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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?

#191

Post by mathgeek »

mFixman wrote: post #176
aninhumer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wouldn't it be a better idea to invest in bonds or more stable sources of investment for the next few years until we can make sure of the impact of Brexit-Trump? I wouldn't be surprised if AAPL and other giant third sector companies fall in value right now.

In investing terms, you're talking about a "less risky" rather than "better" idea. You'll only know if something was better after the event in question has passed.

Passive investing when you have many years before retirement means you worry about long term trends rather than short term risks.

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

#192

Post by logicallee »

fsloth wrote: post #142
logicallee wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some of us bring in value by developing existing software packages which amplify the work effort of some critical sector or another. The renumeration for this work is in the form of regular pay. A portion of which should probably be invested smartly. As software systems grow they turn into complex systems. They become embedded in the processes of the end users, while requiring constant boring work to remain alive. I…

"The remuneration[1] for this work is in the form of regular pay. A portion of which should probably be invested smartly."

I guess my objection was to the idea of saving "as much as possible." I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't work for a salary: but you should take some of that salary and spend it on actively building or backing businesses, not just passively.

Based on your background I think you would be amazed how much business you could create by investing in/overseeing a developer in India or China, for example. Your knowledge/background + $5000 goes waaaaaay farther than you think. (regardless of who the owner ends up.)

To me this is the opposite of the advice to passively save as much as possible!

[1] I corrected the spelling of this word - I mispelled it before too.

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

#193

Post by sigi45 »

coldtea wrote: post #49
sigi45 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah thats exactly what you should do to promote something like this. Tell anyone how much you made with your own tipps without proof/proof of your specific case and use it to sell it

What part of "$103,892 USD total funds raised" on the provided link was difficult to parse? And why assume the other is lying? This Ask HN is specifically about passive income, and calls for people to share their profits. It's not about them posting their IRS returns or other proof. If you're gonna doubt them, might as well skip the whole post.

It is the same crap Tim Ferriss is doing. People like the idea, think they can use it as well only to never understand that they are a part of a pyramid scheme which is ultra flat and has only him or someone like Tim Ferriss on top.

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

#194

Post by benevol »

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…

It's good advice to save money and to spend conservatively, if you're poor.

On the other hand, the implicit question of the post was "what did you create to generate passive income" (it's called "Hacker" News, not "Invester/Banker" News).

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

#196

Post by mathgeek »

thinkloop wrote: post #171
dirtyaura wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct that it is not passive income in traditional sense, but in HN, "the passive income" has come to mean something that generates automatic revenue after the initial work without requiring significant maintenance/upkeep work. The prime example of passive income used here is patio11's Bingo Card Creator. One also could say that in traditional investing, the upfront work is the research work to find right i…

> One also could say that in traditional investing, the upfront work is the research work to find right index funds or buying property in real estate investing This is the key point. In absolutes there is no such thing as passive income. Anything will take at least 1s of effort, and $0.001 of capital. The spirit of the term, is income that is heavily skewed towards being generated from assets rather than effort. A ne…

> Until the "nothing" gets filled in with the equivalent of a salaried wage, I'm not a fan of calling it "passive income".

Would you also consider creating a static "how to" site that generates revenue from ads to not be passive income? I think that's the most basic example of what HN considers passive.

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

#197

Post by logicallee »

pc86 wrote: post #182
davidwihl wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes but why answer the question when you can get on a soapbox instead?

My soapbox was prompted by the words, which I'm not embellishing, "save as much of your salary as you can".

I don't think there's anything wrong with saving or with passive investments. But it shouldn't be as much as you can. Engineers have other very good uses of their money, which I outlined.

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

#198

Post by supersaiyanverx »

wfunction wrote: post #133
bdowling wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you sell you pay taxes on the gains, so you are probably better off borrowing against your investments if you need cash, since borrowing isn't a realization event for tax purposes. Investments that pay dividends aren't as good for individuals since the dividends are taxes at ordinary rates.

> you are probably better off borrowing against your investments if you need cash I don't understand what that means. Whom would you be borrowing from? Where would the cash be coming from?

You would borrow from the bank, using your stock holdings as collateral. Not as easy as he makes it sound, but not unheard of if you have even a meager amount. Say, at least 50k.

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

#200

Post by soft_dev_person »

bert2002 wrote: post #96

The best was a physical project - www.spypatch.com. A sticker for the camera on your laptop. I dont do any advertisement, but it sells through Amazon and the website. ~2k/y.

Clever.

Friendly correction: peace of mind, not piece of mind =)

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