What was your best passive income in 2015?
What is your best source of 'passive' or recurring income?
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W3Counter is completely passive -- no new code or features in over a year, no customer support load, autoscaling frontend (EC2) and backend (Aurora). Improvely gets feature updates a few times a year and has some light e-mail support load. I continue to have no employees or contractors.
Trying to diversify more in 2016.
Some people only count only dividends as income. In this case, there would be no "passive loss", but the total income would only be ~2-3% pa instead of ~8% pa average.
And as you said they definitely lost money during the recession if they're seeing 8% now. There's no way they're just doing that from bonds or dividends alone.
Do you have an example of an 8% dividend stock?
If you've got E-Trade, go into Quotes & Research -> Tools -> Basic Stock Filter and search by Yield > 8%. Today there's 66 results. Of course, you need to do your research: Dick Smith Electronics is supposedly offering 33.5% yield, but they've just gone bankrupt. Slater And Gordon at 13.95% yield have been hugely impacted by UK Regulatory changes in recent months.
You might look closer at BHP Billiton: (BHP.AX, 9.95%). One of the world's biggest mining operations, and the shares have tanked post-mining-boom. Surely they'll have to cut their dividend, but even if it was halved, it would still hit your 5% extremely-good-dividend level.
Other names I recognize are Seven West Media (SWM.AX, 10.44%) who own newspapers & television stations, but also have part-ownership of Netflix competitor Presto that is preloaded on Samsung televisions. Beyond International (BYI.AX, 9.09%) produce television shows like Mythbusters, and have had steadily increasing dividends over the years.
Anyway, that's the approach I've taken: it's usually about buying into well known companies that pay dividends that steadily grow over the years, at times when the share price has been hit so hard that the dividend yields become huge.
[1] http://www.fool.com.au/2015/12/04/todays-telstra-share-price...
My new project http://timeblock.com that are funded by that income and that I do not write any code for has generated app. 2000€ in recurring revenue last year although it is not passive yet it is MRR :)
Besides the RR we also help new users with their weekly meeting by facilitating a good communication.
„normal“I guess it would only loosely be called "passive" as I spend a lot of time on it. But, I can take vacations and it continues to earn... for a while :)
I also work on a full recreation of the website, because now i only make a small part of my target audience happy, the rest only clicks a few times and comes again after a few weeks.
I am afraid shipping the new site will change my income tho :/
I could easily make them look at 4-10 sites on average if i optimize this part properly, and i am on it.
I have had 3.5 Million view from 250k users with 500k sessions the last 30 days. Not to long ago i also had no idea that this Adsense rates are still possible, then again the site is also really active and as said just growing.
And yeah it are indeed a lot of views, i am still surprised myself everytime i look into Google Anyalytics. Also the feeling when i noticed that i reached 96'000 on the Alexa international rating. Not bad.