My current worth is €247540.1 (36.95% of my first goal – €670K).
My dearest dudes,
This is the first time in the last 12 months that my net worth decreases from one month to the other…
Why a net worth decrease if I still save 70% of my salary?
As I said last month, February was going to suffer a major hit because I had many bills to pay. The hit I predicted wasn’t as bad as I thought, but I continue to spend cash on RP#3 like a mad man!!!! And guess what, this will continue in the next two months. 🙁 I not only underestimated the costs of remodeling the property, as I’ve been saying in the past months, as I also decided to do a deeper renovation. For instance, yesterday I decided to replace most windows and doors of the property. This will cost me another 5k. If I keep the current windows and doors, chances are that they will cause me problems down the road (especially in the next months). Having this property in a different city diversifies my investments, but also costs me more money (and time!) to pay it a visit. Therefore, I am trying to eliminate variables I know will be problematic at some point.
For now, I will leave 2 units as they are (I cannot rent them out as they are now). I estimate to have enough liquidity to renovate the next unit in July.
Rental income
Yesterday I rented out another unit, starting from April 1st (BTW, renting a unit on the last day of the month is becoming a tradition :)). This is really one of the best units of the property and I rented it out for €275/month. This will increase my rental income to €1225 (in May I will move to RP#1, and so the rental income will decrease to €950/mo, unless I rent another unit of RP#3 in the meantime – which I don’t believe as I will be traveling in March). In September, one of my leasing contracts increases automatically by €50/mo, and so, if nothing changes, the overall rental income would be €1000/mo at that point. If I rent two of the other units, the aggregated rental income can be as high as €1500. Any extra cash from rental income in 2017 will be exclusively dedicated to renovating the units in RP#3 which I didn’t renovate so far.
My goal is to rent out two other units of RP#3 until the end of April. These units should rent for €230/mo each.
Online income
My online income dropped for the second month in a row. I will comment on this in the online income report/income diary. As I said last month, I needed to invest more time in promoting my blog, which I have. We are not talking about low hanging fruit here, though. The results from this investment will only be noticed in the long run.
My Real estate business
My Real Estate business hasn’t yielded many results so far. It will involve more and more work as time goes by – I predict to make about 20k in 2017, but I am not sure I will net anything from that. I can only evaluate the results of this business in September or later, as my strategy is supposed to yield results in the long term.
I have identified another property which can be a quick and clean flip. I’ve got two options now. I will work on this subject in April (as I won’t be in Portugal next month).
Goals for February
The goals for February were clearly missed, not only because I have been sick for two weeks, as I also decided to change my strategy at the beginning of the month. However, I am comfortable with the results I had.
- Make at least $500 online. FAIL (this will be explained in the online income report)
- Rent out at least one more unit (although two would be really cool). DONE!
- Read three books. FAIL (as I invested a lot of time in my SEO experiment)
- Make some money on my RE business. FAIL (too soon to yield results – maybe in April)
Goals for March
My goals for March (does not include the goals for the blog – those follow in the income diary):
- Make at least $300 online and promote the blog (details in the income diary).
- Read two books.
- Complete the renovation of the first part of RP#3.
In February I was also approached with a part-time research position, which would perfectly fit my needs. 🙂 The only problem is that, as we are talking about a grant really, they have to open it to more people. I hope I end up getting it! It would be a great to have a salary to pay off my bills while I set up my Real Estate business and take my blog to a totally different level.
Ben