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Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

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51–60 of 103 posts

Re: Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

#51
post #17

Peer to peer lending is the best thing I have found this year. You can get around 5 to 7 percent interest and you don't need a large amount of capital. With all the other financial markets so volatile right now this is a pretty solid rate of return. There are always risks of default that you will need to consider, but most platforms allow you to mitigate that with automated diversified portfolios.

Careful though, you can quickly be picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. It's a low amount of interest for unsecured debt and when you don't get the principal back that 5-7% suddenly seems not so high. And "automated diversified portfolios" is exactly what mortgage backed securities were a decade ago. Look how that turned out.

Mortgage backed securities were not risky because they were diversified. They were risky because nobody fully understood how undiversified they were, especially at the lower grade tranches.

Meanwhile, LC was alive in '08, and you can look at how their notes performed. Investors lost single digit percentages. In other words, they beat S&P by a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

#52
post #31

Peer to peer lending is the best thing I have found this year. You can get around 5 to 7 percent interest and you don't need a large amount of capital. With all the other financial markets so volatile right now this is a pretty solid rate of return. There are always risks of default that you will need to consider, but most platforms allow you to mitigate that with automated diversified portfolios.

You might want to try out my project PeerCube https://www.peercube.com , a side project that became full-time job. We provide lots of analytics and automation for Lending Club and Prosper platform and work with both retail and institutional lenders on these platforms. As others mentioned, be careful with unsecured peer to peer lending. It is not all roses. Do your homework and stay diversified in your investments on…

Cool!

Re: Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

#53

I built a themes website ( https://jekyllthemes.io ) in a weekend that's monetized using affiliate links and Adsense. After the initial work was done, it's virtually 100% autopilot and brings in around $80/mo.

What sort of traffic numbers do you get, and how do they discover you? This is the sort of thing that I believe can be easily duplicated. Not copied, but translated to different ideas. Generating traffic can be difficult, so the subject, plus actually useful content, is important.

In the last 30 days the site received 27,000 page views and 7,000 sessions. Organic search made up 80% of traffic. The concept of a curated list for XYZ can be translated for other ideas, sure. Getting traffic was part luck for me. At the time it was a low competition keyword but now there are a lot of similar sites up.

Re: Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

#54

My approach is simple: invest the vast majority of all money after expenses into VOO (S&P 500 index fund). First max out tax advantage accounts like 401k and IRAs, then regular accounts. I have $1,100,000 in VOO. Trailing inflation adjusted returns are 7% ish. Call it $25,666 for the first 4 months of 2016. I KNOW market returns aren't smooth like this but it is a simple approach that works for me (I'm not selling th…

this is my near exact strategy as well, except for holding a balance of 1,00,000... damn that's impressive.

Re: Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

#55
I just created http://namestormy.com to solve a problem I had, which is finding relevant free domain names.

I've hacked it together one morning and in a few days it got featured on product hunt.

I have some features (like automatically filtering domain names without the paid api) rolling out soon and I hope that could make a nice passive income.

Re: Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

#56
post #54

My approach is simple: invest the vast majority of all money after expenses into VOO (S&P 500 index fund). First max out tax advantage accounts like 401k and IRAs, then regular accounts. I have $1,100,000 in VOO. Trailing inflation adjusted returns are 7% ish. Call it $25,666 for the first 4 months of 2016. I KNOW market returns aren't smooth like this but it is a simple approach that works for me (I'm not selling th…

this is my near exact strategy as well, except for holding a balance of 1,00,000... damn that's impressive.

I bought my first stocks in 1993. Stick with it and you can easily beat me!

Re: Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

#58

I recorded some tutorial/lesson videos on niche tech topics and put them on YouTube. Spent about 40 hours creating and editing the videos. They have been online now for nearly 10 months and i have a total of ~250k views. That made me nearly $300. Not a ton of money but considering it is truly passive and will probably be making another $500 in the next 10-15 months its acceptable.

Couldn't you monetize better with some niche related affiliate products?

Re: Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

#59
post #49

I've been running https://briefmetrics.com/ for almost 3 years now (email reports of your Google Analytics). It has been going back and forth between 100% running itself and investing a couple months of effort into it. I discovered I really don't enjoy marketing/promotion, so it has languished for sure. It's up to a bit over $1,000/mo right now which I'm fairly happy about but I feel it could easily be x2-x5 of that…

Dude, you should definitely raise your prices. I would pay at least $19 a month for this. Had to double take when I saw $8 a month.

Re: Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

#60
post #49

I've been running https://briefmetrics.com/ for almost 3 years now (email reports of your Google Analytics). It has been going back and forth between 100% running itself and investing a couple months of effort into it. I discovered I really don't enjoy marketing/promotion, so it has languished for sure. It's up to a bit over $1,000/mo right now which I'm fairly happy about but I feel it could easily be x2-x5 of that…

Dude, you should definitely raise your prices. I would pay at least $19 a month for this. Had to double take when I saw $8 a month.

Let's talk after you start paying. I'd love to hear how you're using it and how it's providing value for you—and even get a testimonial for the frontpage! :)

FWIW there are multiple tiers: $8/mo, $35/mo, $85/mo, $275/mo and I have one custom-priced "enterprise" client.

That's another lesson I learned: The kinds of feedback I get from paying customers vs drive-by trials is completely different and often opposite.

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