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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?

#231

Post by brianwawok »

antr wrote: post #172
PaulRobinson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't say where you are based, but you are going to get a shock if you think interest rates are going to stay on the floor. If you can get a genuine 25-year fixed rate, great, but you need to tread carefully here. Brexit, Trump, EU sentiment, China trying to deal with their own problems, they're all pointing to the same way: devalued currencies. Where they start, rising interest start to follow. I'd also be wary…

The all-in fixed rate is 2.10%, and let me repeat: fixed. Not LIBOR + spread + you need to have you savings account with us + you need to buy my home insurance, etc. I don't understand why you say "tread carefully"... when it's the bank bearing all the IRS cost. Plot any LIBOR curve, and you'll see that the bank is the one to lose here. Banks are fighting for customers, and cheap loans and mortgages is the game they…

Don't you lose if you can't find Tennant's for your property? Or do you plan to just go bankrupt if that happens?

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

#232

Post by branchless »

dbg31415 wrote: post #199

Surprised nobody has mentioned getting married yet. Dual incomes is probably the easiest path to wealth. Just don't ever get divorced...

Heaven 17: I'm your money.

Buy this

Sign here

Order now our emotional life

I'm offering you the post of wife

Plus the overnight treasury

It'll work for you if it works for me

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It's a great song and a very good album:

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

#235

Post by susi22 »

velcro wrote: post #93
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…

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

GERMANS: Be aware! Don't buy any US ETFs when you pay taxes in Germany. There is pretty heavy penalty tax on ETFs. Depends on the difference of the price on the first day of trading of the year and on the last. If unlucky you can pay 50% tax on your gains. I did just this year pay 45% and I won't be getting it back. Read thru this first: https://www.justetf.com/de-en/news/etf/steuereinfach-in-etfs...

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

#236

Post by vital101 »

Many years ago when I was still a PHP + Wordpress developer, I discovered that getting updates to private plugins and themes was a huge pain.

Fast-forward a few years and I finally built out https://kernl.us as a learning project (Mongo, Node.js, Angular). It's mostly passive income now, pulling in ~$450 per month.

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

#237

Post by hudibras »

lorenzhs wrote: post #177
azatris wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How confident can I be of this? Why are banks struggling to get even 2% return on their investment if I can just go on and get 7% on average?

There's no guarantee at all. In a really bad year (2008?) you might get -50% or worse. Then you might get some really nice returns in the years after (or not!). If you average over several decades, historically, the returns have been around 7 or 8 per cent per year, but the standard deviation is enormous. Just look at a long-term chart of e.g. the S&P 500 at https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/%5EGSPC - click "Max" and "…

All of this is correct, but the standard S&P 500 index doesn't include dividends, so your typical index fund will (should) do 1-4% better each year than the S&P 500. The S&P 500 does have a lesser-known version that includes the total returns: https://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXSP%3ASP500TR&ei=WWJNWK...

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

#238

Post by monkeywork »

nkkollaw wrote: post #98
vladdanilov wrote: post #26

Optimage – a visually lossless image optimization tool http://getoptimage.com Released this week. Came unnoticed on HN but somehow got featured on PH. 1200+ downloads of free version and a few sales. Not sure if that'll change. In that case, the best of 2016 will be one of the plugins for Sketch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286 .

Saw that on PH, looks good. May I ask what percentage of sales did you get? I'm going to launch my product soon, and I'd like to know what I can expect.

What is PH?

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

#239

Post by branchless »

Passive income. So great that financiers gave people a nice name for extorsion. Some ideas on here are creating value and selling it over time. No problem with that.

Too many are rentier activity, costing everyone more in the long run. Appropriating wealth rather than creating it.

Hacker news seems to embrace this culture. Surely the antithesis of the early days of computing and the origin of hacker culture.

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

#240

Post by coldtea »

sigi45 wrote: post #193
coldtea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's ultra flat then it's not a pyramid scheme. It's only a pyramid scheme if it trickles down to ever diminishing returns.

At worse, what you describe is a snake oil sale.

But people can genuinely learn things from this or from Tim Ferris work too, so it's more like any self-help book/product sale basically. As long as it contains useful stuff that the buyer didn't know before on their own, it's legit for me.

Of course if the content is good, it still relies on the determination of those applying it. And some luck besides.

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