Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions?

23 pointsthrowaway_yc14 comments

Please share suggestions of whats worked for you and what hasnt

Buy either a larger multi bedroom house or a multi family home with 5% down payment and get roommates.

Charge roommates for rent who mostly cover either all or 50%+ of your mortgage.

Live in it for a year (you have to reside for a year because 5% down gets you owner occupied financing), then buy a 2nd place, move out of the first place, and backfill your bedroom with another tenant.

Repeat every year for 3-5 years, and you'll have 3-5 properties with tenants. if you do it right, you'll cash flow right away.

Buy VT or a similar broadly diversified equity index fund, it can't get more passive than that. I have all my savings invested that way.

what happens when you need to pay for $TragicLifeEvent and are forced to liquidate your ETF position in a downturn?

I should have probably said that I also keep 6-9 months of living expenses in a traditional savings account for emergencies. It didn't even occur to mention it since it's a minuscule portion of my net worth (< 2%), compared to the amount that's invested in the market, but that's definitely a good observation and I should have specified that to begin with.

>6-9 months of living expenses in a traditional savings account for emergencies

Geez seeing comments like this make me wonder if I'll ever be debt free enough to have nearly a year of living expense to fall back on. I've barely got enough in my savings account for 2 months of bills and loan payments.

If it makes you feel any better, I had to travel 6k miles from my home country to Silicon Valley in order to reach this level of financial stability, so I had to do some significant sacrifices (e.g. not being able to stay close to friends and aging parents, ...).

Tragic life events that need you to liquidate your savings are very rare. Personally I used charge cards (they had a zero balance) while I waited for the market to come back (2 months) and then I pulled out as little as possible. When the market was much better I paid off Charge Cards.

A couple of suggestions:

- Affiliate websites. These are basically content websites with built in affiliate links. You try to rank your content for certain keywords in search results

- Real estate. I've been a real estate investor since 2008 and I can say that it's probably the most well known way of building passive income. Simply put, you buy a house, rent it out and continue the process. However, it's a long term game because of the amount of starting capital required to buy. I wouldn't recommend it if you don't have much money to start because of the repairs and maintenance you will be responsible for as tenants continue renting.

I hope this helped. Let me know if you have any questions.

Did you hear about Amazon FBA?

You can source a product from a Chinese manufacturer and sell it on Amazon: 1.) find a niche that you find interesting before you source 2.) you bulk buy this product and ship it directly to Amazon warehouse 3.) make attractive Amazon listing and put much effort into your launch so that you can get your product ranked 4.) with a successful launch and a quality product you can get to the first page of Amazon 5.) just sit back and refill orders

It has some cons as well, but it is definitely viable way how to create passive income. The cons are following: - the fees for Amazon FBA including monthly seller fee, shipping to warehouse, warehouse storage each month, long term warehouse storage, shipping to customer, Amazon referral fee - you are dependent on one platform - you are not building your own brand (but you can start it afterwards if you see FBA is working for you)

- Web hosting

- Write rich, good quality articles comparing services that pay recurring comissions. I made $1000+ on one lousy blog post like that. One service keeps paying me monthly recurring commission for the last 15 yrs for referring them few customers.

Could you expand on your second point? What do you mean by services paying recurring commissions? Do you have any examples or ways to identify opportunities like this?

> one lousy blog post

I keep hearing that guy's voice - the one with the animated fake hand-written white boards that seems to sell everything online from stock tips to home business deals to manly man ways to be a man - when I read phrases like this. It immediately means "prepare to be sucked in."

"I got rich by writing one simple advertisement. AND SO CAN YOU!" followed by three hours of blah blah blah (no content) until you either give up, or pay up out of desperation to finally get that so-called "tip".

And if it took 15 years to make that thou, I'd pass.

DeFi apps like https://compound.finance

Not really good idea if you don't have much money because of low interest rates.

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