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Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

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Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#22
post #6

What's up with the edit? You can't downvote submissions (afaik?) so what are you referring to?

Despite hanyoon being an HN user for ~5 years, it's apparently the first time they've noticed that all text submissions are displayed as low contrast, similar to a downvoted comment. Even the ever-popular "Who's Hiring?" posts display the text identically.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#23

At the start of every month, buy $350 of the S&P500. At year 40, you should have over $1M and at year 50 over $2M. https://vestu.com/articles/how_to_make_1m/

8% is very generous, I thought 7% was the commonly used figure which gets you 800k in 40 years. When you acount for inflation that is not anything you should consider retiring on.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#24
Like.....absolutely surefire? I can only think of one - borrow $$$, buy a large warehouse/commercial building in a popular part of town, pay it off within 5-10 years either by renting it out/running a business that at least pays for the loan payments, then once it's paid off just rent it out - if it's large enough you will easily get residual income of $5k/month or more. That's like the only guaranteed way with >90% chance of happening. Anything else is a much larger risk and depends on you knowing how to run a company.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#25

At the start of every month, buy $350 of the S&P500. At year 40, you should have over $1M and at year 50 over $2M. https://vestu.com/articles/how_to_make_1m/

That doesn't take into account inflation. Presuming you do keep paying $350/month and not increasing that with inflation, that gives you $1,229,998.43 for 40 years.

If you apply the same U.S inflation rate as seen from 1965 > 2015 to cover a 40 year period, that gives you a cumulative inflation rate of -86.7%, leaving you with the equivalent value in todays money of $163,249.36

You might be a millionaire in 40 years, but you're not going to be rich..

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#27
post #20

Go to a local dentist, look at how they do things like X-Rays. What you will find is that they pay GBP 20k+ for an X-Ray machine that connects via USB Dongle to an old Windows machine... really old. You'll also find that all of their equipment is old copies of Windows, in dusty long-unsupported equipment. Sell a service, that virtualises all of this and that you manage. Charge them GBP 250 per month for it, on top of…

actually there's a lot of money just begging to be given to people who solve the simplest stuff in fields where the computing skill is very very low but the expectations of computing and value from it is very high.

This is true...but dentistry is not one of those fields. There are many companies that already do IT for dentistry. Source: my uncle is a dentist. He has been with the same company since 2004.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#28

Buy a couple duplex properties in an inexpensive midwestern or southern state. You'll have to save up some money to do this, and depending on that amount your margins may be nonexistent. Being a landlord is a lot less work than running a business and far less speculative, and the profit margins show it. But you asked about income, not profit.

Why go for less populated areas? It seems to me that that would increase the risk since it will is easier for a small town to start dropping in population as opposed to a big town. Also land is cheaper and there is more room for development so less people need to rent.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#30
post #7

I see this done all the time: Build websites for a couple dozen clients. Charge hosting fees and maintenance each month to keep sites live. Marking up AWS hosting to $50 / mth and charging some hourly here and there at $100 / hr adds up quickly.

That only lasts so long until the client figures out they are being fleeced. My wife hawks those businesses that are way overpaying for their web hosting and the like (maintenance each month to keep sites live).
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