
Ask HN: What are the some passive income strategies you do beside your IT job? - ya3ad
Amazon FBA, Dropshipping etc. Please share your stories.
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graton
Low cost S&P 500 Index fund. Very passive :)

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kangnkodos
Almost the same thing... the ETF with the ticker SPY.

When I researched this years ago, I concluded the costs were less expensive
than any S&P 500 mutual find I could find. Not sure if that's still true or
not.

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actsasbuffoon
You can also invest directly into an index fund rather than going through an
ETF. Depending on your situation, both have pros/cons.

Many companies offer index funds, though Vanguard's seem particularly popular
(possibly because they invented index funds, IIRC).

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jjeaff
They are also popular because the company is owned by the share holders of
their funds. So huge dividends and salaries aren't going to employees or
shareholders.

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ejo4041
Mostly Passive: Real estate rental

Not as passive:

Amazon FBA: Run a side business selling products on Amazon. I have hired 1
part time employee now that works tasks I have outlined during the week. I
work 1 to 1.5 days per week organizing the warehouse and custom orders. In the
green after 3 years. It's also fun for me.

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fenwick67
Do you sell products you're making, or are you buying and selling?

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mbo1992
Probably buying and selling. There was a Planet Money episode on this, an
entire industry of people who just buy things from Toys 'R Us (and other
retailers without a significant online presence, esp on Amazon), and selling
it on Amazon.

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KeithBrink
Like some others here, I have an Amazon FBA business but I treat it as my
full-time job, even though I've automated a lot of the grunt work and employ a
VA for the things that can't be automated.

I did, however, find a little unsolved problem on Amazon that sucks up
seller's time, so I built a solution[0] for it with about a month of work, and
now it generates >$2k/m with 1-2 hours of customer support work every month.

[0] [https://azlabels.com](https://azlabels.com)

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prokes
Your label product is the best answer on this thread and ironically there are
no comments. Knowing an industry, finding a need and building it is the
ultimate passive income business. Don't know much about your market but I
think you could increase prices to $0 / $20 / $75 per month.

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anon_mouse
Nobody is gonna just dump their secrets into something like this :D

But.. in case people don't mind. How feasible is it to make passive income by
having a blog? I mean by having advertisements or amazon click-thru links.. is
it worth the time to set up and use a blog to generate passive income?

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danellis
That's not passive. You have to keep writing content to keep people coming
back.

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nfin
not very passive, but in some cases blog posts can be popular for years and
therefor generate revenue for years (but not in many fields/topics)

-> kind of passive in the long run

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anon_mouse
I guess this might be true more for technical blogs, ie,. a dev blog
explaining how to download a piece of software or repeat a case study
discussed in the blog.

For example, I was blown away by how useful & accurate this guy's medium blog
was for setting up apache.

[https://medium.com/@JohnFoderaro/how-to-set-up-apache-in-
mac...](https://medium.com/@JohnFoderaro/how-to-set-up-apache-in-macos-
sierra-10-12-bca5a5dfffba)

(just used this for a class, I'm not pushing anything for anyone)

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mdn0420
Rental properties, managed by a 3rd-party professional company.

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actsasbuffoon
This is an interesting idea. Are there any information sources you'd recommend
to people who are curious about this strategy?

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Jemmeh
Check out the Bigger Pockets website. The 3rd party managers are called
Property Managers. Make sure you look at reviews to find a good one, there are
many out there that will end up costing you more than you save. :)

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excalibur
Being married isn't all that passive, but it is a great income strategy.

Having kids is a terrible one.

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cimmanom
How is marriage an income strategy?

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astura
Getting married is, without a doubt, _by far_ the best financial decision I've
ever made. I doubled my income and only very marginally increased my living
expenses. I'm saving more money now that I ever thought would be possible, and
that savings generates income in itself as capital gains and dividends which
is reinvested and compounded. It's friggin amazing! After several years of
marriage our _passive_ income (dividends and capital gains) has become
significant.

That being said, I wouldn't advise doing it solely for financial reasons. :)

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nabeards
You _would_?

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astura
Woah, Whoops! Typo - wouldn't. Fixed, thanks.

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op00to
Are Amazon FBA or drop shipping still passive? Both of those still require
significant time dealing with exceptions.

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maaaats
Last time I read about passive income here on HN it was mostly non-passive
side hustles being shown.

Or stuff like ad revenue from apps or sales of books. Maybe passive now, but
probably took quite some effort getting to there. It may be passive if the
long tail is much bigger than the initial investment, but for most people I
guess it's not.

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pietroglyph
By that definition, no income is passive, because everything takes some effort
to set up.

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motohagiography
Passive tends to mean earning money on rents from capital instead of your
time/labor. The grey area is brokerage and arbitrage where you are earning
money from risk.

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par
I created an app a couple years back that I still work on regularly. So it’s
not super passive, but I only manage to spend a few hours a week on it.
Generates around $1,XXX/month profit. It’s called Meta Meme, it’s in the
iPhone App Store if you want to see it.

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raitom
I made an app a year ago. I did it in an afternoon with 0 experience in mobile
apps, using Rails + turbolinks ios & Android. It's really crappy but it
generates $150/month. Not bad for the time invested.

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calabin
Care to share what the app is?

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pdog
The Vanguard High Dividend Yield ETF (VYM) has a 3% dividend yield and a
minuscule 0.08% expense ratio.

If you buy 500 shares of VYM, you can expect a passive income of $100 per
month.

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mathgeek
For the lazy, this would require an ongoing investment of just over $40,000
currently.

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omarmeky
I have 4 rental properties. Selling 2 though since they are too far from me
(GA and OH). Each under $30K.

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justboxing
Wow. Curious, how do you fund your purchases past the 1st or 2nd rental home?

I'm finding it difficult to get loans. No-one talks about this issue.

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seajosh
If by "passive" you mean a lot of fun, I play bass & gig around town as well
as running a non-commercial internet radio station - goatradio.org. Being a
musician / audio engineer generates a decent amount of cash.

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purvis
I know HN is rather negative toward cryptocurrency in general, but for me it's
fun. I run a small mining farm in my basement. It keeps my sysadmin skills
sharp and more than pays my electric bill.

On a side note: none of this is really passive.. mining, real estate, and
drop-shipping are all very active income streams. Unless you were born with a
silver spoon, you probably won't find truly passive income.

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srednalfden
What equipment do you use to mine with? How re your returns?

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purvis
My farm consists mainly of rx 580 graphic cards. Due to depressed markets, my
returns are just okay right now. Luckily my equipment has been paid off since
December. To put things in perspective, a single 8GB rx 580 costs around $400
(if you're lucky) and only makes $0.80/day. During the peak at the end of last
year, they were making well over $3/day each.

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jadeydi
Build a website [https://toptalkedbooks.com/](https://toptalkedbooks.com/) use
ROR and Big Query. Use AA to handle server cost.

If you like reading, you can find most popular books in the past year here.
[https://toptalkedbooks.com/hackernews/2018](https://toptalkedbooks.com/hackernews/2018)

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sebringj
I would say its easier to be focused than general for the small timer. I made
a niche ERP integration with an app, then sold it for 150/monthly to 20+
customers. I've done other things like building a plugable CMS and making
components but that focused approach I first mentioned was easy money compared
to those.

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ya3ad
Please share the link of your product.

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sebringj
This is just for enterprise customers where they wanted a snap-in mobile
ecommerce app that integrated with their very niche ERP system you probably
haven't heard of. It is just a software subscription agreement with no product
site. I'm embarrassed to show on here anyway as its 5 years old now but you
get the idea. My wife suggested I do this and it was low hanging fruit,
meaning clients wanted it, there was no competition to build it for them as no
one really knows that ERP so it was just a pretty easy step to decide. Peter
Thiel said "competition is for losers" and I know what he meant in this
particular case although on a tiny scale of very niche customers.

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hycaria
I'm on duty a few times per week, it's not too active though. Doesn't qualify
for passive and has a huge entry requirement, but a very good way of having a
double income, since I'm mostly paid to sleep away from home.

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garettmd
Like with the National Guard?

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hycaria
Just veterinary emergencies :)

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mburst
I built the bulk of an Android app awhile ago and now it makes a nice passive
income off of ads. I do end up making updates to it though since I love to use
the app too, so it's not entirely passive I suppose

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0xEFF
Airbnb

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motohagiography
As a related one, considering Twisted Road (sharing site for my motorcycle).

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mlevental
I was just wondering about something like this. how does insurance work?

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09bjb
With Turo (I'd imagine this service is similar), the service or the customer
has to provide it. The risk with these services is competition: the better it
is, the more people start using it...and then the parent business takes a
bigger cut (see AirBnB).

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laktek
Can someone explain how they are using Amazon FBA?

I generate some passive income from (by spending 1-2 hours a week):

\- stock & cryptocurrency picking

\- Calls with industry research firms

\- Earn.com

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mfoy_
How are any of those passive?

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laktek
Passive in terms of time commitment and effort. I don't think there are truly
passive income streams unless you have substantial capital to invest in the
first place (eg: vanguards and rental property)

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cuspycode
I think scalable income is a more useful concept than passive income. What I
mean by scalable income is when you can increase your income by investing more
capital, but keeping time commitment and effort at the same level. In my view
purely passive income is either some instance of rent-seeking, or simple risk-
free return on economic growth. But even those require a minimal level of
effort.

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SirLJ
AI driven stock trading robots, the best hobby ever :-)

No customers, no employees and no investors and truly location independent...

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Someone1234
That sounds pretty fun. But after you get the basic workings right, isn't it
just a latency war with other trading bots (meaning the lowest latency gets in
the most profitable trades)?

If you had a uniquely good trading algorithm isn't it effectively just trading
by hand but faster? And related question, if you're doing a lot of trades,
wouldn't trading transaction fees eat you alive?

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SirLJ
Not really, because I am not into HFT, so latency is not a problem for me...
(I don't have the money, 100s of millions for infrastructure to compete with
the big boys)...

Sure, I can do it all by hand, the key here not speed, but automation... I
rather be fishing or drinking beer by my pool instead... Trading fees: 5$ fee
on $50k/$100k position is frankly irrelevant for example...

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Someone1234
Have you been able to beat the index funds historically?

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SirLJ
Sure, double digits return per year on average... making money in the market
with 6-7 digits account is easy, the challenge is to make similar returns with
let’s say 100M+ account, but I am not there yet :-)

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deanmoriarty
Any book recommendation? I come from a "boglehead"-centric approach [1],
stating that the market is so efficient that it's virtually impossible to beat
it in the long term as a mere mortal, so one might as well just buy indexes
and get the market return, hoping that in the long term capitalism will
continue thriving. And that's what I've done, fully investing my high 6 figure
(soon to be 7) liquid net worth into index funds.

The only exception to the rule would be if one has some sort of technical
advantage (e.g. HFT infrastructures) or "insider" information.

Was curious to hear if you have any resources that in your opinion could make
me change my stance? Thanks

[1] [https://www.bogleheads.org/](https://www.bogleheads.org/)

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SirLJ
OK, here is one book for you: More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God)

My message is this: do not settle for the average - everyone can be a doctor,
lawyer, developer, speculator, you just need the drive and to put the hours...

Passive investing for me is a big mistake, because it ignores the risk
management, especially for small accounts (less than few millions), people
just cannot afford to be losing money for extended periods of time, just look
into Japan's Economic Bubble and Nikkei index, every passive investor in it is
still at about 50% loss for almost 30 years and counting...

To make money in the stock market, you have to have a system that makes money,
not only on the way up, but on the way down as well... For me, personally, my
money are too important to leave them to such a "buy and hope" investing
strategy...

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rubdoev
i have a very lucrative program, i have already made about 200 dollars in
about 4,5 days, here's the link:
[https://bit.ly/2HlmIhf](https://bit.ly/2HlmIhf)

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matte_black
How much does it cost to hire an FBA employee(s)? I have well over half a
million in liquid assets that makes me passive income through investments, but
I’m thinking of investing a portion of that into an FBA or drop shipping
business, but keeping it as passive as I can. In the past I’ve never done it
because I just can’t be bothered into putting part-time job effort into it.

