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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#121

Post by logicallee »

myroon5 wrote: post #8
refulgentis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, grandparent is spam: https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/lending-robot-makes-lendin...

I am not involved with the company other than being a happy customer. It was by far the best passive income I made this year.

I think you're using the actual definition of passive income (make an investment, don't do anything else other than wait), whereas everyone else seems to be talking about fake-passive income, such as lifestyle businesses they pretend not to work on. (But really do.)

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#122

Post by davidwihl »

logicallee wrote: post #117
jrheard wrote: post #13

Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so…

Humanity has had numbers for some 200,000 years. any hacker can, in the next ten minutes, cause their CPU to do more arithmetic than the arithmetic (explicitly adding 2+5, and so forth, multiplying two numbers in their heads) that every single person has done in the history of humanity. okay, but that's just numbers. Today we live in a connected world where 2,000,000,000 people can be reached in any eight-hour period…

I'm all for entrepreneurship but the original question asked about passive income. Your suggestion is clearly very active.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#123

Post by soneca »

DangerousPie wrote: post #103
cesarb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Brazil, so if the government defaults, every other investment I could have made here would also crash, and the local economy with them. It's not called the "risk-free" interest rate for nothing: it's the lowest risk investment one can get within Brazil. Corporate bonds, for instance, will have a higher return, due to their higher risk. As for inflation, when it increases the SELIC/CDI rates tend to rise wit…

> I live in Brazil, so if the government defaults, every other investment I could have made here would also crash, and the local economy with them. Wouldn't that be a good reason to invest some money abroad? > And, actually, the high interest rate is set by the government, as a way to control the inflation But surely that's the interest rate that their central bank charges to the banks (which influences the interest…

They are separate things, but one type of bond is indexed by the interest rate (another is indexed by inflation and a third type is completely preindexed on a fix rate).

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#124

Post by [deleted] »

DangerousPie wrote: post #103
cesarb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Brazil, so if the government defaults, every other investment I could have made here would also crash, and the local economy with them. It's not called the "risk-free" interest rate for nothing: it's the lowest risk investment one can get within Brazil. Corporate bonds, for instance, will have a higher return, due to their higher risk. As for inflation, when it increases the SELIC/CDI rates tend to rise wit…

> I live in Brazil, so if the government defaults, every other investment I could have made here would also crash, and the local economy with them. Wouldn't that be a good reason to invest some money abroad? > And, actually, the high interest rate is set by the government, as a way to control the inflation But surely that's the interest rate that their central bank charges to the banks (which influences the interest…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#125

Post by harperlee »

refrigerator wrote: post #28

My brother and I have built a couple of test prep sites for UK medical school entrance exams: https://www.bmat.ninja , https://www.ukcat.ninja . BMAT Ninja made about $25k this year (up from $16k last year) and UKCAT about $10k. Didn't do any work on marketing really so it is pretty much passive, but I think with a bit of work they could both do a lot better. It's a very seasonal market - we only get customers for ab…

How did you get the question bank? Did you pay students for questions? If so, how did the costs balance the profits?

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#127

Post by davidwihl »

nkkollaw wrote: post #104
aninhumer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vanguard is index funds, so the returns are as good (or bad) as the market.

Average..? Ex., 1%-5%/yr

It depends on the fund. I just did a report on this for one of my classes. https://github.com/wihl/stats107-project/blob/master/writeup...

All the code is in the same repository as R Markdown.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#129

Post by thinkloop »

sanswork wrote: post #39
maaaats wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a book is not exactly passive.

I'm going to assume from your reply that you've just not heard the term before but passive income refers to income from something where you do the work up front and it continues to pay down the road. A book is a perfect example of that.

A new book is not a perfect example of that, it's a shitload of work - very likely more work per dollar earned than a day job. Passive income is related to using capital rather than effort to generate money. If the IP of the book was passed down to his kids and they continued to make money off it, or enough money was made from it to surpass a regular working wage for the hours spent, maybe then it becomes "passive". Right now it's just a lot of underpaid effort on credit.
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