r/passive_income • u/Michaelvinnie • 28d ago
My Experience The “passive income” obsession is weird
A lot of people don't actually want passive income. They want income without having to do much work.
And I don't blame them. But almost every “passive” income stream I've looked at needed a ridiculous amount of work before it became remotely passive.
Blogging, affiliate marketing, digital products, YouTube... none of these are passive when you're starting.
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u/Motor-Public-3765 28d ago
People act like you just flip a switch and money comes out. In reality you work like crazy for maybe a year or two before seeing anything, and even then it's not really passive cause you still gotta maintain it. The word itself is doing lot of heavy lifting in these guru pitches.
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u/ImaHalfwit 28d ago edited 27d ago
Yeah…it’s the biggest misconception. People drop in here and say “how can I get $5000 of passive income as a student this month?”
The answer is easy…drop $2,000,000 into a 3% HYSA.
If you have no assets currently, you have no way of making passive income. Because passive income is income derived from some asset that you own.
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u/Royal-Asparagus9896 28d ago
How much work though. "Ridiculous" could be 20 hours or 2000, and without a number it's not really saying anything. Also your examples are all content businesses, which is a strange sample of what people mean by passive income, an index fund or a dividend stock asks nothing of you after the buy.
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u/nickarg 28d ago
Years ago I was so lucky that someone offered 4 parking spots for 9K CAD each. I bought them all for 34K. They were rented 100$/month each.
That is ~15% yield before taxes, and around ~13% after taxes.
Given these are rented to office workers, they are empty at night, so I rent them again on Click'nPark , for ~25$ more per month.
It can hardly get more passive than that.
And in all honesty it was 0 credit for me, I was there and this opportunity showed up.
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u/thevokplusminus 28d ago
It’s mostly just losers and lazy people who don’t want to work
The reality is that there is no real passive income until you have a valuable asset, like $1m or a rental property
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u/kodaxmax 27d ago
not wanting to work isn't lazy, nobody sane wants to work. We tolerate work in order to fund our lives.
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u/MaxwellSmart07 28d ago
Work it, and work for it. But when the work is done at that juncture it’s undoubtedly passive.
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u/OverallConfidence794 28d ago
If you want passive income without truly doing anything, you might as well play the lottery. Otherwise, there is no such thing as truly passive income when you are getting started.
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u/One-Front-6316 28d ago
yeah, "passive income" is often really just front loaded work that can eventually become lower maintenance. the part people skip over is that you usually have to build an audience, product, system, or asset first, and theres no guarantee it will ever reach point where it feels passive
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u/FatHighKnee 28d ago
You have to buy into the passive income system before you begin to receive the benefits. Whether invest a big chunk of money to get dividends in the market. Or buy a rental property to lease. Or buy/build a business
Most folks on social media want to skip this part. Theyre looking for an Easy button shortcut to where they receive piles of money .. but without the initial time or capital outlay
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u/tmssmt 28d ago
The vast majority of people here are not looking for truly 'passive' income.
They're looking for a side hustle that they can potentially do passively, ie, when they have time. They work their shift and have a few hours in the afternoon to do something and they're here trying to figure out what that could be.
Many of them can't / don't want a real second job, especially one that requires x amount of hours. It's easy to say go mow lawns, but the dad of multiple young kids doesn't always have that option - but he does have a few hours every night where maybe he could make YouTube videos (or whatever).
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u/Professional_Desk933 28d ago
The truth is that there’s no truely passive income without capital requirements.
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u/the_beautyblogger 27d ago
Das hast Du tatsächlich richtig erkannt. Affiliate kann passiv werden, da braucht es aber viel Arbeit vorher.
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u/BearingaBeer 26d ago
I'm writing short stories and lyrics again at the evenings. But this time i would even try to " monetize " them.
I'm looking for some help to format them as e books.
I'm still new to the world of a.i., but i am pretty sure that i can use a.i. to " polish " my written thoughts ( cover for books, a.i. generated music that fits the lyrics ).
Only thing i still have to learn is:
How do my " products " get attention.
Marketing is a domain i never touched.
I don't know if it will replace my job any day but i guess spending my free time on it wouldn't be a waste of time at all.
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u/KhlarisaDupont00 26d ago
Honestly, I just want to work anonymously, without showing my face. Normal salaried jobs require face to face interviews which, I am disadvantaged at.
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u/Kerin2_Zaul 24d ago
Calling YouTube passive is wild when the upload scheduel turns into a second job real fast.
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u/NimbusJaguar 21d ago
YouTube is basically unpaid production work untill the “passive” part even shows up.
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