Ask HN: What are some examples of appreciating assets to build wealth? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some examples of appreciating assets to build wealth?

15 pointshhs19 comments

In the real world, there are appreciating assets like land, oil, and minerals to generate wealth.

I'm starting to build my skills in software. And I wonder if there are certain types of assets to think about. It looks like patents would be viewed as intangible assets. I'm curious if there are good examples of appreciating assets in the HN world?

View on HN

A lot of people here talk about putting your money in an index, the idea being it’ll do better than the average persons stock picks.

Owning a home is a good one, as long as you can afford the repayments and budget for times you might be out of work.

In most countries there is a big tax advantage. Some offer income tax relief, and most will be tax free gains, plus once you pay the mortgage off your savings (vs. renting) are on post tax income. Or in other words if you rent you’d need to make enough income from another asset such that after tax it would pay your rent.

Knowledge is also good. I’m learning SEO and marketing online at the moment, and that creates redundancy in that if I lose all my money I still have those skills to start again. The lottery winner with no skills doesn’t have that safety net.

There are some conservative ideas for you. There are a lot of more risky options too that involve predicting the future. Picking stocks, crypto currencies, angel investing and suchlike. Those can be good, and outliers get rich, but do it with money you can afford to lose.

Interesting, thanks. Based on your experience, did you find any books that were useful?

For SEO I read https://www.fullstackoptimization.com, which seems to be a good guide. I have used some of the techniques in the book, but it is early days. What I can say is that I am getting a tiny amount of traffic from Google from the targeted keywords, and it will take some time to build that up.

For Marketing I watched quite a bit of a Udacity course, which I think you can do for free.

The other stuff mostly online blog posts, forums, government websites etc.

This is useful, good to know. I didn't think much of SEO for some time, but I'm finding that it's one of those timeless things for websites.

Your personal network. Check out “Take the Work Out Of Networking” [0] for non-sleazy ways to build this asset.

0: https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Work-Out-Networking-Connection...

Neat, I'll be sure to check it out, thank you.

Land. They don't build that stuff any more. (But not in countries with unstable regimes)

Close, well-maintained, meaningful relationships with your family and friends.

Totally, I agree. There's a lot of empirical research backing that up, too.

That is what I thought of first when reading the recent article on HN about being homeless. My first though was “can’t their family come and pick them up” or even a friend.

Affiliate sites. You'd be surprised how much those can make.

Any guides on getting started or just learning more about this type of business?

https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/

On this site you can buy already setup websites

https://empireflippers.com/marketplace/

They are very expensive ($3M for a site generating $90K a month) but the site verifies the numbers. $90K a month is insanity. I'm posting it so that you can see how much you can make.

I wonder how to approach this: Do you mean that if one builds a website, that they should link it to an affiliate like Amazon Associates or eBay Partners?

Yeah.

Thank you.

At the same time, I'm not surprised how much most of them don't make.

self education. and investing in one's health

In the mornings during breakfast, my mom would often say, "health is wealth" and "old is gold" and I'd think, "Okay, okay..." Spot on, thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com