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Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#131

Post by djrogers »

eonw wrote: post #77
djrogers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> owning real estate that someone else manages or really owning any business that someone else fully manages for you If you've ever owned real estate or a business you'd know it can't be 100% passive. Even with a property manager, there are always things to fix, change, or update, and the associated decisions to make about it. One bad tenant or a property manager with bad judgement, and you're 100% back in full-time…

you can in fact pay agencies to deal with ALL of that, they just take it out of your cut. have you owned real estate or a business? I have both and i can attest they can be fully managed by others, without headache to the owner, its very simple. industrial RE investors do this all the time.

I do in fact own both, and they only run on whir own until your agent screws something up. It may require less work than other forms of income, but if you expect it to work out long term, it can never be completely passive.

Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#132

Post by pesfandiar »

patrickgordon wrote: post #82
protomok wrote: post #40

Portfolio of index funds based on http://canadiancouchpotato.com 25% TSX (Canadian market) 25% S&P500 (US market) 25% MSCI EAFE (Developed market excluding Canada/US) 25% Fixed Income - cash,bonds,'high' interest savings account, etc. Requires about 4-5 hours of time once per year to rebalance portfolio and update some partially automated Google Docs files to track performance. Works for me...also planning to get a r…

If you don't mind answering, how long have you been doing this for and roughly how has your rate of return been?

I've been following an older Canadian Couch Potato portfolio for a few years now. The market has been mostly growing since 2010 so it probably doesn't count, but it's been returning an average of 7-8% every year (dividend+gain). Even last year, when the Canadian economy didn't do well, its return was positive.

It takes more than 4-5 hours a year for me though. I invest a part of my income every month. It makes sense since I don't pay any commission on purchases, so YMMV.

More info: http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2015/05/01/how-i-invest-my-sa...

Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#133

Post by thesmileyone »

quicksilver03 wrote: post #95

I wrote a book to help boostrapped startups choose the best hosting solution: https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com/ Promoting the book has been the major issue for me, which is probably why it hasn't sold as much as I would have wanted.

If it is actually good (ie, you stand by it, proudly!) then put it on Amazon KDP and link to that high up before your landing page (which is your website it appears).

You can even drive traffic right to it, ie from FB ads to the amazon link... and if you have positive reviews then it should sell if you target the right people.

And drop the price also in line with the rest.

Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#134

Post by dllthomas »

charlesdm wrote: post #66
Jugurtha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any statistics on how each of those are performing relative to each other . I've never traded real money,only paper trading freshman year and played a game on MarketWatch where I traded like a monkey and made profits. I also put a prognostic on AAPL when it was in its 52 week's low and on ORCL and the outcome was as I had predicted. Maybe because there was no real money at stake. I'm just curious and find this intere…

Paper money is not real money. You won't act and respond in the same way as if you're dealing with your own cash. Trading.. well, you'll probably lose your shirt. Investing however is very doable. Start with the stuff you understand well (i.e. probably tech). Why not just put in $5k and see where you end up? Even small amounts can teach you a lot.

> Start with the stuff you understand well (i.e. probably tech).

I worry about diversification. Tech is what I know, but I am already heavily invested: by far my biggest asset is my career, skills and experience.

Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#135

Post by charlesdm »

dllthomas wrote: post #134
charlesdm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper money is not real money. You won't act and respond in the same way as if you're dealing with your own cash. Trading.. well, you'll probably lose your shirt. Investing however is very doable. Start with the stuff you understand well (i.e. probably tech). Why not just put in $5k and see where you end up? Even small amounts can teach you a lot.

> Start with the stuff you understand well (i.e. probably tech). I worry about diversification. Tech is what I know, but I am already heavily invested: by far my biggest asset is my career, skills and experience.

Diversification isn't all people make it out to be. As an example: if you had to pick one stock would you be more likely to pick a great tech, mining or industrial stock? If you know tech and you work within tech, the answer will likely be tech.

Also, people have different risk levels. My personal opinion is that you need to make sure that, if you make a bet (by picking a stock) and you win, you win big (at least 15-30% annualised).

The S&P has good averaged annual returns and it's a good idea to invest a decent amount into an S&P fund. But if you pick an individual stock to invest in, you need to do your homework and it needs to be able to outperform the index.

Think George Soros vs Warren Buffet. In the early days, Soros would make massive bets on certain events and/or stocks. He bet his entire fund on the decline of the pound and made a killing. Warren Buffet is much more methodical about investing and gets great returns too. Both great investors, but they probably have different risk levels, different focus areas and different ways of approaching things. And that's one of the things that makes investing fun!

Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#136

Post by bkrull »

dizrupt wrote: post #98
bkrull wrote: post #70

I run BitPixels ( http://www.bitpixels.com ) that provides automated website thumbnails. I purchased Bitpixels from another HN member a few years ago and have continued to build and market it. BitPixels currently makes ~$1k/month which is enough to cover the App Engine and DigitalOcean bills plus a bit extra. I'm working to find 1-2 more marketing channels that can drive sustainable growth.

Not 100% sure how this works or what it does. Can you explain?

Definitely, so imagine if HN decided to show a thumbnail image beside every link on the front page so users get a preview of what they'll see before clicking the link. When looking for a solution HN will quickly discover that auto generating website thumbnails is a nontrivial challenge to do well.

BitPixels solves this challenge by providing a simple img tag HTML code that HN would use to automatically generate and cache a png thumbnail of any URL.

Behind the scenes, BitPixels uses a server farm of real Google Chrome browsers to load URLs and take screenshots so the thumbnails look exactly like the real website. Most competitors use open source libraries like phantomjs or cutycapt that produce inaccurate thumbnails on modern websites.

Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#137

Post by tones411 »

I have made several small mobile apps. (http://anthonytietjen.blogspot.com/p/my-portfolio.html) I charge for some of them, but my White Screen Flashlight has ads. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anthonytie...) If you are into programming, and are considering an app, make something super simple (like my Cost Per Sq Foot Calculator), and you might be surprised that people actually pay for it.

Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#138

Post by patrickgordon »

pesfandiar wrote: post #132
patrickgordon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind answering, how long have you been doing this for and roughly how has your rate of return been?

I've been following an older Canadian Couch Potato portfolio for a few years now. The market has been mostly growing since 2010 so it probably doesn't count, but it's been returning an average of 7-8% every year (dividend+gain). Even last year, when the Canadian economy didn't do well, its return was positive. It takes more than 4-5 hours a year for me though. I invest a part of my income every month. It makes sense…

Thanks for the info. It is appreciated!!

Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#139

Post by abrookewood »

kohanz wrote: post #108
abrookewood wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's an abuse of the term passive income - his site's product is the interviews he conducts. Unless he automates that away (which would be interesting), he's intrinsically tied up with it's success.

I agree it's not passive yet, but with a blog, he doesn't need to do much automation. Once the content is up, there will be a fairly long tail of visitors to whom the content is new. When I applied for my professional engineering license in Canada a few years ago, I blogged about the process because I found a total lack of such content when I looked for it. I haven't touched the blog since I got the license (over a y…

Good point .. now you just need a few hundred of these and could retire ;)

Re: Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?

#140

Post by jackgolding »

bkrull wrote: post #136
dizrupt wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 100% sure how this works or what it does. Can you explain?

Definitely, so imagine if HN decided to show a thumbnail image beside every link on the front page so users get a preview of what they'll see before clicking the link. When looking for a solution HN will quickly discover that auto generating website thumbnails is a nontrivial challenge to do well. BitPixels solves this challenge by providing a simple img tag HTML code that HN would use to automatically generate and c…

You should chat to the indiehackers guy, sounds like you could help eachother out!
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