15 ms·
Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2017?
Any side projects, Game, OSS, Hacks.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vm 9y agoPublic market stocks. I know this isn't exactly what you're asking but I mention because it's worth considering in your personal decisioning framework (and is my honest answer)
- herman5 9y ago+1 for VTSAX
- qntty 9y agoJust to put it in perspective, you can make ~$500 per month from having $150,000 in mutual funds if you assume that you make an average of 4% per year after inflation. VTSAX made almost 15% last year, but last year was unusual.
- PenguinCoder 9y agoThat's a very large initial outlay.
- jaggederest 9y ago$10k gets you $32 a month, roughly. And that's not even an especially safe rate of return - true fixed income would be closer to 4% before inflation, i.e. 2.5% after inflation.
- maerF0x0 9y agoGoogle about "safe withdrawal rate" and you'll see theres a bunch of information about a portfolio being able to fund 4% long term (in perpetuity?) .
- jaggederest 9y agoI know of it, and I think it's optimistic. You have to factor in the chance for inflation to go up and general equity returns to go down. I think 7% nominal returns is an outlier in the history of the world. For example, the 30 year TIPS return at the moment is ~1% - I would consider that a truly "safe, real interest rate" return. By that standard, taking out 4% in real dollars has a significant chance of depleting your principal over time.
- aoeusnth1 9y agoPicketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" gives ~5% as the historical rate of return of capital after inflation, which is remarkably consistent across countries and decades. 1% is way off.
- nadezhda18 9y agoa robo-adviser I am using "assume[s] a return of 5.1-5.45% on stocks and 0.74-1.05% on bonds after 0.5% fees". I do find these numbers a bit pessimistic but at the same time, I would expect the robo-adviser to give more optimistic numbers than pessimistic ones.
- softawre 8y ago0.5% fees are high. are you getting value out of those, compared to index funds and some vanguard target funds that are 1/10th to 1/4 of the price?
- nadezhda18 8y agothey do auto-rebalancing and auto tax loss harvesting, kinda hands-free investment. Real human investors can charge 1.5%
- kangnkodos 8y agoS&P 500 return was about 22% in 2017. On paper, I made a lot, although I have no plans to touch any of it for a long time.
- carmenjyuen 9y agoI've put $23k into $clm and make $345 in dividends a month.
- shergill 8y agoI'm sorry.. What is clm? A mutual fund? Is that their dividends?
- jaggederest 9y ago$32 a month from a cash pension (in the form of an annuity) from a previous employer. Apparently they still exist, and it pays half of my phone bill.
- dawhizkid 9y agowow how'd that happen
- ghaff 9y agoFor people who have been in the workforce for a while, substantial legacy pensions from prior employers are still pretty common--even in tech.
- jaggederest 9y agoFortune 50 companies with enormous legacy systems. Not recommended, but it is a nice "sorry for all the stress" bonus.
- maerF0x0 9y agoOnce I worked for a forestry industry company and they forced me to be in the union. After a month of working with them I had accrued like $300 in pension (total value, not monthly). They actually tracked me down and paid it out to me like 4 yrs later when I had completely forgotten about it. Probably cost them $300 to get it into my hands.
- nicolrx 9y agoMy blog gets 1M unique visitors per month and earns 2K/mo with adsense.
- cko 9y agoQuestion: with that many uniques, wouldn’t you be able to monetize further? Affiliate marketing and such?
- Scoundreller 9y agoSeems low to me too. I'm getting ~US$200/month with about 30k page views per month (not even uniques, but I'm a one-stop-shop, not a portal). And it's all static, so zero maintenance. Just pay the couple bucks a month to S3 and domain names. But then again, I target people angry at their XYZ provider, so the clickthrough rates are pretty good :)
- soared 9y agoNiche/industry can have a huge impact on cpms though.
- arca_vorago 8y agoAre you doing the writing or are you aggregating or something else?
- Scoundreller 8y agoMyself, but I haven't added any content for ~4 years.
- laksmanv 9y agoWhat's your blog?
- pragmatic 9y agohttps://blog.botletter.com https://blog.botletter.com ?
- annon2323 9y agoBitcoin investment up to 40k
- Adamantcheese 9y agoI got like $10 for the whole year selling books with literally only the poop and alien emoji in them. Pretty sure it's just book reselling bots though, but I can't be sure.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoIs this a two-character book, or one or more longer (but illegible) books?
- Adamantcheese 9y agoIt's two separate books, each ~150 pages long with just that emoji repeated. Completely useless, made em as a joke a few years ago, they still bring in money during the holidays.
- muzani 9y agoWould you mind sharing a purchase link?
- Adamantcheese 8y agoSure, here's links to both of them: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1505357888 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1505357888 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1507842953 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1507842953
- qwerty2020 9y agoI make ~$200-250/month with Find-me[1]. Essentially a database with statistics and contact information for content creators actively looking for advertisers/sponsorship opportunities. Had a lot on the road map (creating more of a platform) but have pivoted to other projects since this doesn't seem to be getting the traction I was hoping for. [1] www.find-me.co Also make ~$1.5k/year from old Udemy courses on pretty basic topics (beginner-level SQL, Google Sheets, etc).
- panorama 9y agoI make ~300/mo off of a peer-to-peer loan management software I created for lenders off of 0 marketing (just word of mouth sales). I have some residual revenue along those same lines for a book I wrote in 2015 on helping junior developers get hired at their first job (link in bio if interested).
- jedberg 9y agoTruly passive: Stock gains Mostly passive: Managing rental properties. There is some work involved occasionally when things break or new tenants need to be found, but for the most part I just collect my fee each month.
- maerF0x0 9y agoDid you purchase a long time in the past? Are you getting free cash flow (ie after all expenses) from your properties? When i've looked I havent found deals where one is actually making money (unless you count the equity on the property) and usually are eating cash flow monthly.
- drchiu 9y agoYup. This resonates with me as well for stocks and properties. Takes a long time to build and quite underwhelming to own. Nothing to brag about as people pretty much roll eyes and move onto talking about sexier ways of making money.
- heyyyouu 9y agoDo you worry about renters you'll have to evict? That's what scares me about getting into this -- the thought of losing thousands when it can take months and months to get someone out. Plus the emotional toll of having to do that; not sure I'd want to, although from watching some TV shows on it it seems there's quite a few people who do it on purpose. Still, if those people have kids...
- 9y ago
- f3r3nc 9y agoA game that had 2mm++ downloads free / paid since 2012. It's an online game with players still playing although well beyond it's peak. Since 2013 we pivoted from making games to it services and had not much time to make significant changes other than updating to newer iOS. It still generates about 2-3k yearly revenue which is a good bonus in central Europe. soctics.com
- hidiegomariani 9y agoChecks if a website is mining crypto currency http://whoismining.com http://whoismining.com Donations/Affiliates 10/month
- shanecleveland 9y agoI offer up a weekly printable office football pool sheet for the NFL season. I've had it running for a few years now, and I find that it ends up doing better each year. It's mostly automated/passive, but I spend about 15 minutes each Monday night updating it for the next week. I mention this one because it's one of those things that I just did, mainly for my own needs, and put out there. And it mainly just sits there but does better year-over-year.
- CryoLogic 9y ago100-200/mo from YouTube this year. Down from nearly a grand at it's peak. Algorithm is worse, ad rates are terrible and demonetization for no real reason is very rampant. So I guess mutual funds is the answer this year.
- arca_vorago 9y agoIf yt/g isn't careful they are going to start bleeding out users even faster than they already are. I've seen a huge uptick in comments like yours the last few months. To go from 1k/mo at peak down to 100-200 largely due to their arbitrary algorithm fuckery is... really fucked up.
- justboxing 9y agoHow many total views is that income spread over? Are we talking like 100K / 200K range or over a million?
- nikkwong 9y agoGot lucky with a Kickstarter project that has evolved into a business which finances my life/interest in programming+design. It was definitely the most lucky thing to happen to me in my entire life.
- gnarcoregrizz 9y agocrypto "investments" and some mining, 401k, etfs
- StavrosK 9y agoMade http://historio.us http://historio.us, a full text search engine for bookmarks, nine years ago. It's been making a few hundred dollars a month with zero marketing ever since.
- thedirt0115 9y agoBought a couple cheap condos near the biggest university in a flyover state, got a property management company to take care of everything (finding tenants, collecting payments, handling service calls, etc). It's a few hundred bucks a month on top of other people basically buying houses for me.
- maerF0x0 9y agoDoes it make free cash flow after all expenses (including amortization of big ticket repair items) ?
- thedirt0115 9y agoYes, the figure I gave was profit after all expenses. Since they’re condos, the association covers the heating/cooling system and everything exterior. I guess we’ve been lucky on the repair front, because the only thing we’ve had to pay for (in ~6 years) was a cheap dishwasher and toilet fix and occasionally repainting between tenants.
- shostack 9y agoHave you done the math on estimating returns with things like a gap in tenancy, repairs, etc. factored in?
- thedirt0115 9y agoNot really, but like I said in response to other comment, we’ve had very few repairs. There’s never been more than ~1 week gap between tenants — near university housing is always hot, and the management company only gets paid if the place is occupied. They usually have the next tenant signed before current one leaves. In one, we’ve had the same tenant for the whole time.
- jonandersense 9y agoiOS app “Leap Second” made about 2k a month last year this year 5-10k. Required some initial upfront work to create the app but since then Ive been putting in about 2h per week.
- philip1209 9y agoAmazon stock
- carmenjyuen 9y ago$nflx stock
- STRiDEX 9y agoI made an Adsense plugin for Angular and if you copy and paste the doc's use example with my ad code (it says to replace) it shows you my ads (duh). Several people have for some reason used it in production, maybe hoping to get their own adsense account/code later. It earned $140 last month.
- gremlinsinc 9y agoI'd be careful, if the end-user breaks google's policies you could be banned from adsense permanently.
- westondeboer 9y agoI thought about doing something similar like this, just seemed to shady for me to actually do. Good job though!
- runnr_az 9y agoEmoji domains... making enough to pay for a Subaru Outback car payment every month!
- Psilidae 8y agoWhere can you buy those now? I remember they existed, but I thought that was basically a registrar bug that was fixed. The last time I searched around, I couldn't find any registrars that permitted emoji domain names.
- runnr_az 8y agoYeah! https://xn--i-7iq.ws https://xn--i-7iq.ws Still a work in progress, but we've sold like 25,000+ of 'em. Just launched .fm as well...
- muzani 9y agoI got about 20% ROI from cryptocurrency. I didn't get greedy, just targeted a better return than any other account.
- arca_vorago 8y agoAre you targetting a specific coin you like for the featureset or are you diversifying and just spreading it out and focusing on the volatile liquidity at play?
- muzani 8y agoI keep it simple. Only invest in coins with very good fundamentals, as in so strong they could potentially beat Bitcoins. Buy when people are panic selling for no reason. Sell when everyone gets excited about it, when people like my farmer uncle are advising me to buy.
- nadezhda18 9y agoIn 2017, I made a net profit of $11,000 from 3 niche websites + my blog about said websites I also have other investments I keep for retirement but I really do not track how much I get there. It is for the distant future.
- craftyguy 9y agoI feel like this recent article "Don't give away historic details about yourself" is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16793636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16793636
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- shostack 9y agoI'd consider spending time organizing and planning my finances a "side project" since I'm a spreadsheet geek and enjoy doing that sort of thing. As a result, I realized I was an idiot and had let too much accumulate in my checking account that gets abysmal interest. Moved it to a savings account with slightly better interest and I get a little more money from it. Nothing worth writing home about, but definitely worth the few minutes it took me to make that change.
- softawre 8y agoWhat savings account, if you don't mind?
- shostack 8y agoI don't share that information, but I'd suggest you check sites like Bankrate or other comparison sites (warning, they are all affiliate sites) to check out savings rates. Suffice to say, I went from something like .01% APY to considerably more than .01%.
- _noqo 9y ago$1000/year for hosting. Got a cheap HostGator shared hosting and host low traffic websites for some clients (static/WordPress). As a designer with no advanced knowledge in hosting/IT/domains/backend, it was pretty easy and no complications, I can't complain. Now planning to move from HostGator to DreamHost because HTTPS is expensive in HG and free in DH (also using the free Netlify plan for static sites, HTTPS free).
- Bromskloss 9y agoHow much to people pay you for hosting one such site? The idea to design and host simple sites sometimes crosses my mind when I go to some restaurant that doesn't have a working site.
- pablo-massa 8y ago$100-$200/year.
- davidivadavid 9y agoReleasing the Landing Page Cookbook[1] and making Product of the Day on ProductHunt worked pretty well. [1] http://yourlandingpagesucks.com/cookbook http://yourlandingpagesucks.com/cookbook
- superkitty 9y agoI got $1500/month for cleaning houses on weekend.
- dudul 9y agoDoes it qualify as "passive"?
- verylittlemeat 9y agoAre there many part time cleaning jobs out there for men? It seems like an interesting way to make side money but it strikes me as a job people prefer to hire women for (sort of like nanny jobs).
- dudul 9y agoGood question. While I do get the bias of society towards women for nanny jobs, I don't see why this would apply to cleaning people.
- johannkaupen 9y agoInteresting answers. I expected Bitcoin owners to be a big part, 2017 was crazy. Wondering if, a) there are not too many people owning bitcoin in the hn community. b) everybody is a HODLER. c) nobody counts this as passive income.
- nadezhda18 9y agoor maybe they cashed out in 2018? I sold my Ethereum in 2018
- NoCanDo 9y ago100 bucks about every 2 months from Youtube ads. Aboot 10 bucks a month from adsense. Can't be arsed to do more aboot my Youtube and webpage. 's fine for now. Maybe down the road sometimes in the future. There's definitely potential, definitely an audience with need tho.