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Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

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Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#152

Post by klawed »

Vivtek wrote: post #101
nostromo wrote: post #40

Real estate. (Ok, not 100% passive, but what is?) You can buy a duplex for not much more than a single family house in many US cities and, thanks to the low interest rates for an owner-occupied mortgage, rent out half and live for free. Unlike tech, you will not have a giant windfall with real estate; but also unlike tech, it's very easy to price your product, find customers, and figure out what your cashflow will be…

A word of caution: unless you have the personal skills to deal with tenants, do not make the mistake of thinking that real estate is passive income. Like any earning occupation, landlording takes attention to detail, the ability not to procrastinate, and people skills. Unlike most occupations, landlording will bring you into contact with some of the worst people the planet has to offer, under what has to be the worst…

>Unlike most occupations, landlording will bring you into contact with some of the worst people the planet has to offer, under what has to be the worst possible set of circumstances.

I suggest rephrasing to

>Unlike most occupations, landlording may bring you into...

I've had a rental property now for many years. It's in an evolving, urban Boston neighborhood and the property generates ~$1000 more than the mortgage, taxes and insurance per month. I have 5 tenants who are all recent college grads. My agent did credit checks on all of the original tenants and many new ones have cycled through over the years. Aside from replacing a couple of appliances (which consisted of ordering them online and coordinating delivery with a tenant) I've had zero issues. In fact, the last 3 years, I've given each tenant $100 off of December's rent to let them know I like having them as tenants. I have about $80,000 out of pocket invested so without even considering the equity I'm building in the house, I'm getting around a 15% rate of return (granted at a higher tax rate that a capital gains...)

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#153

Post by icoder »

I created http://www.colormandala.com

It makes ~2 dollars a day from adsense. Breadcrumbs, but I haven't spend any time on it for like half a year. Amazon affiliate adds almost nothing to this. Being in the Chrome Webstore seems to have helped a lot in page visits.

I still wonder from time to time if I should put some effort in upping this a bit. But my time is limited and the app doesn't fit my current strategy (mobile, mhealth specifically).

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#154

Post by nanijoe »

apike wrote: post #78
w1ntermute wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're practically giving that app away at $5. Wedding-related businesses are extremely high margin, simply because it's super easy to rip people off when they're really happy (same applies for funerals, except people are too sad to care in that case). You could probably sell this for 5x as much and still make more money - the bride will want everything to be perfect for the wedding and will be willing to spend whate…

Intuitively, I'd agree. When we release the upcoming major version (iPad support, advanced queueing, etc) I'd like to try $10. On the other hand, after 1.5 years at $5 we've been trying $2, and revenue has been consistently higher since the change. I suspect this is because it drove us into findable range in the "Top Paid Music" chart, but with no analytics it's frustratingly hard to prove.

Make an iPad only version and sell that for $9.99 or $19.99

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#156

Post by ssebro »

sinak wrote: post #103

Two friends and I started http://repeaterstore.com straight out of college. Within a year it was profitable, and within 3 it was doing $3 million in revenue (and about a 15% profit margin). It's pretty much stabilized since then, and we hired a manager to monitor the operation. Most stock is shipped through drop shoppers, we just have 2 customer support people to handle phone calls and emails. Forthe last 2 years we'…

You're having db issues here : http://www.repeaterstore.com/applications/small-building.htm...

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#157

Post by saryant »

jwatte wrote: post #136
phil wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to be pretty pessimistic to think taxes will rise faster than your rate of return!

The point of 401k is that you compound the growth on the deferred tax money, and then pay much less /present value/ tax once you retire. Index funds and high yield bond funds give you low overhead with almost no "gambling" element. Drawbacks: Limited maximum contribution, very long deferred gratification, vulnerable to future policy changes.

Exactly. I keep all of my 401k in index funds, same with my Roth IRA. I have other non-tax-advantaged accounts I use to investing in individual stocks.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#158

Post by ckluis »

TWAndrews wrote: post #54
w1ntermute wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're practically giving that app away at $5. Wedding-related businesses are extremely high margin, simply because it's super easy to rip people off when they're really happy (same applies for funerals, except people are too sad to care in that case). You could probably sell this for 5x as much and still make more money - the bride will want everything to be perfect for the wedding and will be willing to spend whate…

Holy crap yes. My wife works in the wedding industry, and being able to manage the music for your entire wedding is worth way more than $5. A DJ will cost something like 50 - 100x that.

Got married last year. $1200 for the DJ.
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