Legitimately passive income is not a thing.
It's not a good term for what people are describing here. Most will have been quite active in generating their income.
Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
31–40 of 90 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
#32Legitimately passive income is not a thing.
Dividends?
Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
#33I run a clothing store online. All of the order processing and fulfillment is handled automatically. I do no marketing or advertisement beyond social media. It's pretty nice. Sometimes I sell meme shirts that generate $3k in a month if I'm feeling particularly clever. I was able to bootstrap this business for like $12 for a domain name and a free trial of Shopify which gave me enough runway to scale. Been doing this…
Excellent America painting, really captures the passivity of the country and the spirit of this thread. https://odomojuli.store/products/america
It's not loading for me.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
#34This might sound strange, but I don't like the term "passive income". It sounds like a scam. Probably some people actually want a scam, but I think there is a better way of putting it. Profit is roughly "sales - costs". Normally costs are scaled by labour. The higher the volume, the more labour and therefore the higher the costs.
You can categorise the shapes of these curves. In a really dysfunctional company, the amount of labour your need per unit will increase as volume increases. A good example of this might be some bus companies where the cost per rider increases as the number of riders increase -- you get popular and you go out of business.
Consulting companies tend to have a linear relationship. The more you sell, the more you have to do. However, the per unit cost doesn't really change based on volume. Manufacturing companies tend to have a less than linear relationship. The per unit cost decreases with volume. You get the "efficiency of scale".
With computers we can create services with a very nearly constant relationship between volume and labour. In other words, I do the work once and then there is no other cost to increase sales. Of course, from a business perspective, this is ideal. You do the work and then you can scale the business without having to invest more money.
The thing I dislike about the term "passive income" is that it implies that you are getting free money. It's not true. For this kind of constant cost business, you've front loaded the costs. The first one costs as much as the first million. In fact, you may be in the red for a very long time (or forever... "Any side projects, Games, OSS" ;-) ). For this reason, I'd much prefer (the infinitely less catchy) term "front loaded business". I guess it will never catch on, but I wish we could discuss this topic without having to always derail into get rich quick and "living the dream of money without work" schemes.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
#35No side projects. The little time I have outside of work and family, I read or browse hacker news before falling asleep. I did take vacation recently and play The Witcher 3, which ruined gaming for me.
I have about $200k spread thoughout some index funds and individual stocks that all pay dividends in my post tax accounts. I reinvest all that income and the taxes are kind of annoying to deal with, but’s it’s better than nothing.
I also have a high yield savings account. A big chunk of my total cash is tied up here because I’d rather stay liquid. I think the rate is now 2% annual or just north of. It gets me $300 a month. I just save it and let it grow, aside from taxes on the interest.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
#36Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
#37I wish I had one :(
Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
#38Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
#39Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019?
#40I bought a site last summer that sells YouTube intro videos for $5/$10 a pop: http://introcave.com I made about $13k off it, which sounds good but was really only about $20/hour. Hoping to grow it quite a bit this year and then start offloading tasks. I don’t know if I can ever get it truly passive, but that’s the dream.
I love how easy it is the see and hear previews of the intros (just hover over them)!