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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?

#451

Post by distances »

susi22 wrote: post #235
velcro wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Do you mean also for accumulating ETFs? Are you supposed to list all ETF purchase prices/start-of-year value, and the end-of-the-year value in the tax declaration, then?

Do Germans not have any practical way to invest in accumulating funds?

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

#452

Post by donohoe »

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.

Cool. How do you process payments via text? I assume you send them a link to a page to complete transaction?

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

#453

Post by t0mislav »

berdario wrote: post #406
t0mislav wrote: post #360

25$/month in Adsense. Not much, but it's passive and it grows. Everything started as a fun small project. http://random.country/

Parsing of the capital name doesn't handle Switzerland properly

Ok, will check, thanks!

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

#454

Post by nthState »

omegote wrote: post #367
andersthue wrote: post #185

Still my 5 year old watermarking tool making around 3-5k$ a month. My only new product this year was a 6 weeks video course [1] in productivity, it makes around $5000 every time I fill a class. 1. http://timeblock.com TimeBlock course

What's that watermarking tool of yours?

Maybe it's: https://www.watermark-image.com/download.aspx

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

#456

Post by xchaotic »

brianwawok wrote: post #224
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.

True, but no income is truly passive. I think you also have to consider the savings of not having to own a house (or being able to rent out an existing one) so it's as good as any other 'passive' strategy posted here.

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

#457

Post by alex_anglin »

kobeya wrote: post #403
ceejayoz wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renaissance is part of the market, and it's the sort of thing that we individual investors can't beat. "The market can't be beat" doesn't mean no one can see better returns - it means a random yahoo like me simply can't compete with the information, processing power, and access funds like Renaissance have. Thus, an average investor is a lot better off with an index fund instead of trying to pick individual stocks. (F…

So buy into the Renaissance mutual fund. There, you beat the market.

Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns?

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

#458

Post by n-exploit »

robius wrote: post #389

I used to do index funds. Then I went looking for an active portfolio manager. After a few years I found one, he was good, but 6mo in he switched jobs and left for another career. The next guy wasn't good and eventually didn't want to actively manage the account. I kept looking until this year when I found fractalgo, which is used by large institutional investors to trade through science without emotion and second-gu…

What type of returns are you seeing? How has it performed in down periods? What's your beta?

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

#460

Post by irrational »

chug wrote: post #448
klenwell wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier this year, at my last boring corporate job, I was trading stock trading stories with our head accountant. (Like the time my brother and I were trading stock tips about 10 years ago, when he turned me on to some up-and-coming German solar energy firm and I mentioned to him some small biotech company I had just read about. I invested a couple thousand dollars in the company my brother suggested and it was bankr…

It's important to remember that this is putting all of your eggs in one basket to a certain extent though. Your income, your 401k match, and your ESPP are all tied to your employer, so as long as things are good, ESPPs can be a great way to make easy money, but if things take a stark downturn, you can find yourself with ESPP you lost money on, a slouching 401k, and no job. The chances of that happening are fairly low…

That's true, but I always sell my ESPP as soon as it is purchased. That is an immediate 15+% return. Our ESPP is 15% off of the lower of either the beginning or the ending of the offering. Of course the hope is that it will be the lower at the beginning of the offering so that the sell will be 15% + the amount the stock has risen since the beginning.
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