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What was your best passive income in 2014?

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Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#301
My math textbooks [1,2] generated over $20k since 2013. The sales are split between print and pdf sales. It's definitely motivation enough for me to continue as is, but I'm scaling the business further with better distribution.

Books are not dead. I believe there is a great opportunity for specialist to "distill information" in their field and offer it to others as books. People don't pay for the content (which can be found on the Internet) but for the analysis and the curation of this content.

It's not "easy money" because writing and editing a book takes years of sustained effort, but if you're an expert in X, you already spend your days explaining X so writing down your explanations won't be //that// tough.

[1] noBS guide to Math and Phys: http://minireference.com/ [2] https://gum.co/noBSLA

PS: Anyone interested in writing a book about Chemistry and/or Biology? Get in touch with me so we can combine forces and take over the UGRAD textbook market!

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#302
post #27

Dividends on stocks. I've never had an idea good enough to make an app out of, or build a company around. So instead, I started investing a small amount of my paycheck in to my brokerage account. Buying lots of stock in Dividend Kings[1], I've earned $25 this year, with another $20 through October. It's not a lot, but I'm fully thinking long-term. 1: http://long-term-investments.blogspot.com/2013/02/15-Best-Di...

Preferred stocks. Current dividend rates are between 6.5 and 7% typically. Especially high quality companies trading at or under $25. Senior to stocks, subordinate to bonds.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#303

It's been a while since I shared my S3stat [1] numbers. I prefer to talk in vague handwavy terms rather than concrete numbers, but this should give a picture of the trajectory: 6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at that point). 18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand. 30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a major…

I'm curious to know how well your cheap bastard plan (https://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan) has been working out. Has it brought in some customers?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#306
post #34

$5k per month for 18 months in a row. Made a portfolio website for my girlfriend. Got positive feedback, refactored into Wordpress theme and published on ThemeForest. Not 100% passive as I spend 3-4 hours per week for answering support emails. ThemeForest is a perfect place for passive income if you are a website developer. At first it challenges your skills as you need to create the concept, design it and code it. T…

I just typed in "portfolio" onto ThemeForest and I have to say, pretty stiff competition. Many of the themes I looked at are VERY high end, clearly created by some kind of design professional. Definitely not an area your average web-developer can just drop into. I can definitely write the code but you also need a good artistic/design mind. Just to make everything more coherent and to create a real theme that runs thr…

Not only that but ThemeForest users now demand support for their investment. It mostly means keeping up with the rapidly updating Wordpress framework but most of the highest rated themes have some sort of post-purchase support. I think that is why most of the coders are from areas where the cost of living is lower (Eastern Europe/Asia).

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#307
post #75

I am the author of two books: "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" ( http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com ), which came out in October, and "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things" ( http://www.correlated.org ), which came out earlier this month. One thing I didn't realize when I started pitching the first book was that there would be "p…

The Experimenting book is really nicely put together. I bought it a few months ago and have enjoyed it. Thanks!

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#308
post #304

A bought a vacation rental in Hawaii this January. It has been very nice. Purchase price was 510k. It rents for $260-$400 a night and has 90% occupancy rate. I can share more details for those interested.

Do you have someone managing the rental or do you do that?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#309
post #304

A bought a vacation rental in Hawaii this January. It has been very nice. Purchase price was 510k. It rents for $260-$400 a night and has 90% occupancy rate. I can share more details for those interested.

Definitely interested in the details. ~16% ROI is excellent! Does you have management company that takes care of the property?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#310
Bingo Card Creator is still plugging along, though both down from previous years and an increasingly small portion of my business. I spend under 20 minutes a month on it on about 2 to 5 issues which make it past T1 support.

As for numbers: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month Historically, multiplying by 60% usually gets a good approximation for profits.

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