My Year-over-Year (YoY) Growth in 2017

I thought I would do a quick post about my favorite metric (or at least what I consider to be the most important one), and that is Year-Over-Year growth, or oftentimes shortened to YoY.

I believe YoY growth is extremely critical in measuring one's progress and in making real strides towards financial independence for a few reasons. First, it helps you clearly see the direction you are moving, which is always nice and good to know (which may be obvious to us bloggers, but MANY people do not have a clear understanding of which way they are moving). But more importantly: it helps you clearly see the pace at which you are moving! 

Knowing your "pace" is extremely important in your journey toward FI, and oftentimes we overlook measuring our pace for more exciting metrics like "total dividends earned" or "number of companies that payed out" or "total passive income."  But consider the following example: if your YoY growth turns out to be only 3%, then in reality your "growth" is probably nothing more than inflation!  Who cares about the dividends or number of payers or income! In 'real' dollars, your growth is actually probably zero! Or consider a growth of 5% with all equities (or all dividend paying stocks).  Is that good?? Well, I would say no - you're taking on significantly too much risk to only achieve the 5% growth that you did.  You should be getting much more than that!

With all of that said as an introduction, I have been very thankful and excited for the growth that we've achieved this year.  In September, I anticipate we may have YoY growth for the month at approximately ~275% from last year!  We will see, but I'm excited for the final numbers to come in over the next few weeks, as I'm hoping for monstrous growth. If it is close to my estimate, we'll just assume a conservative 225% here, below is what my YoY growth for 2017 would be:   

Overall, I'm very excited to achieve that level of growth.  A little too sporadic for my particular tastes (but real estate will do that sometimes!), and February and May were clearly disappointing - thanks to some larger real estate expenses and a few portfolio moves, but this year I've written a lot about how it would be the second half of the year where things really kicked in to the next gear for my plan. And that is actually what we're seeing in the above chart.  Take a look again: from June onwards my growth has been a monstrous 113% average per month!  

With 9 months of the year completed, seeing a 41.6% per month average growth is great!  We will see how the rest of the year actually turns out - it only takes one tenant to move out to COMPLETELY reverse these numbers :), but I'm hopeful I can finish the year strong with very good numbers.

What do you think? How has your growth been? Do you calculate YoY growth as an important metric of your progress?  What level of growth do you consider acceptable?

Thanks for reading!

Passive Income Dude