Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 266 posts

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#141

Post by refurb »

throwaway088 wrote: post #7

So, about renting, I bought a single family home for $500k in bay area. It now is worth $1M. Gets me rent before expenses of $40000. So far, I have spent about $5k per year on. Repairs etc. So effectively, I make about $20k after taxes, repairs, mortgage interest etc. Overall, I spent $350k by way of downpayment, mortage interest payment, etc. No major tenant issues. Hence, I would peg my return on investment of 5% i…

How did you spend $350k in down payment, mortgage interest on a $500k house?

Do you have a mortgage on it still? I don’t see that in your math. And what about the opportunity cost of your down payment?

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#142

Post by refurb »

throwaway088 wrote: post #25
throwkeep wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that can quickly disappear for those who end up with tenants that don't pay and can't be evicted.

That's my fear. But can you tell me in what situations I cannot evict my tenants. (Honest question).

Right now? CA still has an eviction moratorium going. If your tenants stopped paying rent you’d just have to bank roll it until it ends and you evict them.

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#143

Post by dangus »

outro_macros wrote: post #125
Murgen_90 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your ROI like? Do you have a big initial investment to get this kind of income?

ROI is just under 5% right now Minimum entry into decred staking is 37,000 USD unless you look into ticket splitting I have over a few thousand decred which I'm already planning to never sell so staking is a no-brainer. My cost-basis is probably $25 so my initial investment was much lower

I truly don't mean to be snarky, but I think you're doing worse than an incredibly wide array of medium-risk mutual funds and ETFs.

For example: https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/profile/VSMGX

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#144

Post by chillacy »

dangus wrote: post #138
HockeyPlayer wrote: post #132

Buying real estate for short-term or long-term rentals is buying yourself a second job. If you want something more passive, consider investing in several different real estate syndications. You can find them on CrowdStreet or FundRise although I believe you will get into better deals if you join a local investor group and learn from the experienced members. If there isn't a group near you, I'm enjoying participating…

Sincere question: why is this better than going with the vast array of mutual funds and ETFs available? Is it the return rate? Something else? It seems like your typical ETF or mutual fund is easier to get into and get out of, just a few clicks on your brokerage of choice. Your answer brought up the obvious general answer: the only way to make passive income from investments is to already have a lot of money. To me t…

I looked into syndication and commercial real estate earlier this year. My primary motivation was to diversify my holdings.

I ultimately bought a house where I could rent rooms out on airbnb or to renters instead of going with a syndication. The main factor was getting leverage: a 30 year mortgage at 2.8% APY is basically free money.

Airbnb is not passive, but I look at it this way: I'm going to live in a house anyways, I might as well get into the business of living.

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#145

Post by dangus »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #133
kinghajj wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on why you dislike ETFs? From my point of view, they provide retail trades the opportunity easily to allocate a portfolio among various sectors. Does your dislike of ETFs extend to "old-school" mutual funds, or is there something about ETFs in particular that turns you off of them?

The criticism is that they do not lead to efficient allocation of capital (the point of the stock market) but rather a feedback loop where the ETF fund has to buy TSLA and AMZN because they are in the top 500, and that makes them worth even more, keeping the in the 500s forever, and not because they produce value and were deemed a good choice by a professional investor that did his due diligence, but simply because o…

Maybe this is just a pedantic terminology thing, but what you're talking about is much narrower than the ETF.

I think the image of an ETF you're seeing is of the S&P 500 index fund or total stock market index fund.

However, an ETF is just a method of exchanging securities. There are thousands of ETFs in all kinds of different categories: https://etfdb.com/etfs/

I personally subscribe to the idea that the fears about passive indexes ruining the market with feedback loop economics are overblown.

What they really did was bring down the cost of actively managed funds by providing competition. Not only that, in the post-Bogle world there are a lot of "hybrid" funds and robofunds that offer index-like expense ratios with more opinionated holdings than VTI.

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#146

Post by vineyardmike »

cjohansson wrote: post #93
impostervt wrote: post #32

Publish books on Amazon. I've published 4 and make about $3k in profit per month, after paying for ads on amazon. Don't write them yourself, that's a lot of work. Instead, do key word research about what books sell in non-fiction categories (fiction is a whole different ballgame). Look for keywords that 1) auto complete in the amazon search bar, and 2) have less than 4,000 matching books, and 3) have an average Amazo…

That does not sound passive to me, ideally a passive income should require minimal amount of working hours outside of ones regular job

Passive income is about "do once, profit passively forever after" and this fits that -> write once, revenue forever.

No income source is truly "free". Either you pay with time or money.

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#147

Post by e19293001 »

meristohm wrote: post #49

Cheeky-and-also-serious response: Soil, for the food you grow to eat, share, or sell. Much about a green, growing area is passive income for is. Another option is lobbying your elected officials to regulate in the interest of healthier land, water, and air, which will help you and many others. Making something useful and giving it away (or charging a nominal amount for hosting costs, or asking others to help with tha…

No need for soil for some plants. Check-out Hydroponics[0] no need soil for farming. You could grow indoors or outdoors. That's free food for the future. There's a lot of ongoing hype in this right now. Youtube, facebook groups, reddit, blogs . . .

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#148

Post by Blahah »

blentrop wrote: post #55

I've been using Mudrex[0] to rent bots to put my crypto to work. They have been very good and open about everything. Creators are active in discord server answering questions. [0] https://mudrex.com/

It's hardly fair to judge a crypto fund on the last year. They would have had to be spectacularly incompetent to lose money.

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#149

Post by 3371 »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #104

Credit card cash back, it’s easy to get 5% on most purchases. That’s $1,000 tax-free a year for $20,000 expenses you’ll have either way.

It makes me sad that $20000 is my annual income and I'm a okay (I guess?) developer!

Re: Ask HN: What passive income investments exist to supplement your salary?

#150

Post by turtlebits »

brundolf wrote: post #2

I would point out that renting out a condo is not a passive investment; keeping up with tenants, doing cleaning and maintenance, etc. can be a full-time job (maybe less so for a condo than a house, but still). And as we here probably know, maintaining a website is not necessarily passive either, and I would imagine the same is true of a vending machine. These are projects, and at some point they become businesses; no…

I would disagree. If you own property in a good location, screen your tenants, it's almost no work. I have several properties and spend less than an hour a month on average in total dealing with any issues.
Post reply on HN