I'm sorry, but this topic is stupid. And I don't know why everyone upvoted it.
Do you honestly think you can get money passively? As in by doing nothing? Downvote me all you want, but I'm actually disappointed to see a thread like this on the home page of hacker news.
You guys should know that there is no such thing as "passive income" and anything worth doing is going to be difficult. You are wasting your time trying to find these "do nothing and make money" or "get rich quick" schemes.
I think you might have a different idea of "passive income" than the rest of us here.
Passive income is money generated without requiring you to go to work, trading a set amount of hours for steady cash. Instead, it's spending the effort on building something (whether it be a book for royalties, a website for subscription payments, investments for interest / asset worth increase, or real estate for rental money) that generates a cash flow without requiring the 40 hour work week.
Granted, it's not "passive" in that you still need to spend the time and effort to get it up and running, but once your system in place there's usually much less time involved to keep it operating, which is why this type of income is much more attractive - you can scale this system to make much more money than you ever could through salary.
However, the risk is correspondingly higher; if your product doesn't do well, you don't get money, whereas you can get away with a reasonable amount of subpar performance at larger companies without too much problem.
Another try -
Do term deposits / Government Bonds / ?? pay a higher rate than the inflation rate?
If so - that is passive income. OBVIOUSLY it requires capital / time / effort / luck / something to start with... But once that part is done - the rest is passive.
No one said "free" income, no one said "do nothing" income and no one said "quick" income-- they said passive. i.e. spend once (either with time or money) and keep earning.
I get a check every month from a biz I sold-- no effort for the last two years. I rent a house up in Anchorage, Alaska with a property manager-- no effort for the last 3 years. Some passive income is easier than others, but almost none of it is easy.
Sadly, I've come to realize this is true. On a positive note, I've also come to realize that you can get enjoyment from gardening your projects.
I had a Facebook app which was basically working well, generating thousands a month. I thought it was on autopilot. But always stuff would go wrong. An ad network would start paying less after they realize I'm not trying the competition, so I have to try to negotiate. Facebook would change their API in seemingly compatible ways, but necessitate changes if you want to stay in the game. Disk space would run out. Increasing popularity would require optimizing stuff and so on and so on.
You're right and wrong. Because yes, making money from doing nothing won't work. But making (quasi) passive money off of something that you've built might. Yep. That's the trick I say. Don't just say something is stupid. It makes sense to think about this stuff.
Dividend yielding stocks generate passive income. Some of the stocks which have been hit hard because of the downturn, IBM, for example, have more attractive dividend yields than before. So, sure, you may not become wealthy, but you can generate passive income. Building wealth is different then generate income from zero to very few hours of work.
That's a pessimistic and limiting attitude, sir. Software is a great business because it's easy to copy; analogously, so is the web because of its scale. Most of the work goes into developing, setting up the system. The rest of the work goes into watching and maintaining it while you either build the next thing or sit on a beach. If the latter can be monetized, that's arguably a valid way of generating passive income.
I think "Set it and forget it" is an appropriate phrase for what making money passively entails. Unless it's a lucky investment that pays out over time, most people view passive income as working really hard on something, launching, then sitting back and allowing the revenue to come in while doing routine maintenance on whatever the product is.
Do you honestly think you can get money passively? As in by doing nothing? Downvote me all you want, but I'm actually disappointed to see a thread like this on the home page of hacker news.
You guys should know that there is no such thing as "passive income" and anything worth doing is going to be difficult. You are wasting your time trying to find these "do nothing and make money" or "get rich quick" schemes.