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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?

#641

Post by [deleted] »

branchless wrote: post #629
koonsolo wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you are saying, but I think you are missing an important concept. If you created more value than you spend, you have an extra. Other people want to spend more than they created. So what happens is that people who have the extra, can loan their value to those who have a deficit. This loaning can also be considered a service. People are not forced into renting. What Mr. Money Mustache is saying is "He…

He's saying "i live frugally, be like me" then doing something that doesn't scale. We can't all be the landlord, rent seeking.

[deleted]

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

#642

Post by koonsolo »

branchless wrote: post #629
koonsolo wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you are saying, but I think you are missing an important concept. If you created more value than you spend, you have an extra. Other people want to spend more than they created. So what happens is that people who have the extra, can loan their value to those who have a deficit. This loaning can also be considered a service. People are not forced into renting. What Mr. Money Mustache is saying is "He…

He's saying "i live frugally, be like me" then doing something that doesn't scale. We can't all be the landlord, rent seeking.

He says: Earn a lot, spend little, invest the difference. Once the revenue of your investments covers your spending, retire. That's what he's saying. And the key is indeed living frugally, which makes it all easier. And yes, he rents out houses, that's his investment. I don't see anything wrong with this.

If everyone was a landlord, then that would be a pretty bad investment now would it?

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

#643

Post by mark_l_watson »

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?

re: piracy: I just released my latest Leanpub book (Haskell Tutorial and Cookbook) 2 weeks ago, and I put a Creative Commons 'share with attribution, no modifications, no commercial reuse' license, and I explicitly tell people that it is legal to share the PDF, ePub, and Mobi files with their friends, and they have my best wishes if they do so.

I have written a number of books and the payout in increased networking with people who are into the same tech as I am, increased consulting business, etc. is awesome. I also make decent passive income from writing, but that is a secondary objective.

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

#644

Post by saddestcatever »

averageweather wrote: post #256

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…

Is there more data that I'm not seeing? I just see high & low. This information is available on literally every travel guide.

Also, "Bangkok Thailand" asks me to pick a town/city.

What is the question the user actually wants to know? Should I pack a raincoat? Should I pack a dress coat for nights? Do I need an umbrella, or just a coat with a hood, etc...

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

#645

Post by mojomark »

klenwell wrote: post #300
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…

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…

"...the best investment I ever made was our company's ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plan)."

This is certainly not true for all companies. I lost over $100K due to our Employee Stock being driven into the ground over the course of a decade by a CEO and board who had loose ethics and no business running a company.

My advice is, before investing in you're ESPP (or Employee Stock Ownership Plan - ESOP), even if you're surrounded by exceptional talent, take a close look at your corporate leadership before purchasing. If they seem sleezy and disingenuous, they probably are and it may be 10 years before you realize you've been totally screwed.

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

#647

Post by module0000 »

Rodfarva wrote: post #420
module0000 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, my best passive income was from investing as much of my income as I can part with paycheck to paycheck. No boring investments though, always the exact same two funds: UWTI and DWTI, both of which are gone, they delisted on Dec 8th. That said...there are many funds like them, those in particular are 3x leveraged crude oil ETF's. That means if the price of oil rises 1%, UWTI rises 3%. If it falls 1…

This is very bad advice. 3x funds are not meant for long term buy an hold. They experience contango and even if they index end up flat you can still lose money from the gyrations of the market. Nobody should b investing in in leveraged etf longer than a few days.

I didn't say to buy and hold it...that would be very foolish unless you know something that noone else does(which is unlikely). I was talking about using the daily volatility to profit from following the banks. ie: day trading. My positions in leveraged funds last less than 60 minutes, and the average is probably closer to 10 minutes.

Before you jump into 2x or 3x, you should be able to reliably generate returns from a non-leveraged ETF tracking the same commodity.

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

#648

Post by antr »

brianwawok wrote: post #635
antr wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worst case scenario, pay the mortgage with my salary.

So that seems a pretty risky investment to me. Only a few percent profit for the risk of eating a giant monthly bill.

"Risky" investment for commercial real estate in a tier I area in a European capital? I find any residential property more risky and volatile, at least from a price elasticity point of view.

I guess we have different views on how we perceive risk. But that is ok.

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

#649

Post by limedaring »

e12e wrote: post #445
limedaring wrote: post #206

I wrote Hello Web App and Hello Web App: Intermediate Concepts ( http://hellowebapp.com , they're learn-to-build-a-web-app books using Django) and self-published both in 2015. Just checked and this year I've made about $13,000 in profit. It's mostly passive — this year I started using a fulfillment company so the majority of my work is sending them orders (and answering questions about the book.) Hoping to continue t…

I'd be curious to hear a rough estimate on how much work went into those books, and the site? I'm assuming "13k in profit" means sans expenses for proof reading, hosting etc - but not counting the actual work writing everything? I also find it satisfying to see that it's apparently quite possible to make (some) money on such projects - keep up the good work! :-)

So the year they were wrote (first book came out May 2015, second book in Dec 2015), I made $15k profit. Mainly because I did two Kickstarters for the books + the launch campaigns. Of course, 2015 (and a bit of 2014) was when I was spending time writing/designing/editing/publishing the books, so "profit" would be lower if you include my time.

This year, other than answering questions on my book's discussion forum as well as running a couple workshops for PyCon and DjangoCon, has been largely writing-free so it would truly be 13k in profit. :)

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

#650

Post by limedaring »

wineisfine wrote: post #595
limedaring wrote: post #206

I wrote Hello Web App and Hello Web App: Intermediate Concepts ( http://hellowebapp.com , they're learn-to-build-a-web-app books using Django) and self-published both in 2015. Just checked and this year I've made about $13,000 in profit. It's mostly passive — this year I started using a fulfillment company so the majority of my work is sending them orders (and answering questions about the book.) Hoping to continue t…

Very nice work there. Could you share the name of the fulfilment company (or a similar), Google gives me here some rather traditional results. Outsourcing support would be of great help.

I'm using PrintNinja (http://printninja.com) - they also do the printing for me, and they've been phenomenal. Great quality, reasonable prices, absolutely stellar customer service. The fulfillment is relatively new, and they're still working out the kinks, but I really like working with them so it's nice having only one company for both aspects.
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