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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?

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, as a guideline, you'd have made about 7% p.a. on average, well above inflation. The question is whether you can handle the drawdown (can you keep your nerves during a crash?)

then again: beware of averages. Historical PE ratios are quite high (though EV/FCC would be more instructive) - so it is unlikely that the next couple of years will bring 7%. We're living in a world of free money: if central banks change interest rates the party could come to an end.

Not necessarily. If the interest rates are reduced because the economy improved, then the growth could stay similar.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do I have any rational expectations to beat inflation by having well diversified index funds? You should get inflation + some economic growth + risk premium for holding equity.

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?

risk --> reward.

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

#265

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.

What a strange attitude.

I'm very grateful that my landlord chooses to own an apartment and rent it to me on a short-term basis. I needed housing for four months, I already own a house (which is being remodeled), and I certainly didn't want to try to buy a second house for five months.

For that rental, I'm happy to let my landlord earn a profit, in exchange for taking on the risk of owning and maintaining the property.

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

#266

http://www.averageweather.io Only have made like $20 off Adsense, but I've got a lot more work to try and get this tool into passive mode: * working on selecting a date range * style up the site a bit more * maybe have users so you can save searches etc I get very valuable data that the travel industry would probably consider great leads, but I'm just figuring out what to do with it all. Edit - and fill out these gra…

Nice. Some wants:

* If I type Manhattan, NY, automatically show me a map w/ overlay of weather in Manhattan and surrounding areas. Maybe default to today, but also forward cursor to calendar.

* Or maybe automatically show bar chart of Manhattan for 1 week starting today. If they select a day automatically show +-3 days.

* or allow a date range to be selected or even just Month of December

* you need exposure, I've never heard of this before

edit: Oh ok, you've already done some of these, good.

1 more: move the C/F selector to upper right and make it a sticky value per visitor

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

#267
post #173
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.

The fees on HL are quite high though, it's worth shopping around the brokers. http://monevator.com/ is a great resource for this stuff.

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

#268

Previously, as a developer evangelist with Twilio, I had to know the tech events and tech leaders in my local community. While I didn't figure out a repeatable approach then, in late 2015, it hit me. I built a bot network that reads tech events - mostly meetups, some conferences and workshops - for a given city from a variety of sources and tweets them. I use machine learning to determine hashtags, time of day to twe…

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

#269
post #208
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, holding actual physical USD cash is a bad investment; older bills are worth less (exchanges will give you something like 10%-30% less for older bills, if they are accepted at all), so the longer you hold it, the less it's worth. On the other hand, there are funds which track the USD; see for instance http://www.bb.com.br/docs/pub/siteEsp/dtvm/dwn/inf04128893.p... . That fund had a return of 150% in…

You buy food in BRL yes, but when the BRL has a massive swing up or down food prices can swing the opposite way to compensate. If BRL drops 30% and food prices rise 30% you're going to be in a bad situation — dollars are likely to be far more stable

The packaging for every food has the manufacturing location printed on it, and almost every one I've seen is produced somewhere in Brazil, often in a nearby state. So, it's the opposite: the price for the food I buy has a greater chance of tracking the BRL than the USD. Fuel is also produced locally (by Petrobras).

And when the food prices do increase, consider that the food price is a big component of the inflation index, so both IPCA and later SELIC would rise to compensate.

The pain point is electronics. Almost all of it is imported, or has imported components. That one does tend to track the USD.

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

#270
post #188
post #119

My passive income is quite standard. Three apartments in a new block. I bought all of them four years ago when the construction was still unfinished. This got me a good price. I knew that the area would be under continuous development, therefore it won't be hard to find renters. I was right. Best part is that I didn't even have to furnish them. I managed to rent them all unfurnished.

In what country are you located? Furniture is more of a short term rental requirement, unless you've included essential appliances with your categorization.

Germany (Frankfurt). I didn't provide the appliances, except for fridge and electric oven+stove (because I managed to get a discount on buying three sets of these appliances through a friend). Sorry, also the kitchens were furnished by me. The rentals were made long term.
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