How to Make Passive Income?

Having been super broke in the past, I’d recommend increasing your primary income first. It’s infinitely easier to have one good paying jobs than two low paying jobs.

A round up of previous discussions on hn was posted recently. You might find it useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29855402

You need capital to make passive income. And you need to be willing to risk that capital. If you dont have those things, dont bother.

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.

Money don’t grow on trees.

If there was a magic way to make money without work, everyone would be doing it.

The theory is simple:

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!

I live comfortably on passive income at 34 years old with my diverse portfolio of income producing assets, which include but are not limited to:

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.

Get someone rich to give you a bunch of money.

Get a high paying job -> invest your savings well -> work on side projects if you feel like it.

"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.

I would recommend you to read the Richest Man In Babylon. It is a small book that explains how one can go about building wealth. Briefly,

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.

You're struggling with your current income? I guess that means there's more going out then coming in? Any income would solve that. Or cutting costs, which might work even quicker.

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.

Get a better job ASAP. Passive income, to large extent, is self-help bullshit. Any business or investment requires attention.

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.

I think it’s important to note that there’s no such thing as passive income, there are plenty of things that require a ton of time upfront, but no time to maintain.

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

Substantial passive income requires a bigger financial invest, e.g. if you can buy 1,000,000 ADA and stake those, you'll get round about 50,000 ADA rewards per year (39,000 USD, currently). Same with stocks, buying an apartment/ house to rent it to others etc.

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.

Get a high-paying job in FAANG and invest your savings.

You live in Berlin? By an apartment and rent it out! But given the prices nowadays in Berlin this is probably unrealistic for you. You might want to have a look at Magdeburg though. Intel is going to build a huge factory there and probably 10000 employees will soon search for some place to live there: https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen-anhalt/magdeburg/magd...

There are 6 pages of questions and thousands of comments on this topic.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+hn+passive+income

If you're fine with living with others I know a few people that bought houses with more bedrooms than they needed and they'd just rent out the spare rooms. Everything is cool as long as you have good tenants and don't mind the constant company. When things are good, this means a much reduced mortgage expense.

I don't know much, but I'd try 10 different things as rapidly as possible and see what sticks.

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

Either have capital and invest. Or start a low-maintenance business (but it needs to actually work).

Live below your means, save up money, put it into something where you can just pick up the checks.

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.

A lot of people work a part time job, or work 2 remote jobs at the same time. Not necessarily recommending this approach, but i've worked with people that were doing it, including one right now.

Make a lot of money and buy stocks. This is the easiest approach.

It's hard to get into a position where you get money for nothing. I'd gladly tell you exactly how to do it, but unfortunately I am just as lazy.

Maybe try feudalism, though.

The only way is to automatic active income. Find a way to make money and than find a way to automatic that activity.

For this question to be answered, it would help to know your area(s) of expertise.

Real estate is one of the most common ways

Buy property and rent it out

Just buy some more money.