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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#111

Post by therealjohn »

ABS wrote: post #70
austenallred wrote: post #11

I co-wrote a book on user acquisition and co-created an accompanying video course to climb out of debt left over from a failed startup. Made $104,000 in revenue since June (turns out the user acquisition stuff actually works), about 87k of which is profit, so we'll say ~$11,000/month part-time. It still makes me a solid $2,000/month now with zero work, and hopefully more once the book is officially published. (It's d…

Vincent Dignan, one of the worst twitter spammer I've ever blocked (more than once since he likes/liked to ignore complaints, open a new account and do it again...to the same people!). If spamming all of twitter in alphabetical order is an example of the growth hacks.... I see the account he used to do most of the spamming has been suspended by Twitter now https://twitter.com/vdignan

Would you not spam Twitter if you were in debt and could make 11k/mo? I agree it's lame but gotta pay the bills :)

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#112

Post by therealjohn »

sanswork wrote: post #39
maaaats wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a book is not exactly passive.

I'm going to assume from your reply that you've just not heard the term before but passive income refers to income from something where you do the work up front and it continues to pay down the road. A book is a perfect example of that.

2k/mo with zero work is indeed passive.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#113

Post by ukoki »

madaxe_again wrote: post #79
cesarb wrote: post #71

Here in Brazil we have it easy. The most boring funds (the ones which track the interbank rate - CDI) easily return around 12% per year (depending on the administration fee; the smaller the administration fee, the higher the return). With the inflation around 6% per year, this gives around 6% returns before tax. If you stay with the fund for at least two years (and it's of the correct kind), the tax rate is 15% over…

Man alive. Here in the UK a five year treasury bond yields precisely nothing - potentially less than nothing. I have a mountain of cash and nothing to invest it in here. Even property doesn't present a meaningful yield any more. It also doesn't look like it's going to get better, just worse - so as far as I can discern the best course of action is just to spend it before it becomes completely valueless. To stay ahead…

If you don't trust UK markets and gilts, it's easy to buy the same ETFs the Americans are buying (though you may pay a little more due to currency conversion). Vanguard also has non-UK ETFs denominated in GBP eg: https://www.google.com/finance?q=MUTF_GB%3AVANG_FTSE_DEV_5J6...

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#114

Post by martinko »

velcro wrote: post #93
jrheard wrote: post #13

Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so…

Any tips for something solid vanguard-like in the EU?

I user interactive brokers and just buy VOO (vanguard S&P500 etf)

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#115

Post by yonibot »

jrheard wrote: post #13

Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so…

This book taught me the fundamentals of passive investing (https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/03933...) and this website is THE online community for Bogle-style, passive investors (https://www.bogleheads.org/), once you understand the basics.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#116

Post by abutler »

refrigerator wrote: post #28

My brother and I have built a couple of test prep sites for UK medical school entrance exams: https://www.bmat.ninja , https://www.ukcat.ninja . BMAT Ninja made about $25k this year (up from $16k last year) and UKCAT about $10k. Didn't do any work on marketing really so it is pretty much passive, but I think with a bit of work they could both do a lot better. It's a very seasonal market - we only get customers for ab…

Looks good! What did you use to build this?

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#117

Post by logicallee »

jrheard wrote: post #13

Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so…

Humanity has had numbers for some 200,000 years.

any hacker can, in the next ten minutes, cause their CPU to do more arithmetic than the arithmetic (explicitly adding 2+5, and so forth, multiplying two numbers in their heads) that every single person has done in the history of humanity. okay, but that's just numbers.

Today we live in a connected world where 2,000,000,000 people can be reached in any eight-hour period of time.

Any hacker can find any niche and make a product that will be the first search result within it (by being the first; making something that doesn't exist; and telling people).

Why save a salary, when you can create a business, create value, and scale to the entire Internet and give people some benefit?

Every hacker should start one or several businesses. While it may not exactly be a moral obligation, this brings humanity forward.

EDIT to clarify: I am disagreeing with the suggestion that hackers should save all or most of their money - (put in my parent comment as "save as much of your salary as you can") -- rather than saving it, they should invest it into their businesses, adwords to grow it, other advertising and business development expenses, hiring, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#118

Post by ukoki »

cesarb wrote: post #71

Here in Brazil we have it easy. The most boring funds (the ones which track the interbank rate - CDI) easily return around 12% per year (depending on the administration fee; the smaller the administration fee, the higher the return). With the inflation around 6% per year, this gives around 6% returns before tax. If you stay with the fund for at least two years (and it's of the correct kind), the tax rate is 15% over…

12% sounds great but that's about how much the BRL has decreased against the dollar over the last five years. Just holding USD cash would have gotten you about the same returns.

https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDBRL:CUR

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#119

Post by tove »

My passive income is quite standard. Three apartments in a new block. I bought all of them four years ago when the construction was still unfinished. This got me a good price. I knew that the area would be under continuous development, therefore it won't be hard to find renters. I was right. Best part is that I didn't even have to furnish them. I managed to rent them all unfurnished.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#120

Post by tinbucket »

herbst wrote: post #67
tinbucket wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be really interested in learning from you about what you did with this site and the less successful ones.

What i did? Well when i have a idea that i think somebody else could like too i throw it into a website, then throw it out there and see what people think. Sometimes i get valuable feedback and can improve, sometimes it is good as it is. The only "secret" other than user generated content (what makes it actually passive) for me is to never stop trying. I have like 50 in use domains right now, many which i did not ext…

Thanks for the reply. It's something I'm researching but without much background knowledge or experience, it's hard to know where to start.

How do you source your user generated content? Is the big earner a forum or the like? I'd kind of envisioned some kind of static sites with ads.

Have you taken a noticeable hit like others in this thread from diminishing ad revenue and rates?

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