Ask HN: How to Make Passive Income?
I live in Berlin, Germany. I'm struggling with my current income and I would like to make passive income, would you please suggest some realistic ideas?
Passive income (in the forms that it actually exists, and isn't a scam being sold by someone who makes their "helping" people create passive income) requires long-term thinking, and it's nearly impossible to make good long-term decisions when you're worrying about rent money or your next meal.
If you work full time, focus on getting a raise, a new job, or changing industries.
If you're a freelancer or consultant, raise your rates, or fire a shitty client to make room for a good one.
If you don't know how to do these things, you're not alone, and there's no shame in asking for help.
_Reliable_ income isn't necessarily a pre-requisite for passive income, but it's emotional leverage that most people try to skip past and never achieve either.
Fortunately if you are a software developer, you can make things that other people require a lot of capital to do. So you can make your software vending machine of some sort and have passive income from that. Advertising it requires capital, and you have to design the system that has low infrastructure costs.
If there was a magic way to make money without work, everyone would be doing it.
I think the parent commenter's point (and apologies if this is a mis-read, shp0ngle) is that passive income is a fantasy unless you're just stashing extra money in investment vehicles. That doesn't sound like the situation nada_ss finds themselves in.
Continuously writing books for 20 years is work. The first book would probably have significantly less sales if the author didn't invest time or money in marketing and sequels for 20 years.
The root comment would still hold true:
> If there was a magic way to make money without work
I met many people in my life, rich and poor, but nobody was lying on the couch and enjoying rain of 500 euro banknotes. Maybe it’s an American thing.
1. find a profitable niche
2. solve a problem for that niche
3. do marketing in that niche to get people to pay for what you've done
In practice, making a passive income is tough and it's way easier and faster to be working for someone else. If 0.1% of my users would be customer I would be doing much better than my day job, until then I'm in the marathon of bootstrapping my business. Good luck!
1. Find a profitable niche 2. See if you could market to said niche in a way where you have an unfair advantage. 3. If yes to 2, market and sell the product before you have it to ensure demand 4. Build the product.
It is possible your project will fail; try to figure out why. Pick a new project and try again.
I noticed the blog items mostly.
1. Businesses I founded & own that are managed & operated by my employees. 2. REITs & other dividend paying stocks. 3. Real property that I own that is managed by property managers. 4. Music that I have published and receive streaming royalties on. 5. Personal loans (this is risky and I don't recommend it, but I do make some passive income this way). 6. Crypto lending (I use Stablegains which is currently paying 15%(!). Use my referral code to get $25 FREE when you sign up: https://app.stablegains.com/signup?ref=SWKDN4UXUG 7. Asset trade-ups to capture capital gains (such as in real estate). 8. Leveraging credit card cash back rewards by using these types of cards for ALL of my purchases, business and personal.
These are my primary income earners, and when added together, they make quite a sum of passive income for me. I started at zero like many of you here. It is possible to build a diverse portfolio of passive income with relatively low risk, without starting with a ton of capital. It just takes some good ideas, excellent execution of those ideas, self-control over your spending, and smart decision making. Don't lease the new Tesla when you can get by with the $5k SUV you already own. Those kind of things.
Most advice and success stories are too vague, unreproducable, and/or obvious to be useful.
I understand some people need to be told not to spend $5000/year on coffee, but it's exhausting when I've never spent money on coffee in my entire life and 99% of personal finance advice is on that level of unhelpful.
"Passive income" as it's sold to people on social media frankly doesn't exist. You work hard, build something other people want, and people pay you for it.
1) Save some money regularly (min 10%). 2) If 1) seems difficult, figure out a way to increase your earnings or reduce your expenses till you can do 1). 3) Invest the surplus wisely. Trust it to people who are trustworthy and seem to know their stuff.
Overtime, you will have enough passive income.
Sure, their portfolios might bounce back at one point, but who knows when.
Just because we had a 13 year bull run thanks to printing money and dumping it in the stock market, does not always guarantee this can go on forever. The war certainly didn't help either.
Sometimes stocks are just gambling, and it's best to only gamble what you're not afraid to lose, instead of your entire life savings.
If you want passive income without any type of upfront work, you might look into renting stuff out that you possess. House? Why not rent a part to someone? A car, or other tools? Maybe you can rent them to somebody.
Once you secure "normal" income, save up in Bitcoin. This will at the very least protect your purchasing power against inflation. With a little bit of luck your purchasing power will grow as Bitcoin gets adopted.
Putting all your eggs in the Bitcoin basket is risky because it will likely collapse because it's a less than zero-sum Ponzi scheme. It's arguably good for short term speculation but not long term investment.
The key is to find something you can create once and sell multiple times.
Be prepared for the amount of time you’ll have to spend to start making “passive” income
So, you'll have to maximize income and reduce cost as much as possible to fill that "investment bag". One way to do that is to become self-employed, win a corporate customer that is okay with remote work and move to a lower-income / cost country for 10 years.
A lot of people today try to build traction for their digital product in a large enough niche. Never ever underestimate the effort needed for that! That hasn't much to do with passive income.
If you've got a talent for writing, you could write 9.99€ Kindle books for high margins.
How the hell can OP buy an apartment if he's already struggling to get by?!
I swear, sometimes I feel like the HN userbase live on another plane of entitlement.
You're in Berlin. Why not have some tutoring business specifically to Berliners? Then after you've done some tutoring, anticipate whatever next-level skill they need and upsell those online courses.
Just brainstorming
Save up to buy a home. Then save up to buy a second one. Rent out the second one while paying someone to manage it for you. Rinse and repeat.
Maybe try feudalism, though.
Unless of course you're talking about investing in a REIT.