Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 713 posts

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

#481

Post by chug »

irrational wrote: post #460
chug wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only company I've worked at with an ESPP required you to hold the stock for 1 year before selling--not in the sense of tax incentives unfortunately, but you literally cannot sell before 1 year. I didn't realize there were ESPPs where you sell immediately. In that case, woo free money!

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

#482

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pdog wrote: post #398
nchrys wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>It only makes sense to invest in a fund that matches your local currency. //

Why? Surely investing in a higher growth economy is better?

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

#483

Post by Murkin »

billconan wrote: post #437
Murkin wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a great place to build and edit the book. The pre-release is a good market validation bonus. Once its done we will publish on Amazon as well (no exclusivity at leanpub)

Are you worried about piracy? Because leanpub allows paid user to download pdf and epub files. those can be easily shared. whereas, on amazon, you probably could only distribute the work via kindle and printed (I'm not sure), without providing any shareable files?

You can't escape piracy if you offer epub.. just hope enough people appreciate enough to buy.

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

#484

Post by makeset »

logicallee wrote: post #117
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…

Humanity has had numbers for some 200,000 years. any hacker can, in the next ten minutes, cause their CPU to do more arithmetic than the arithmetic (explicitly adding 2+5, and so forth, multiplying two numbers in their heads) that every single person has done in the history of humanity. okay, but that's just numbers. Today we live in a connected world where 2,000,000,000 people can be reached in any eight-hour period…

> rather than saving it, they should invest it into their businesses

"Saving it" here is not hiding it under the mattress. Buying stocks is literally investing it, only into other people's businesses. Buying corporate bonds is lending it to other people's businesses so they can grow. And investments into existing established businesses could easily be argued to have at least as large a potential impact as starting out on your own with a minor project that is more likely to fail than not.

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

#485

Post by Huppie »

hobonumber1 wrote: post #476
paviva wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't buy directly from Vanguard in Canada. Questrade is essentially a very low cost broker (low as in free for ETFs).

You can buy certain Vanguard Funds from Canada. For example: VAB, VSB, VCN.

I think you misunderstood the parent. All three examples are ETFs with Canadian assets, available on the Canadian stock exchange.

OP's point is (most likely) that you can't buy them directly from Vanguard (i.e. using an account on www.vanguardcanada.ca) but will have to buy them using a broker (e.g. Questrade.)

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

#486

Post by nshelly »

pdog wrote: post #402
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…

This isn't really passive income outside of the 2% dividend yield of a total market index fund, which isn't all that great. A $500,000 investment only yields about $10,000 annually. (Not to mention the significant risk of a market drawdown in a given year.)

I think the idea is that you can plan on withdrawing 4% every year as well. The more flexible you are with your expenses, the more you can withdraw while ensuring you will have sufficient income throughout your retirement. I like the hybrid constant-percentage / constant-dollar withdrawal method where you keep 7.5 years of withdrawals in bonds and the rest in stocks. So a $1m portfolio produces $40k per year so 7.5x * $40k is $300k in bonds, and $700k in stocks. https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Withdrawal_methods#Combinati...

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

#487

Post by dang »

gragas wrote: post #374
mFixman wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be a better idea to invest in bonds or more stable sources of investment for the next few years until we can make sure of the impact of Brexit-Trump? I wouldn't be surprised if AAPL and other giant third sector companies fall in value right now.

I hope you do that. That way you'll be able to quantify your liberal hubris.

> liberal hubris

When a thread takes a turn for the worse, please don't reply unless you can make it better, not worse still. Political name-calling makes it worse still.

Since I had to ask you to keep partisan politics out of HN threads only a couple days ago, I'd like to emphasize the point. This is not what Hacker News is for. Please (re)-read:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

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

#488

Post by DanBC »

billconan wrote: post #437
Murkin wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a great place to build and edit the book. The pre-release is a good market validation bonus. Once its done we will publish on Amazon as well (no exclusivity at leanpub)

Are you worried about piracy? Because leanpub allows paid user to download pdf and epub files. those can be easily shared. whereas, on amazon, you probably could only distribute the work via kindle and printed (I'm not sure), without providing any shareable files?

It's very easy to pirate Kindle files.

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

#489

Post by Schwolop »

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 awesome! I have that grinder, but haven't had this issue (yet...). My only issue is that the lowest grind setting isn't quite fine enough for some beans, but with your pictures I think I can actually see where to shove a tiny shim to make that work better too. I'd always intended to do that but hadn't ever gotten around to it.
Post reply on HN