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Ask HN: What is your yearly passive income?
- heinrichhartman 9y ago7.49EUR interest payments from my Bank account (pre tax). Does that count as passive income? At least I am not doing anything to get it.
- jsegura 9y agoI think so, anything that you invest zero time to obtain. Good catch
- Cerium 9y agoIf you are counting that, then building up a dividend portfolio is a good source of passive income. About $400 a year from a 1x,xxx portfolio.
- noitsnot 9y agoI'm not a buyer in this market. Is there anyone else who prescribes to this? It must be a very long term play.
- prezjordan 9y agoInspired by previous "passive income" posts, I decided to ship something small [0] after quitting my job earlier this year. It only makes me ~$100/mo, which is enough to cover my PC gaming addiction. Super fun experience, amazing how much you learn from building such a small piece of software. [0]: http://shade.cool http://shade.cool
- alexval 9y agowow that's a cool and simple idea. I work on a cocoa app so I will find that valueable for meeting accessibility standards. Do you have a windows version?
- prezjordan 9y agoNot yet, but there does seem to be enough interest for me to sit down and build one!
- mstade 9y agoThat's remarkably useful actually, cool project! Funny release notes too: > # What's New in Version 1.0.3 > "Hey Jordan, this app looks great but unfortunately crashes when I mouse over to my second monitor while selecting a color" > "That's impossible, I fixed that! Are you sure you're using the latest version?" > "Yes I'm positive. Just put your primary display on the right and mouse over to the left screen" > "Hmm... works on my machine." > "Your other right" > "...Oh." > · This version fixes a bug with the color picker when your primary display is to the right of another display.
- vivan 9y agoReminds me of an anecdote from The Pragmatic Programmer: Andy once worked on a large graphics application. Nearing release, the testers reported that the application crashed every time they painted a stroke with a particular brush. The programmer responsible argued that there was nothing wrong with it; he had tried painting with it, and it worked just fine. This dialog went back and forth for several days, with tempers rapidly rising. Finally, we got them together in the same room. The tester selected the brush tool and painted a stroke from the upper right corner to the lower left corner. The application exploded. "Oh," said the programmer, in a small voice, who then sheepishly admitted that he had made test strokes only from the lower left to the upper right, which did not expose the bug.
- prezjordan 9y agoLoosely based on a real story in which my roommate discovered the bug because his work monitor was on the other side of mine :) Glad you enjoyed though.
- CamTin 9y agoDo/did you do any marketing for it, or that $100/mo is just from being in the app store?
- prezjordan 9y agoSome marketing in the form of a blog post [0] talking about the first week of sales. Other than that just word of mouth from social media. I've also linked to it from my other Medium articles which get a couple thousand reads per week, but haven't converted many of those to sales. [0]: https://hackernoon.com/20-hours-of-work-258-in-sales-the-first-week-of-shade-e0fff99f797b https://hackernoon.com/20-hours-of-work-258-in-sales-the-fir...
- CamTin 9y agoHow much of your sales are "walk-in" from the app store versus buzz/referrals from your (not small) network?
- vacri 9y agonegative a few grand. I supplement my mother's retirement income a bit, and give a regular-but-small amount to charity. It's pretty easy to set up - just contact your bank and get an automatic monthly transfer going. I did it online, and haven't had to worry since!
- dsjoerg 9y agoI run a small website that loses me a few hundred dollars per month. Not taking it down out of nostalgia & for the people who are still using it.
- moksha256 9y agoThe more I explore this concept of 'passive income' the more it seems like a unicorn not unlike the Facebooks and Instagrams of the world. Sure, it's possible to generate truly passive income, without any ongoing work to sustain it, but such projects are so rare that it's impractical to pursue them. It's like saying you're going to create the next unicorn...good luck with that. 99.9% of endeavors worth doing pursuing require some level of constant work to continue capturing the value they generate. I say this as someone who made his first few 'passive' dollars LAST NIGHT WHILE I WAS SLEEPING. But I put 'passive' in quotes because this was after 5 months of working for nothing, and the grueling work required to keep my offering attractive continues.
- douglaswlance 9y agoBuy a financial asset. Boom! Passive income.
- CryoLogic 9y agoIt's very easy to get passive income. Just buy high dividend mutual funds. 100k in the market should net you 4-12k per year.
- volkk 9y agoah yeah, the good ol' 100k i have lying around should finally have some use for me!
- cdiamand 9y agoI make ~$60 a month off my side project -https://oppslist.com https://oppslist.com. Although it's been priceless in terms of the things its taught me about shipping a product, and market demand.
- mstade 9y agoLooks like your cert is invalid, it doesn't work if you drop the www subdomain. Edit: I checked out https://www.oppslist.com https://www.oppslist.com which works, and had to come back and say that's a nifty site, well done!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mintplant 9y agoI make around $2,000/year from a store on the Second Life marketplace [0]. I rarely log into SL anymore, except to move money out of my account, but the products I made back when I was active continue to sell. I've never done any advertising for them, so it's all based on organic search traffic and word of mouth. [0] https://marketplace.secondlife.com https://marketplace.secondlife.com (1 USD = around L$250)
- zerr 9y agoI wonder what kind of people use SL nowadays.
- mutterkorn 9y agofreaks
- nsx147 9y agoWriting covered calls once per month
- aabajian 9y agoI run a side project for sending business reminders: https://www.cronote.com https://www.cronote.com Cronote made next to no money for 5 years, but slowly migrated its way to the top of Google for search of "text message reminders" and "sms reminders." I did a ton of work, made an iPhone app, changed the billing system four times and rebuilt the interface three times. I now have ~60 paying customers, but it only makes $300 per month after all expenses. I don't think I've recouped the man-hours spent, but I've certainly learned a lot along the way. I learned Python/Django (website back-end), Objective-C and Swift (iOS app), and lots of fun stuff about timezones and calendaring APIs.
- soulchild37 9y agoYour side project reminds me of patio11's appointment reminder. I visited your website and found the enterprise pricing is jarringly low, I recommend reading some of patio11 HN post / his blog, perhaps you might be able to increase price and earn 10x more a year.
- ezekg 9y agoI think your server is serving on port 4431, which is odd, so your link is broken unless you use https://cronote.com:4431/ https://cronote.com:4431/. You should serve on port 80 and 443.
- thatwasunusual 9y agoI honestly don't know, but I should problably check. I sold a _very_ small IT company in 1998 for $50K when I got a "real job"; the truth is, I didn't earn much on my own company, and it was doomed to fail anyway. I was only 22 years old, and my financially over-protective dad (thanks, though, and RIP) insisted on putting all the money into pretty secure stock funds. I've never needed the money, and after my dad passed away in 2012, my brother's lawyer and accounting company keeps it under control. Based on a fairly conservative avg. interest of 7% since then, I should be good for $190K now, increasing approx. $1K+/month at the moment. If my rather poor math skills serve me right. The reason I don't bother about this investment is that I'm currently OK with the "normal pay", but it's also because I'm afraid of being disappointed if I look into it, or (worse) get so excited I spend it all on crap. :/ Also, if I never bother about those money, I guess I'll never miss them when the stock market _really_ crashes. :)
- zht 9y agoyou should probably check... there may be fees or other things that have happened.
- thatwasunusual 9y agoAh, yes. I forgot to mention that; the "fund controllers" take 1.25% of my portfolio. The last 5 years it seems to have increased 12,6% in average, though, so I'm not that worried. If I had controlled it myself, well, you get the idea... :)
- graton 9y agoThat is a crazy high expense ratio. Schwab offers an S&P 500 index fund for 0.03% https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/how-to-invest/impact-of-costs https://investor.vanguard.com/investing/how-to-invest/impact... http://financials.morningstar.com/fund/expense.html?t=SWPPX®ion=usa&culture=en_US http://financials.morningstar.com/fund/expense.html?t=SWPPX&...
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- penguin2016 9y agoHow do you define passive? Is 3 hours a week passive after setup costs? Would organic traffic after doing SEO for 2-3 weeks be passive? Theres a lot of things which take 1 hour/week after being setup right.
- cweagans 9y agoAfter setup costs, I'd define it as "anything that brings in a number of dollars, where the number of dollars is not directly proportional to the amount of time I spend on the thing in any capacity".
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y agoMy day job matches that description!
- cweagans 9y agoReally? If you choose to work 30 minutes a day for the next 6 months, your income won't be affected?
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y agoOK, you got me on that one. However, if I choose to work 60 hours a week for the next 6 months, it won't be affected either.
- soulchild37 9y agoI released a mobile app for checking upcoming train timetable half year ago and earned approx $300. Assuming the same sales figure on the next half, yearly will be $600. Was inspired by a previous "passive income" posts in HN too, original goal was to cover Apple developer annual fees.
- seanalltogether 9y agoI make about $250/mo off of Space Gremlin mac app and a few mobile games that probably amount to nothing now. With kids entering the picture it's been harder to focus on passive income projects.
- numbsafari 9y agoI love space gremlin! Great app.
- seanalltogether 9y agothanks!
- Mojah 9y agoIt might be passive income now, but that is without counting the months of work and years of experience I had to put into it. A near-zero-maintenance project is DNS Spy [0], which brings in roughly ~600$/month. [0] https://dnsspy.io/ https://dnsspy.io/
- reacharavindh 9y agoCuriously watching this discussion. I have a few ideas that I thought I should spend time building a product around releasing in the wild - a few months ago. Haven't had the kick in the back to do them yet. May be looking at someone else's $$$ will do it.
- davedx 9y agoI make a few hundred per year from my e-book, which took about half a year of on and off work to finish and is now partially out of date (tip: don’t write books about front end software development). My current side project is more ambitious and has a lot of potential but it’s probably not going to work as passive income...
- numbsafari 9y agoMy wife got our safety net liquid assets into decent yielding savings accounts[1]. We’re also keeping some liquidity on-hand for some home renovation projects. That plus dividends on small non-401k holdings and we’ll pocket about $2k this year in a truly passive fashion. [1]: lmcu.org
- michaelthiessen 9y agoI think that "passive income" is a misnomer, or at least, not very useful. I find it more helpful to think in hourly rates, since you're always putting in time for something. If you spend 100 hours setting up a website, and over the next 5 years you never touch it and you make some money, some would consider that "passive". But really, you put in 100 hours, and made $x from it. I think people are really looking for high ratio of money to time spent, not something that is truly "passive".
- graton 9y agoMy S&P 500 index fund has gone up a lot this year. So good stuff there :)
- exitreturn123 9y agoMaking a throwaway for this. My annual pre-tax income from work is about $2,500,000. My annual passive pre-tax income is about $1,200,000. This is 100% derived from investment returns from an exit I had a few years ago from a startup I was with. I spend about $400,000/year (after tax) of that. Here's the kicker: Nothing makes you feel more poor than being worth about $40m in cash while you hang out with billionaires and live in NYC or SF.
- umanwizard 9y agoWell I can't relate to your kicker at all. I'm worth 200k and my income is 300k pre-tax. I live in NYC on that salary and feel fabulously rich.
- mrskitch 9y agoSo now that you've got a throwaway, and have purged the most sensitive of data, what market are you in and what's the product? You should really interview at indiehackers or something similar as there's an entire community trying to do similar. Finally: you need to hang out with different folks and get your perspective changed :)
- lazerpants 9y agoNope. Try being worth -32k. And yes, it is often my job to hang out with wealthy people (in NYC, not SF).
- exitreturn123 9y agoI do believe that I will never feel as rich as I did when I went from negative net worth to zero. That liberating feeling was amazing, as it's all upside after that. You'll get there, and it'll feel so good when you do.
- 5oksuuhm 9y agoSpare some change?
- warent 9y agoNice, that sounds pretty sweet. I'm 22 and worth < $1m. Mind if I ask some questions so I can get to where you are? What was your role in the company? How long were you with the company for and how long after its founding did you join? Was the company ever funded or 100% bootstrapped? After you had your exit, how did you begin investing your money and why did you decide on that mode of investment? Do you currently work a corporate job or do you work for yourself? Any other tips or advice? Thank you!
- catpolice 9y agoMany of the things I would be tempted to describe (and am seeing others here describe) as passive income aren't, at least in the strict sense: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/passiveincome.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/passiveincome.asp In the colloquial sense, I made about 18k last year off of money I dumped into Betterment a while before. I don't do anything but periodically check on how much money I've made. I wish I'd started passively investing about a decade earlier. If you have anything beyond an emergency buffer just sitting in your checking account, just do it.
- bespoke_engnr 9y agoI have a Linux/Programming/Tech Career YouTube channel ( https://youtube.com/c/tutorialinux https://youtube.com/c/tutorialinux ) that just hit 50k subscribers (yay!), and it makes around $450/month in ad revenue. I also made a poorly targeted and marketed practical system administration Udemy course last year, which does about $500/month. These projects, along with a few other small things, are on track to make around $15k this year. That's after about 3 years of putting lots of time, effort, and love into creating content on YouTube. Unfortunately that 'passive' income just barely approaches 10% of what I make at my full-time job (Sysadmin/Ops/Automation/DevOps? stuff), so the idea of working on my 'passive/hobby' projects full-time is not an attractive proposition yet. I like building, running, and automating large distributed systems, so I'm not really itching to quit my full-time work and "just" be a teacher. The ideal situation would be 'regular' IT work 3 days a week, and working on YouTube, my own web apps, and additional tech courses the rest of the time.
- chippy 9y agoHow much time do you put into the YouTube channel per week / month? I'm seeing on average three 20 minute videos produced per week - so it's at least one hour, but I'd imagine each video takes longer to edit etc?
- bespoke_engnr 9y agoAs I've started trying to be more professional about it, the time it takes to produce content has grown quite a bit. 20 minutes of me talking into the camera takes 2-4 hours to plan, outline, film, and edit. 30 minutes of screencast takes about 8 hours to script and film, and edit. The planning/research phase before that takes really long, because I try REALLY hard to avoid dependencies on jargon and specialized knowledge, to make the material accessible. I'm actually about to experiment with a series targeted at more experienced sysadmins, where I can just improvise and work on a practical project without much planning or gradual explanation of the fundamentals. I'm hoping those videos will be much faster to create. I spend a LOT of time thinking up and planning material, though -- not really sure how to count that.
- pingou 9y agoI make -200 Euros (yes, minus) per year with https://champignouf.com https://champignouf.com (a website to identify mushrooms). I think it's the case for many people that their side project make them lose money, if you consider hosting costs.
- djsumdog 9y agoI earn $6 a month on my patreon: https://www.patreon.com/battlepenguin https://www.patreon.com/battlepenguin I was driving around the US for five months and writing, but now I'll have to put that on pause as I just moved in with a friend and need to find a real job again.
- raihansaputra 9y agoJust read through some of your blog posts. Sadly I'm not in a position to be a patron. I really, really like your writing. I want to write too, but most of my writings are stuck in a journal half-finished. Do you have any tips to fleshing out pieces of writing like blog posts?
- le-mark 9y agoRental property, single family home. About $4800 a year in principle paid down. I'm thinking of putting some cash toward paying off the mortgage, and pocketing all the rent (minus insurance and tax). Just haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.
- discreditable 9y agoOn bestmotherfucking.website I make $10-20$ per year which goes into its namecheap account. It breaks close enough to even that I have no plans to shutter the site for the next 5 years. On my blog I have affiliate links to Amazon products which I explain how to use. I've made $428 over the past year. Those regularly net 30$ per month on average. It covers the web hosting and leaves enough to help me buy random Amazon stuff.
- agumonkey 9y agoDo solar panel and home growing food counts ?
- julox 9y agoI am earning 10 cents pert month with pythonconverter.com
- reverend_gonzo 9y ago2 bedroom condo rented out on AirBNB. Don't have a full year's worth of income yet, but I expect around 12k in profit plus 12k in principal paid down plus any rise in market value.
- reactbro 9y agoI make $3000 a month committing cybercrime
- smnplk 9y agoYou need to be spanked.
- codazoda 9y agoI've made a measly $179 this year from Passive Income. It's not much but it is entirely passive. Most of it comes from Google AdSense on my blog, which I've been writing posts in for about 15 years. I mostly write stuff that I've researched and completed and that I want to remember how to do again in the future. I don't consider my time because these are simply notes I wrote for myself and would have written regardless of being paid for them.
- megaman22 9y agoIt's not exactly "passive", but I make about $16k renting the bottom floor of the duplex I own. It's not without headaches of having to deal with tenants and maintenance and whatnot, but since I live there anyway in the upstairs, it's primarily things I would have to do in any case. And I can write off a lot of interest and tools and materials on my taxes. It pays the mortgage, if not the taxes, and should be a nice little income property down the road when I buy a real house. I also make about $100 a year on Amazon affiliate links on my blog.
- ionised 9y agoZero. I put every penny of it to good use.
- runj__ 9y agoNot including anything from the company I co-founded: $10-$20 a month from publishing Hypersphere (a book written by the 4chan /lit/ board) which sells a few copies a month spread between Lulu and Amazon. http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/product-22517627.html http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/pro... It was really fun self-publishing something and as an added bonus it's in the permanent collection of the MoMA Library.
- tachibana 9y agoStep 1: Save diligently (>30% of pre-tax salary) Step 2: Invest in very conservative investments that throw off free cash (I personally like fixed income like US treasuries and municipal bonds). The operative word is "conservative" so that the passive income is reliable and can be treated as a permanent offset to lifestyle costs. Step 3: ... Step 4: $$$ -- As the income in Step #2 grows, it increases the savings ratio in Step #1 (a geometric series!). This is a doable formula anywhere (I currently am working and raising a family in Silicon Valley) and I've achieved financial independence in about ~10 years. I still keep working to stay engaged.
- marketvulture 9y ago+500/mo and growing after 5 months. Workable passive income is not a rare unicorn, but calling it "passive" is a misnomer. You have to work to get traffic, incrementally improve the product and handle bugs, etc. Perhaps we should call it what it usually is: "side" income.
- lucraft 9y ago£0
- mapster 9y ago$5k/year from digital product ecommerce site (3500 products). i made it in 2012 and it just hums along as ppl buy & download. occasional emails - mostly requests. I need to expand this site to help with kid's college expenses a bit. might as well.