Ask HN: What are the some passive income strategies you do beside your IT job? Amazon FBA, Dropshipping etc. Please share your stories. |
Ask HN: What are the some passive income strategies you do beside your IT job? Amazon FBA, Dropshipping etc. Please share your stories. |
When I researched this years ago, I concluded the costs were less expensive than any S&P 500 mutual find I could find. Not sure if that's still true or not.
Many companies offer index funds, though Vanguard's seem particularly popular (possibly because they invented index funds, IIRC).
But of course fees are effectively much higher if you are paying transaction fees.
But vfiax (vanguard) or swppx (schwabb) can't be beat (.04 and .03) when it comes to fees. And it is pretty common for brokers to offer free Mutual fund trades or you can get an account directly with those brokers and trade for free.
Not as passive:
Amazon FBA: Run a side business selling products on Amazon. I have hired 1 part time employee now that works tasks I have outlined during the week. I work 1 to 1.5 days per week organizing the warehouse and custom orders. In the green after 3 years. It's also fun for me.
I did, however, find a little unsolved problem on Amazon that sucks up seller's time, so I built a solution[0] for it with about a month of work, and now it generates >$2k/m with 1-2 hours of customer support work every month.
But.. in case people don't mind. How feasible is it to make passive income by having a blog? I mean by having advertisements or amazon click-thru links.. is it worth the time to set up and use a blog to generate passive income?
-> kind of passive in the long run
It can be done part time and still be profitable, but it can't be done passively unless you're a genius in your fields and everyone is beating down your door to hear what you have to say (in which case you should write a book).
I'd say the amount of time you'd need to spend monetizing & driving traffic wouldn't really make it passive.
Simpler question, do blogs generate at least $100/yr?
You could potentially farm out the work but that applies to a lot of businesses. :)
I have a technical blog/youtube and most of the "profit" is from having that on my resume.
I'm in the process of looking at blogging tools to do something very similar. I'm kinda worried about having a history though in a few years that shows I only post during interview times :D.
Feel free to message me if you'd like to chat more.
Having kids is a terrible one.
If you include kids in the mix, then, yes, much more expensive and the toll of a failed marriage much more significant.
That being said, I wouldn't advise doing it solely for financial reasons. :)
There's some grey/in between area though, real estate can be passive (1 unit with long term tenants) or a full time job (multiple properties, distressed properties in need of significant repairs, or something like AirBnB - unless you've got employees doing all the work). Same with stuff like writing, if the effort is already done and you just sit back and collect ad revenue or referrals, that's passive. If you're actively writing blog posts regularly, its not passive.
As far as the FBA case, if you've hired someone to do all the finding deals, packing and shipping, it is pretty much passive; if you've got a white label product and you've set up your suppliers to ship regular shipments from China direct to Amazon's warehouse, its probably pretty passive at that point.
Selling on Amazon or eBay is surprisingly streamlined. Exceptions occur, but they're pretty easy to take care of if you budget them into your margins and don't try to jerk buyers around.
I sold a few hundred dollars a week on eBay and a "problem order" comes up once a week at most. Usually, it's just a full refund or a new shipment.
Or stuff like ad revenue from apps or sales of books. Maybe passive now, but probably took quite some effort getting to there. It may be passive if the long tail is much bigger than the initial investment, but for most people I guess it's not.
If you buy 500 shares of VYM, you can expect a passive income of $100 per month.
I'm finding it difficult to get loans. No-one talks about this issue.
On a side note: none of this is really passive.. mining, real estate, and drop-shipping are all very active income streams. Unless you were born with a silver spoon, you probably won't find truly passive income.
If you like reading, you can find most popular books in the past year here. https://toptalkedbooks.com/hackernews/2018
I generate some passive income from (by spending 1-2 hours a week):
- stock & cryptocurrency picking
- Calls with industry research firms
- Earn.com
I have a large sum of money coming in later this year, and I'm thinking about investing it. Passive investment with an index fund is generally a good long-term strategy, though I strongly suspect we're in for a recession in the near future. I'd hate to lose 20-40% of my investment within a few months of putting it into the market.
On the other hand, the amount of money I'll have on hand will be enough to do some things that most people can't. For instance, I'd have enough money to execute an option without trading on the margin on fairly large stocks, as opposed to selling the options contract, which seems to be the more common strategy. If I understand this correctly, that should enable me to be able to make small but reliable returns with relatively little risk.
Hopefully I didn't mangle the terminology too badly. I'm researching all of this stuff somewhat frantically, and I'm new to it. I'll have to spend a couple months doing paper trades before I'm comfortable with putting real money into options.
No customers, no employees and no investors and truly location independent...
If you had a uniquely good trading algorithm isn't it effectively just trading by hand but faster? And related question, if you're doing a lot of trades, wouldn't trading transaction fees eat you alive?
Sure, I can do it all by hand, the key here not speed, but automation... I rather be fishing or drinking beer by my pool instead... Trading fees: 5$ fee on $50k/$100k position is frankly irrelevant for example...
I don't post that often. When I get stuck on a problem because of poor documentation or poor explanations I just make a tut off that. Mostly focused on other things right now though. Making a video is a lot of work. Come up with a project, a script, rewriting your explanation, fill in your gaps in info, voice recording, video editing. It adds up.
For example, I was blown away by how useful & accurate this guy's medium blog was for setting up apache.
https://medium.com/@JohnFoderaro/how-to-set-up-apache-in-mac...
(just used this for a class, I'm not pushing anything for anyone)
Generally it's understood that "passive income" on HN refers to income resulting from an initial investment of labor that continues to generate revenue with little to no additional labor input.
By the wider definition, yes, you are correct.
In the same way you can say "work at Starbucks part time for a year and then invest 100% of that extra income into an index fund for passive income" rather than "work on a book for a year and collect book sales as passive income."
Can I hire a younger, better looking guy to go marry a rich lady and send me back dividends?
The only exception to the rule would be if one has some sort of technical advantage (e.g. HFT infrastructures) or "insider" information.
Was curious to hear if you have any resources that in your opinion could make me change my stance? Thanks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God
My message is this: do not settle for the average - everyone can be a doctor, lawyer, developer, speculator, you just need the drive and to put the hours...
Passive investing for me is a big mistake, because it ignores the risk management, especially for small accounts (less than few millions), people just cannot afford to be losing money for extended periods of time, just look into Japan's Economic Bubble and Nikkei index, every passive investor in it is still at about 50% loss for almost 30 years and counting...
To make money in the stock market, you have to have a system that makes money, not only on the way up, but on the way down as well... For me, personally, my money are too important to leave them to such a "buy and hope" investing strategy...