I made a few hundred bucks licensing my Fuzzyset.js library: https://github.com/Glench/fuzzyset.js#license
Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
21–30 of 178 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
#22Not really passive but almost. I sell bicycle bells on etsy[1].
It started with a friend that had the idea and later left the project. Initially I joined mostly because I was interested in finding a technical solution for how to print them.
The fun tech is that I use a pen plotter. [2]
I don't really make that much money selling them but at the same time I had a 400% increase in sales this year (Thank you etsy algorithm, and probably thank you pandemic). 0 investment in marketing, I just make sure I have stock (16h of work per year probably, but hard to measure). Also this year I moved to a place where the grocery store and the mail office are in the same place and 5 minutes from my home which is perfect.
I have a a bit too much fun optimizing processes. finding weird ways to automate the writing of shipping info in the packages.
The only thing I wish I had more time to, was at improving the drawings.
[1] https://www.etsy.com/shop/gunaPT
[2] https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2019/bike-bells-with-axidra...
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
#23To me, passive means little or no ongoing time investment. If we are looking at "best" in terms of revenue, then dividends from investing in the stock market are by far the best source of passive income I can imagine. I've got a 1.5x leveraged portfolio over on IBKR that is currently yielding ~2.9% dividends across a wide range of sectors. I am paying ~1% in margin fees at the moment, so I basically get to use their…
I looked into this (and even implemented it for a time) but by every analysis it was better to ignore dividends and instead focus on total return. If you want monthly income, just draw down the assets monthly.
By the way, this is called a carry trade. If you’re using a lot of leverage for small interest (1.9%) returns, it can seem like free money until it blows up in volatile times and results in huge losses. So anyone considering this should keep an eye on risk.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
#24To me, passive means little or no ongoing time investment. If we are looking at "best" in terms of revenue, then dividends from investing in the stock market are by far the best source of passive income I can imagine. I've got a 1.5x leveraged portfolio over on IBKR that is currently yielding ~2.9% dividends across a wide range of sectors. I am paying ~1% in margin fees at the moment, so I basically get to use their…
How did you earn the money to invest?
Income from my job. No side projects pulling in cash (yet). Getting close on a few though. Hoping I can post something far more interesting here next year when this question comes around again.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
#25https://isitketo.org It's just a content site about the keto diet. It runs in the background and earns money from Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate links, the latter of which are dwindling because I haven't had time to fix dead product links. It's a plain static site, so it doesn't need any server maintenance or software upgrades. Not totally passive because I actively tried to grow it for three months when I had t…
Are you interested in selling your Keto site?
I'll code you a competitor for much less than that person would charge, if they are even willing to sell :)
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
#26I started a niche YouTube channel on Python for Stock and Crypto Trading, very beginner level:
https://youtube.com/parttimelarry
Over $2K/month as of November from a combination of YouTube ad revenue, Buy Me a Coffee donations, and affiliate links (TradingView Pro Subscriptions, Tradier, Amazon books etc).
Should hit 10,000 subscribers in the next couple of weeks. Plan is to grow this to 100,000 subscribers over the next 3-4 years.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
#27Selling weekly covered calls on stocks in my equities portfolio, 2k per week, super passive.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
#28https://www.babyrocknyc.com/
I recently had my first baby and had a few ideas for some sardonic baby attire, so I whipped them up in a store for drop-shipping. It nets a half-dozen sales per month, with almost zero upkeep beyond new designs when I've got a new idea.
The pictures I get of babies wearing the clothes is exponentially worth the effort put in.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
#29To me, passive means little or no ongoing time investment. If we are looking at "best" in terms of revenue, then dividends from investing in the stock market are by far the best source of passive income I can imagine. I've got a 1.5x leveraged portfolio over on IBKR that is currently yielding ~2.9% dividends across a wide range of sectors. I am paying ~1% in margin fees at the moment, so I basically get to use their…
I looked into this (and even implemented it for a time) but by every analysis it was better to ignore dividends and instead focus on total return. If you want monthly income, just draw down the assets monthly. By the way, this is called a carry trade. If you’re using a lot of leverage for small interest (1.9%) returns, it can seem like free money until it blows up in volatile times and results in huge losses. So anyo…
I agree with this position - I am not running a pure value-oriented portfolio. It is very nearly a 50/50 blend between value/growth at the moment. Only ~25% of my portfolio represents investments explicitly for purposes of driving dividend income (REITs). I say 2.9% as a "safe" figure in context of investments that are more-or-less idle without all the stress (i.e. holding a bunch of TSLA is not always fun). In reality, my total portfolio is more than doubled YTD, but I wouldn't publish that as a typical figure.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
#30I made €73k from a Chrome Extension. [1]
Went down twice in the last year so I had to spend some time on that.
Chrome Webstore are shutting down their payment system, so I've spent some time migrating all that nonsense.
If you're interested, I also wrote about others monetising their extensions and how they did it. [2]
[2] https://tillypay.com/blog/how-to-monetise-a-chrome-extension...