $500/mo in funds from my ordinary brokerage to them could translate into fairly significant extra income, since they are commission-free transactions w/rewards points.

    My only issue is that it seems a little “too-good-to-be-true”. I’m planning on taking a closer look at it when I’ve got the free time!

    Looking forward to reading more of your blog!

    • Charles,

      Thanks for stopping by! I am a bit of an Excel junkie in my own right, and chart, track, and monitor my investments diligently. I am big fan of seeing things laid out in a nice visual manner, and passive income is suited perfectly for that.

      Loyal3 has been a great tool that I’ve used this year to keep some investment dollars flowing to my dividend growth portfolio. The credit card rewards and no-cost functionality is fantastic, and only adds to the perk of being able to invest fractionally in a solid group of dividend growth stocks.

      I wish you and the wife the best on your journey towards financial independence.

  14. W2R,

    How have I not come across blog before? Lots of information and good writing to be found here. Awesome charts, too!

    You’re already doing pretty great on the passive income, can’t wait to reach your level! I also like that you have such a diversified passive income portfolio.

    Looking forward to reading more,
    NMW

    • Glad you’ve found me NMW! Better late than never, right? :)

      I appreciate your support of my portfolio and am looking forward to putting out more great stuff! Thanks for your support and readership.

  15. W2R,

    So, is ARCP becoming even more attractive lately? I have had it in my wish list for a while and just took another look at it. At $11.85 it seems like it is in the right area to be thinking about pulling the trigger for me before the x date.

    Keep cranking,

    Robert the DividendDreamer

    • I think that it is certainly a solid buy below $12, but since the ex-dividend date is monthly, I wouldn’t worry about timing as much. Find an entry point that fits your valuation and jump in. Given your direct exposure to real estate, I personally wouldn’t hold a ton of assets in REITs.

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