If Passive Income Is So Great, Where's My Piña Colada?

And where's my beach?

These cows on Rapa Nui have more beach time than I do. Maybe they’re better writers than I am. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

The only real way to enjoy passive wealth is to inherit it or marry it, and I failed to do either.

I’ve never chased passive wealth, but by chance I do a couple of things the gurus claim will have you spending your days on a beach sipping piña coladas. Yet here I am, beach-less and piña colada-less.

Writing isn’t passive

The claim: Write books/blogs and the money will just roll in forever. 

The reality: If you check out all my writing, it will soon become obvious that I’m writing almost every single day. I publish a lot – and some of what I write doesn’t show up with my name on it, so I’m writing even more than is apparent. It’s not a passive income source at all. Writing is hard work! 

Several years ago, I wrote two series of genre novels (under a pen name), and what I found is that if you want those to sell, you have to grind out one book after another. Some people write one every month and I can’t do that without letting the quality suffer. 

As soon as you stop frantically spinning that merry-go-round, it stops turning. 

My old novels still sell sometimes, but unless I spend time promoting them and writing new ones, I can forget it. 

This year, I published a more serious novel, The Trailer Park Rules, which is about how the sale of a trailer park to a corporation triggers changes in the lives of the people living there (and about poverty, and about addiction, and about hedge funds and about media ….) You may note that I still am not spending my days on a beach, and still am not sipping piña coladas all day. 

I publish constantly

I have almost 700 pieces on Medium, but the older ones seldom make me anything. Once in a while, some new fan discovers me and goes on a quest to read all my work, but for the most part, even the evergreens only earn money for a few days or weeks.

If I want to keep making money on that platform, I need to publish at least every few days.

Here on Substack, things are much the same. People are going to forget about me if I don’t post about twice per week, and if I don’t make good use of the Notes feature. (Fortunately, reading, writing and restacking Notes is a highly satisfying way to spend time!)

Landlording sucks

The claim: Rent out some apartments and you’ll spend the rest of your days lolling about on a golden throne.

The reality: Landlording is hard work. It’s never been profitable for me.

Candidly, it might have worked out better if I had gone into it purposefully, but I became a landlord by accident. We couldn’t sell the house we were moving out of in 2008, so we started renting it out of necessity.

What a nightmare! My whole family loves that house, and we did a lot of work with the intention of staying there forever. Our tenants have not loved and appreciated it as we do. One broke the glass cooktop of a really nice range I bought as a splurge when I lived there. When I discovered it, claimed she’d dropped a package of frozen hamburger on it. That was clearly a lie. 

One literally nailed strips of scrap wood onto the wall so she could climb up to an overhead storage area. (It’s where we stored things like holiday decorations and off-season clothes. We used a ladder.)

One lady painted a giant Bible verse on the wall. OK, fine, but not everyone follows that religion and even if they do, they might not want to make that the centerpiece of their decor.

So many left behind a dirty stove, a dishwasher full of dirty dishes, a refrigerator full of spoiled food or just a lot of junk I had to deal with.

At one point, I agreed to give a new tenant a break on the rent in return for her handling the clean-out. She wanted to move in immediately and I was too busy at work to do a deep clean right away, so I accepted her offer. 

The new tenant came to regret this deal. She told me the previous tenant’s teenage daughter had left used menstrual materials in her bedroom closet.

This is a fireplace, not an incinerator! I bought this little house as a recently divorced mom. Renting it was a nightmare, but now my son is happy to rent it. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

Another time, some idiots used the fireplace to burn trash! That was a chore to clean up. At the time, the city provided free weekly garbage pick-up. Whatever possessed those people to burn their trash instead? I cannot describe my white-hot rage as I dealt with the aftermath.

I’ve had to replace carpeting, patch plaster, re-paint walls, replace light fixtures, replace blinds, fix broken windows and clean and clean and clean. We always do all the work ourselves, of course. 

Tenants would call at the most inconvenient times to complain that the toilet was clogged (with one of her giant hair ornaments in it) or that an outlet had sparked (because her kid stuck a piece of jewelry in it) or that the furnace wasn’t working right (curiously, the problem has not recurred since my son moved in five years ago).

At one point, a woman secretly let her new boyfriend, a roofer, move in. He threw piles of discarded roofing material in the backyard. At the same time, a branch landed on the roof and pierced the shingles. Water got in and brought down part of the bedroom ceiling. She did not say a word – just let the damage continue. 

If I had secretly snuck a roofer into my house, I would not have allowed him to use my backyard as a construction dump, and I would have suggested he haul his ass up to the roof and do the very simple fix that was required. Failing that, I’d have informed the landlord right away that a branch had damaged the roof. If the tenant had asked if I’d give her a break on the rent in return for her boyfriend fixing it, I’d probably have gone for it. 

For these reasons and many more, I never made any money by renting the house out, but the good news is the final tenants decided to leave at about the same time my son was ready to get his own place. He always pays on time and never damages anything. 

At one point, however, he did complain about the rent: “Raise my rent already!” he said. 

Now he gets to live in one of his childhood homes, all by himself, and the only downside is he has to mow the enormous yard in summer. I’d sell it to him at a very fair price, but he has no interest in owning a house. 

He’s helped with enough home repairs and maintenance to last him the rest of his life because he and his sister both had to pitch in to restore the house after every bad tenant. He has ripped out carpeting, primed and painted and scrubbed up all kinds of filth.

That’s right, I had to raise my own tenant to get a good one. Someday, my son may decide to move, and if he does, I’m selling that place immediately. Never again will I rent to anyone I did not give birth to!

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.