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.
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.