Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 713 posts

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

#221

Post by twic »

iSloth wrote: post #173
velcro wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips for something solid vanguard-like in the EU?

I get vanguard in the Uk via HL, some funds are on there and the fees are not too bad for the most part.

If you're on HL, you could also look at their 'core trackers':

http://www.hl.co.uk/funds/index-tracker-funds/wealth-150

For example, that provides the FTSE all-share through an L&G fund:

http://www.hl.co.uk/funds/fund-discounts,-prices--and--facts...

Which has fractionally lower fees than the Vanguard equivalent:

http://www.hl.co.uk/funds/fund-discounts,-prices--and--facts...

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

#222

Post by davidwihl »

anthonyherron wrote: post #220
davidwihl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MOOC or are you at Harvard? Was the course worthwhile?

Through the Extension school, all online. I found it worthwhile.

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

#224

Post by brianwawok »

pilom wrote: post #217

I work remotely and moved into an RV to travel around North America with my wife. Started blogging about travel and working on the road at http://therecklesschoice.com and using Amazon affiliate links whenever appropriate that pull in about $50/month.

This seems not passive. If you blog 5 hours a month and make $50, you made $10 an hour.

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

#225

Post by StevePerkins »

FrancoDiaz wrote: post #178
threeseed wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unemployment rate in the US is 4.9% which is basically full employment. Now sure there are a number of people who don't report and those who wish to work more. But I don't think it's going to be easy to get those people back into work. Most are either in industries that are disappearing due to automation. Or they lack the skills/training to re-educate themselves. And without tariffs (which will impact exports) th…

4.9% isn't even close to being the real unemployment rate.

Nor does it reflect the stagnant/decreasing income of the jobs that people DO have.

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

#226

Post by nchrys »

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…

I have read a lot about passive investing (The Intelligent Investor, Mr Money Mustache etc.) but I live in France and it does not seem as simple as in the US to invest in a SP500 index fund for example. Especially if you want something that is quite tax efficient. Does anyone have any advice?

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

#227

Post by albertTJames »

maaaats wrote: post #31
austenallred wrote: post #11

I co-wrote a book on user acquisition and co-created an accompanying video course to climb out of debt left over from a failed startup. Made $104,000 in revenue since June (turns out the user acquisition stuff actually works), about 87k of which is profit, so we'll say ~$11,000/month part-time. It still makes me a solid $2,000/month now with zero work, and hopefully more once the book is officially published. (It's d…

Writing a book is not exactly passive.

Yes, and not only is it not passive, but you actually have to say something interesting, which means you have to have some business knowledge in some field. And even then, it actually makes money only if it works. Which is rare, probably more rare than a successful startup depending on the specific domain you are writing about.

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

#228

Post by twic »

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.

Ah, you see, because the market is famously perfectly efficient, equity and bond markets have already priced in the expected effect of Brexit-Trump. So investing in equities now essentially gets you a discount over what they would have cost had Brexit-Trump not happened.

Whereas (more seriously) investing in "more stable" things like bonds forces you to pay a premium, because every man and his dog has desperately been chasing stability, safety, yield, etc since 2008, in many cases using quantitatively eased money to do so.

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

#229

Post by branchless »

77yy77yy wrote: post #215

Domain sales, over US$ 2M/yr that could have been mid 7 figures easily but still holding onto those other gems. With all the new extensions valuable .com domains is where it is. Brokers managing sales. Also not sure if falls into passive or not, sold a business few years ago and did the financing, still getting paid monthly for few more years.

Twenty first century rentiers!

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

#230

Post by branchless »

antr wrote: post #33

In early 2016 I purchased commercial real estate, got a 25 year fixed rate mortgage, and leased it. This requires very little of my time every month, and the post-tax yield is above 5%. I couldn't be happier. I'm now considering doing this again in 2017. Hopefully interest rates will remain as low as they have been in order to lock-in an attractive mortgage.

The American dream: very little work and lots of money.

Reality: others work hard and get less so rentiers can kick back.

Post reply on HN