Built for myself.
Shared with everyone.

The beginning

I have spent more than twenty years working in a corporate role, and for most of that time my approach to investing looked like everyone else's: act on a hot tip, follow the crowd into whatever was trending, sell when fear kicked in. I bought stocks based on advice from colleagues, articles I half-read, and the vague sense that something was going up. It is not a strategy I would recommend. The losses were not catastrophic, but more importantly, none of it was building anything. I had no idea what my investments were actually producing — because most of the time, they were not producing anything at all.

The shift came when I stumbled across a school of thought that reframed the entire question. Instead of asking "what will this stock be worth in five years?", the question became: "how much monthly income is this generating right now?" The philosophy is centred on building a portfolio of assets that pay you regularly — dividends, distributions, coupons — and reinvesting that income to compound the stream over time. Price movements become largely irrelevant. What matters is the income, and whether it is growing. For someone like me, without a finance background, without the time or inclination to analyse balance sheets obsessively, it was the first investment framework that made genuine, practical sense.

It also led somewhere more specific than I had anticipated. The strategy is built around regular payments, but my version of it quickly became a question not just about income, but about monthly income — a more precise thing. Some months would naturally pay well; others would sit nearly empty. I found myself looking at my portfolio the same way every time: which months are short, and what do I need to add to fill them? Every position I considered became, in effect, a decision about which gaps on the calendar to close. That is the question the tool was built to answer.

The problem — and why no existing tracker solved it

I converted to this approach less than two years ago. Almost immediately, I ran into a practical problem: I could not find a single tool that tracked everything together. My income came from three places — dividend-paying stocks and REITs across multiple exchanges and currencies, a rental property, and a handful of other streams like savings interest and bond distributions. Every tracker I found was built around capital growth: portfolio value, percentage gains, sector allocation. A few handled dividend income reasonably well. None of them handled rental income. None let me set a monthly income target and see all three streams filling it in real time. The tools that came closest required a monthly subscription — which felt quietly ironic for a strategy designed around not paying unnecessary recurring costs.

So I built my own. I am not a developer by profession, so what started as a rough spreadsheet slowly became something more structured — a browser-based passive income tracker that consolidated every stream into a single monthly number, measured against a target I set myself. I added live FX rate conversion because I hold assets in several currencies. I added a 12-month income calendar because knowing which months are thin and which are heavy actually matters for planning. I added dividend lookup because manually updating yields across a growing portfolio is tedious. Every feature in Income Refinery exists because I personally needed it.

Why I'm sharing it

I kept the tool to myself for a while, then had a fairly obvious realisation: if a twenty-year corporate professional with no finance background could benefit from having a dedicated passive income and dividend tracker, there are almost certainly others in the same position. People who are done with speculation and want to track real income. People working toward retirement who want to measure progress in monthly cash flow rather than portfolio value. People in the FIRE community — Financial Independence, Retire Early — who have a number in mind and want to see, clearly, how close their passive income stream is to hitting it. And people who do not want their holdings uploaded to a server, who have no interest in creating yet another account, and who would rather pay once — or nothing at all — than add another recurring subscription to their lives.

Income Refinery is free to use, runs entirely in your browser, and stores your data only on your own device — nothing is transmitted to any server I operate. It tracks dividend income from stocks, REITs, ETFs, and funds; rental property income; and any other recurring passive stream you want to add, all converted to a single base currency and measured against a monthly income goal you define. There is a Pro version with unlimited holdings, Excel and JSON export, a forecast engine, and a Dividend Health Panel — a one-time $49 payment, not a subscription, because people building passive income portfolios should not be paying monthly fees to the tools that help them do it. If you want to understand how every feature works before you start, the user guide covers it all. I am still early in my own journey toward financial independence. Income Refinery is what I use to track mine. I hope it helps you track yours.