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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?

#391

Post by branchless »

antr wrote: post #297
branchless wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American dream: very little work and lots of money. Reality: others work hard and get less so rentiers can kick back.

because... I haven't worked hard and saved money? or, like you are implying, I shouldn't have saved any money, and spent it all... fancy cars, exotic vacations, and parties. I guess I gave up one lifestyle to reach another one. We all have different priorities.

I don't believe land is taxed highly enough so the system encourages monopolising land to appropriate value added by labour that should be going to workers.

I think right now we have a situation were money makes money and selling your labour doesn't, in the average case not in the "I'm a senior engineer at google" case.

I just don't see how this ends well. Workers struggling to get wage rises at all and yet 5% per anum return for those with capital. We've just had Trump and yet here everyone is basically saying "I can get further ahead by playing the system".

It's not looking good.

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

#392

Post by cpach »

gottebp wrote: post #312

Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL SmartGrinder. The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use ifixit[2] to drive the traffic. It's passively making ~$425/mo with about 10 minutes of work per week on my end. This all happened because my grinder failed and I couldn't get parts. [1] https://www.shapeways.com/prod…

Honestly, that’s one of the coolest side projects I’ve heard of this year. Kudos!

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

#393

Post by retube »

DangerousPie wrote: post #77
cesarb wrote: post #71

Here in Brazil we have it easy. The most boring funds (the ones which track the interbank rate - CDI) easily return around 12% per year (depending on the administration fee; the smaller the administration fee, the higher the return). With the inflation around 6% per year, this gives around 6% returns before tax. If you stay with the fund for at least two years (and it's of the correct kind), the tax rate is 15% over…

You probably know this, but it's always important to keep in mind what causes such high interest rates. A high interest rate is a signal that lenders are wary of lending money to the borrower because of an increased risk of default/inflation. That's fine as long as you are aware of this, but don't think you're getting a "better deal" than someone investing in a boring 1% German government bond. That 12.5% you're gett…

That's not true for domestic currency bonds. There's no chance of default as a sovereign can always print more of it's own currency. Sovereign yields are driven by inflation expectations and what investors need to earn on excess of that.

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

#394

Post by AtticusTheGreat »

rovr138 wrote: post #382
AtticusTheGreat wrote: post #378

I just recently launched a statuspage aggregator at https://statusbeacon.io which has been pretty cool to work on. I've also got an online multiplayer boggle game that has made me low 3 digits per month since about 2008, http://serpentinegame.com , mostly ad revenue but also paid memberships.

Looked at statusbeacon.io. Is there a place to see all the providers you monitor without having to sign up?

Hey, currently no I don't have that list in a public place. So far I have 43 services integrated, and most of those are fairly big ones like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, etc. I was thinking about making the list available on the landing page though, so maybe I'll do that. Anything in particular you're looking for?

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

#396

Post by jastr »

karolisram wrote: post #299
jastr wrote: post #273

TheSimplePostcard.com, makes me ~$220/month. Text it a photo and it sends a postcard. It took me a few long weekends to build using Django and Twilio.

Sweet project, like it a lot :) perhaps do the same for Europe?

I need to find a postcard printer in Europe.

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

#397

Post by PascLeRasc »

gottebp wrote: post #312

Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL SmartGrinder. The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use ifixit[2] to drive the traffic. It's passively making ~$425/mo with about 10 minutes of work per week on my end. This all happened because my grinder failed and I couldn't get parts. [1] https://www.shapeways.com/prod…

This is really cool and I'm sure many here would love a longer write up of your process doing this.

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

#398

Post by pdog »

nchrys wrote: post #226
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?

Invest in a cheap French or Eurozone total market index fund. It only makes sense to invest in a fund that matches your local currency.

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

#399

Post by armenarmen »

I built catelus.com a couple weeks ago and I've done $130 in revenue.

It's a domain name idea generator. You feed it a keyword and it translates it into 30+ languages and shows you .com's that are not being used. Trying now to get more eyeballs across it. Fun though!

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

#400

Post by berdario »

bb611 wrote: post #281
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…

Unemployment is only 4.9% because the participation rate dropped 3% points in the last 10 years: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 That's close to 10 million people who have stopped looking for jobs who we would otherwise expect to have them.

But the participation rate can float for a few different reasons

http://qz.com/286213/the-chart-obama-haters-love-most-and-th...

(clickbaity headline, but the contents seem sound)

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