[throwaway98121]

No side projects. The little time I have outside of work and family, I read or browse hacker news before falling asleep. I did take vacation recently and play The Witcher 3, which ruined gaming for me.

I have about $200k spread thoughout some index funds and individual stocks that all pay dividends in my post tax accounts. I reinvest all that income and the taxes are kind of annoying to deal with, but’s it’s better than nothing.

I also have a high yield savings account. A big chunk of my total cash is tied up here because I’d rather stay liquid. I think the rate is now 2% annual or just north of. It gets me $300 a month. I just save it and let it grow, aside from taxes on the interest.

[siruncledrew]

Putting money in holdings like stocks, funds, and other investments seems like the closest thing to “passive income” based on how I would expect “passive” to be defined. It’s getting paid to park money in something for some time. If it’s simple investing like in mutual funds and ETFs, then almost anybody could handle the level of personal resources that goes into maintaining that source of income which is mostly just checking the performance and filing taxes once a year (pretty much this could be accomplished with price notifications and something like turbotax).

I don’t know, maybe that kind of “passive income” is no longer cool or desirable.

Every form of passive income requires periodic blips of input, but the magnitude and frequency of those blips could vary a lot depending on the business. There’s some forms of passive income that are really like part-time jobs or require a full-time job worth of effort to launch something. These don’t seem very passive to me.

I see people preach on the internet how they found some golden opportunity that lead to raking in thousands of dollars on a monthly basis with minimal oversight. I’m sure instances of this exist, but frankly I think there’s a lot that is still unsaid about what was required to pull it off. There’s a group of people that are instead looking for the snake oil fountain that allows someone to live like their retired in their 30s but without doing any work. This is no longer “passive income”, and is instead just another “what’s the easiest way to become rich” search. The reality is that identifying and executing a high-ROI opportunity that recurring brings in money with low input is not as easy as following an A->B->C guide or else every market entrant would have like a 90% success rate and everyone would already be doing it.

If people genuinely want passive income, then financial investments or monetizing hobbies (to the extent it’s still enjoyable) seem like a good place to start for providing a good lifestyle/income balance.

[shanecleveland]

"Investment income" is certainly a good example of "passive income." But it seems when investment income is touted as the only true form of passive income, it is forgotten that, in most cases, some outlay of effort was required to first generate the initial investment.

Likewise, many projects that require some initial effort upfront may eventually produce income with little to no continuing involvement. Passive income.

[travisr]

Capital One 360 is offering 60 month CDs at over 3% now. Just a fee of 6 months of interest if you withdraw early. Pretty liquid and would get you an extra $75/month of income if you just did half of your savings (+$150/month for all of it).

[solaxun]

60 Month CD at 3.0%? Anybody signing up for that should not be allowed to manage money ever again. Look at the yield curve, you are getting (almost) nothing for locking your money up an additional 5 years.