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Comment by dejv | Hacker News Reader

I do have portfolio of small web apps: tools for learning music notes, non-latin alphabets, language flash cards and so forth.

They are making some nice money each year, but the trend is quite clear: given same traffic I am making about 50% less each year. Ad revenue is way down (more adblock users, less money per click, CTR is down), but paid premium plans are balancing it a bit.

These projects are still my biggest passive income stream, but they are going to die in few years. Other than that I am owning agriculture land (that I am renting), rental property and portfolio of p2p loans.

Those traditional assets are much more expensive to acquire, but then the yield is much predictable and stable. Still, the tech projects are my best source of income considering the amount of money/time required to create it.

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How are the p2p loans doing?

They are doing good. My strategy is to invest very conservatively and for relatively short time. I am making about 7% pa.

That's pretty impressive. I was under the impression that its near break-even.

Which site are you using if I may ask? And what is your idea of short time in this context?

I am from Czech Republic and I am using quite a new platform called Zonky.

What I see is that quality of loans go down as a platform scale and I am lucky to be with this platform from the start. So my cohort is made up of mostly early adopters. I am year in my portfolio with 0 defaulted loans and 1 late payment (I feel like this loan will default during the lifetime).

My strategy is to invest to nonconsumer debt (no car loans, no holiday or Christmas presents loans or loan refinancing). I am investing in loans with disclosed profession (investing in IT professionals, govt workers, school teachers...) and with disclosed loan history (aiming to people with 0 debt). I want the loans to be paid in 3 or 4 years. I do break my rules for about 5% of portfolio that goes to riskier loans, this is where I get majority of my yield, otherwise my yield would be like 4 or 5% instead of 7 - 8%.

I guess this strategy is not applicable in US or UK, where is normal to have some debt (there is/was very different debt culture in most EU), and even here is still harder to discover these good loans, so I basically stopped investing in there.

Next year I want to start experimenting with b2b loans for unpaid invoices (business sell their new invoices with terms like NET30 or NET90 to boost their cashflow).

Thanks

that's because of "programming is fun, it's easy, let's do more programming, let's teach everyone how to do programming, yyyaaahhhh"

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