I live in Berlin, Germany. I'm struggling with my current income and I would like to make passive income, would you please suggest some realistic ideas?
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.
Passive income (in the forms that it actually exists, and isn't a scam being sold by someone who makes their "helping" people create passive income) requires long-term thinking, and it's nearly impossible to make good long-term decisions when you're worrying about rent money or your next meal.
If you work full time, focus on getting a raise, a new job, or changing industries.
If you're a freelancer or consultant, raise your rates, or fire a shitty client to make room for a good one.
If you don't know how to do these things, you're not alone, and there's no shame in asking for help.
_Reliable_ income isn't necessarily a pre-requisite for passive income, but it's emotional leverage that most people try to skip past and never achieve either.
I have a job but not good salary and I can't change or ask for a raise right now because it is not possible. That's why I'm trying to find another source of income in addition to my current job. Thanks for taking the time to answer
If you’re willing to share, what is preventing you from finding additional work? You obviously feel married to a job that isn’t really working for you, and I’m wondering if you’re really stuck or just feeling stuck.
I'm stuck cz with my age and the skills I have, I can't find better job, I'm trying since more than 6 months to find better job but it didn't work out. So I was thinking about a part time job in addition to my main job. Kind of writing or doing hand made things. I'm just not sure what to do and where to start.
If you don’t have the skills to find a better job, consider using your free time to develop those skills. If you think of yourself as a student who has a job to cover living expenses, maybe you will feel motivated and excited. You have an opportunity to work towards a better life and have your costs covered by someone else. It’s all about how you look at it.
I made some aggressive investments in crypto this year, and they are paying off nicely… for now. I’m willing to pay the short term price of anxiety for getting these ridiculous returns, but there’s no way I’d recommend that someone put their meager savings into this stuff. I’m willing to take extreme risk, but I can also “afford” to lose the money. Even though the returns are technically passive, worrying about when to take my money out of a full time job. Sleep-at-night passive income only comes from making smart moves over time, along with inheriting money & getting lucky.
Any time I’ve looked into passive income, I’ve come to the same conclusion: the simplest and most effective way to increase my income is to focus my energy on improving my main career.
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.
I am with you on this! I know a lady with some 20 rental apartments. Income is far from passive, managing (and suing not paying) tenants takes some serious time. Some tech workers have huge stock portfolios, however taking care of stocks takes some time.
I met many people in my life, rich and poor, but nobody was lying on the couch and enjoying rain of 500 euro banknotes. Maybe it’s an American thing.
Taking care of your own trees also takes time. For one, you need to put them in good soil, water them perhaps, keep them clear from pests, trim them, etc.
I think the parent commenter's point (and apologies if this is a mis-read, shp0ngle) is that passive income is a fantasy unless you're just stashing extra money in investment vehicles. That doesn't sound like the situation nada_ss finds themselves in.
I bought a fantasy novel recently that was written in 1998. Turns out the author wrote 11 more novels in this series which was a big part of why I chose it. The most recent novel came out in 2021. She no doubt will receive a tiny amount of income in 2022 from my purchase in 2022 stemming from work she completed in 1998. I would classify that as passive income but of course is it really? Would the book have even been on the shelf at Books A Million if she has stopped writing in 2000? Hard to say but I think most people would consider that passive income earned this year.
CharlesW's interpretation was off, but still it's not truly passive until she stops writing books.
Continuously writing books for 20 years is work. The first book would probably have significantly less sales if the author didn't invest time or money in marketing and sequels for 20 years.
The root comment would still hold true:
> If there was a magic way to make money without work
Start a big bank. The bank can borrow money into existence, and loan it out and make passive income from the interest payments which, by the way, is money that does not exist. Magic. All the big banks do it, and if your big bank fails the government might bail you out.
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!
1. Find a profitable niche
2. See if you could market to said niche in a way where you have an unfair advantage.
3. If yes to 2, market and sell the product before you have it to ensure demand
4. Build the product.
I would change this to. Find a project you would love to do (software, hardware, art; anything you love to be really good at). Make sure other people would like to see that project (ask your friends and see what others have done). Then create the project and blog about it, create tiktok/youtube videos. It can take a year or more . Also this project can be used to get you a job.
It is possible your project will fail; try to figure out why. Pick a new project and try again.
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.
So basically, be wealthy. All of your solutions require money up front, except maybe #4 if you're skilled and lucky, and #8 but the cc rewards for day to day spending is like 1 or 2 bowls of raman.
I read a long list of side hustle ideas. The enumeration was great and very useful, but 90% of the list was essentially really obvious things I would already have started doing if I owned specific non-trivial assets.
Most advice and success stories are too vague, unreproducable, and/or obvious to be useful.
I understand some people need to be told not to spend $5000/year on coffee, but it's exhausting when I've never spent money on coffee in my entire life and 99% of personal finance advice is on that level of unhelpful.
The people I know that founded their own small businesses were not wealthy: they were mostly middle-class. Software businesses in particular mostly just require time and skill.
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.
Yet, those who put their entire savings in the stock market last year are now significantly worse off than if they had just left it in cash.
Sure, their portfolios might bounce back at one point, but who knows when.
Just because we had a 13 year bull run thanks to printing money and dumping it in the stock market, does not always guarantee this can go on forever. The war certainly didn't help either.
Sometimes stocks are just gambling, and it's best to only gamble what you're not afraid to lose, instead of your entire life savings.
Stress leads to bad decisions reducing your options. What I have experienced is that savings help you tide over life's uncertainties. Yes I am letting go of a few % in returns, but I gain something far more valuable - peace of mind and optionality.
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.
Any asset that you can resell (Real estate, commodities) is a hedge against inflation. Bitcoin isn't special.
Putting all your eggs in the Bitcoin basket is risky because it will likely collapse because it's a less than zero-sum Ponzi scheme. It's arguably good for short term speculation but not long term investment.
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.
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...
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.
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.
This is what I’ve been doing. I own high dividend yield stocks with a bit of leverage. I also sell call options against the position for more income. If the stock gets called away I sell put options to buy it back. This is called “the wheel” or triple income strategy. Of course you need to find the right stock and sell the right options. Works great when it works. For true passive though you would need to simply collect dividend with no leverage. Set it and forget it. Of course, depending on your lifestyle this can require lots of capital
My peasants do net fairly sizable tax revenue (largely in sheep, some gold as well) but I would hardly call that “passive”, what with all the galloping around the countryside with my pikemen and all!
