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Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

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Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#31
post #17

* Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral usefulness. * Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment, but stable income and you reduce your own energy bills. See http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar * Renting out property. Needs a much larger initial inves…

In the nicest possible way, your post reads like "Passive income suggestions (2006)" - e.g. I can't really believe that stoozing still works when interest rates are so low, and getting new affiliate sites ranking is very difficult these days.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#33
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give examples of what kind of low-touch reasonable-return investments you've benefited from?

https://www.wealthfront.com Haven't tried this myself, but Tim Ferriss seems to advertise it a lot and I have a few coworkers that use it. Minimum is $500 with no management fees (up to 10k I think)

Looks interesting. However, could not find any info on their past performance. Is that info available somewhere for review?

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#34
post #28

Here's my experiences for last year in passive income: Total Gross Revenues: $20,000 or so. Mostly from a single high-traffic niche site which I promote almost exclusively through social media. My site offers a free version of what a few other websites in the same niche offer as a SaaS service. From that same site, most of the revenue (~80%) is from ads (ad revenue increased when switching to responsive units). Next,…

I'm interested in your path to the free SaaS tool. Do you think it would be viable to outsource the creation of tools to compete with popular, paid ones, offer the outsourced tool for free, and rake in ad-revenue/e-book sales? With proper marketing and seo a person could probably break even within a few months. Is that anything like what you did?

I've never outsourced anything, because I've found that usually websites end up with a "core audience", aka maybe 100-500 people who make up the bulk of discussion, feedback, etc. I like to build relationships with these people, to better understand my audience. Plus they usually market my sites for me. It's a pretty painstakingly long process though.

On the other hand, I've read about owners of tools (like ListenToYouTube, W3Counter) - who run just a tool by itself with little or no social features.

If it's just the tool the audience wants, it may be totally possible to outsource the creation - and than just focus on marketing it. I'd like to see someone take a SaaS tool, outsource the development - release it for free (ad-funded or similar) and post a case study.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#35
post #17

* Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral usefulness. * Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment, but stable income and you reduce your own energy bills. See http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar * Renting out property. Needs a much larger initial inves…

>Stoozing. Find a credit card with 0% interest on balance >transfers.

Doesn't really work anymore : Most balance transfer credit cards charge a minimum fee of 1% to 3% on the transfer amount AFAIK. Savings account pay less than 1%.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#36
post #4

Save money and invest it.

But invested money is not really something that creates an income, unless it is really really much, right? Income in the sense of money that you can freely dispose.

Depends on how much risk you are willing to accept.

For example, the baseline interest rate of Brazilian Government Bonds are paying 14.25%/year.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#37
post #17

* Apps with ads in them. Easy enough to churn out, but decreasing revenues and most of the high earning adverts are the scummiest. Low value and of low moral usefulness. * Solar Panels. In the UK, the government pays you per kWh generated. Needs an upfront investment, but stable income and you reduce your own energy bills. See http://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar * Renting out property. Needs a much larger initial inves…

* Also UK focused - Matched Betting. Exploiting Bookmakers signup/recurring offers for a guaranteed profit. This is good for an early surge of ~£2k followed by a pretty easily achievable £200-£500 per month for <5 hours commitment per week.

Re: Ask HN: Your Passive Income Suggestions?

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Default rates on Lending Club are high enough you get ~33% of the quoted interest rate due to defaults.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have data supporting this statement? I've been interested in peer to peer lending for awhile and this turns me off a bit.

I've made 8-10% per year (defaults included) for the past 2 years on lending club. There are investment limits based on your income that you legally have to follow. I believe its 5% of your income/assets max. They don't confirm your income/assets but there are regulations related to it.

It also takes work to liquidate quickly. So if not selling notes on a second market you're locked into your investments for up to 5 years.

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