What was your best passive income in 2014? • Hacker News Board

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#341

Post by bradly » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:19 PM UTC

aestra wrote: post #312

bradly wrote: 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.

I hope you don't get offended by this question but are you doing this legally? I know in some areas renting a vacation home is legal as long as you do the right paperwork.

No offense taken :) Yes, it is legal. In Hawaii the condo buildings are setup to be ran as vacation rentals. Some people do live in them, but most are rentals. The building are more similar to a hotel in that they have a front desk, luggage carts, and things like that.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#342

Post by lessmilk » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:21 PM UTC

I wrote an ebook on how to make games in HTML5 with the Phaser framework. It's been out for a month now, and it has made me over $16,000 in sales. I keep making a couple hundred dollars per day with it.

Link to the book: http://www.discoverphaser.com

More sales number: http://blog.lessmilk.com/ebook-sales/

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#343

Post by mrfusion » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:21 PM UTC

flyingcircus wrote: post #302

dpcx wrote: 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.

Can you give a couple of examples? What are the risks with preferred stocks?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#344

Post by glxybstr » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:24 PM UTC

_nb wrote: post #339

glxybstr wrote: post #319

In August 2013 I released a very simple web app called Space Email - where users send out messages and read messages others have sent, totally anonymously. It had too much volume for what was built on a very poorly designed backend, and with no reporting/flagging system it had to be taken down. This past June I re-launched it on a better platform. This time users could pay a dollar or more to sign up for an account w…

This is pretty darn interesting. I've definitely noticed there's a clear split between the interesting, longer, sort of more profound messages 'from space' and the flood of 1-word test or joke messages. Any thoughts on this - is it even a problem?

it's to be expected. most of my users come from tumblr, where those sorts of longwinded posts and that style of humor is pretty common. i don't think it is a problem - i'd rather have a happy medium, though. things like this: http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=NTIw or http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=MzAwMTg=

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#345

Post by kehers » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:24 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #220

fookyong wrote: post #77

$1000 a month on book sales. I was surprised since I'm a software guy I didn't write the book to make money, I just did it for something to do. Although my software business makes much more money, I was surprised at how truly "zero maintenance" book sales are. My software I'm constantly fixing, tweaking and improving (which I enjoy). The book is just "out there" and is priced at $30 per copy. I sell > 1 per day. The…

What marketing do you do? I think I an write a decent book on a technical subject, but my big worry is I'll spend hundreds of hours on it and it'll just be another entry on Amazon.

Ya. I worry about this too.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#346

Post by michaelbuckbee » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:25 PM UTC

I built a Heroku add-on that handles the purchase and installation much more quickly and safely than they could do manually (about 80% of our customers get SSL installed on their sites in less than 5 minutes).

https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl

It's been more challenging to get going than I anticipated as it's a significant upfront cash investment to get good cert reseller terms.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#347

Post by bradly » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:26 PM UTC

nonane wrote: post #309

bradly wrote: 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?

There are some more costs. We did a full remodel which was expensive since most things on the island are more expensive (although Overstock and Amazon Prime's free shipping were amazing for buying furniture and things like that). There is also general upkeep, supplies, and vrbo fees. For instance, right now we are replacing the sliding glass doors which is going to be between 10 and 15k.

Hawaii passed law in the past couple years that says you must have someone on the island representing your unit incase something is goes wrong or your tenants need assistance, so we do pay someone to be on call for that.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#348

Post by bernatfp » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:27 PM UTC

mncolinlee wrote: post #338

bernatfp wrote: post #332

Not much at the moment: Profits realized from a very long term Bitcoin investment: 10000$ Bitcoin miner: 600$ (profits) so far. Now I'm covering the costs of running my own SaaS [1] with these profits to create a more sustainable business (I've lost confidence in Bitcoin from an investment standpoint). At this moment my SaaS has 2 trial users but no paying customers. [1] https://calloud.com

Has liquidity ever been a problem for you with Bitcoin investments? I would imagine limited supply and short term spikes could result in filling currency trade orders at lower prices. In other words, it's not clear if you can always depend on selling at face value.

Yeah, but quite a relative issue depending on the exchange. The first thing you learn is that you can't sell at market prices, you just have to place some orders and wait. To be honest I made a few mistakes related to this when I was starting and lost some money. On Btc-e my orders aren't that large so there's nothing to worry about when placing them. It felt more risky on Bitstamp, and Kraken specially due to low volume, but I rarely have to trade there.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#349

Post by bradly » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:31 PM UTC

ohblahitsme wrote: post #308

bradly wrote: 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?

We have our unit listed on VRBO, but my wife and I handle the inquires and renting ourselves. Most condo buildings will run your unit for you if you prefer. They will take care of everything for you (bookings, cleanings, furnishings, etc), but you make much less. Also, you just get a percentage of what the building makes as a whole, so those rooms are really incentivized to be as nice. We wanted our place to be nice and something we would like to stay/live at.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#350

Post by eignerchris_ » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:34 PM UTC

euroclydon wrote: post #138

Here are the all time sales figures for http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com They've been pretty bad the last few months. I think it's because the server was overloaded and response times were getting really bad. It was running on a GoDaddy $70/mo VPS with IIS, SqlServer. But that server was also hosting an Umbraco site and a WordPress blog. The PHP process was taking up 99% CPU nearly all the time. Now I have it runni…

Any success marketing on Pinterest? Seems there'd be a gold mine of home/crafty/DIYers who would be interested.