In this article, I’ll talk about what is a passive income?, What is the need of having a passive income alongside your job or current source of income, and how can you get one or more passive income – maybe even 7 passive income streams you can start in 7 days. For those of you who don’t know what is passive income, I’ll start with some examples and benefits of active vs passive income sources. If you already know what is passive income, you can directly skip to the 7 passive income streams.
Most of us who have a job, work 9 to 5, or more to earn a paycheck. A salary is a drug that you get bi-weekly so that you don’t leave the rat race. You continue to live a happy life as long as you continue to get this salary. What if, for some reason, your salary stops coming? Seems like a remote possibility? In 2020, triggered by the COVID19 pandemic unemployment rates have risen to a record high of 14.7% and gradually came down. This means a lot of people lost their jobs and source of income during this time. What if they were the only earners in their family? What if something like this had happened to you? Would you be able to support yourself – and your family?
In contrast, during the same time period in 2020, the stock market grew to record highs, the real estate market in the US has been hot and continues to rise, Crypto currency has seen record highs. Most importantly, in 2020, a lot of people have become entrepreneurs, launched new businesses, pivoted from a closed business to a new venture – the Zoom economy gave birth to many new ideas and businesses.
If you just rely in one source of income – your primary job or business, it is a big risk in this ever changing economy. You barter your time for money. You work, you get paid. You don’t work, the pay stops! That is active income. If you are not active, there is no income for the most part. A Passive Income on the other hand is one where you can expect to earn without actively working for it. It may take time to setup a passive income source, but once it is set, it requires minimal work to get continuous returns. Passive doesn’t mean that you won’t have to do anything, but it means that you don’t need to be actively involved as you are in your day to day job or single business where you need to get up everyday and go to a store and open the doors.
Why Passive income is key to success (and probably happiness)?
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How many times in a month it happens that you do not feel like getting up and going to work? You just want to sit in the bed and play with kids. May be you just want to unwind and spend some time on yourself. How many times have you wanted to take a vacation but because you need to be in the office or in your store, you had to let go of the idea? How many times you have told yourself – If I don’t go to work, who will pay the bills? Well, if any of these make sense – you should seriously look into passive income. A passive income source will allow you to enjoy life more fully. You will not be dependent on a 9×5 job. You’ll be more independent, more successful and as a result more happy – because you’ll be your own boss!
One other thing about active vs passive income is that the active income is always taxed at the highest tax rate. Uncle Sam will take the first share of your money from your job before you even see it in your bank account. All you get is the rest of it. In the case of passive income though, there are a lot of ways in which you’ll pay less or even no taxes in some cases.
How Passive Income works?
So how does Passive income work? As the name suggest, you are earning something from a work that you are not actively performing. Imagine going to the store every day and buying an Orange to eat. If you don’t go to the store to get an Orange, you won’t have it. Now imagine growing an Orange tree – where you sow the seed, take care of the plant and then it grows into a tree. In the beginning you need to do a lot of work to keep the plan protected, groomed and fed. You need to do a very little work once it grows into a tree and then you just come and collect the fruits! Once in a while you do things to maintain the tree, but those are minimal. These Oranges are passive income generated by the act of growing this tree. When you were buying an Orange at the store, you were paying taxes for it; Spending time in getting the fruit, everyday! Now, you don’t – and still enjoy the fruit.
7 Ideas for Passive Income that you can start in 7 days
So What can be done in a week? A lot! Here are some idea to start and setup a passive income source.
First, you need to find your passion. What is it that you like and will not get bored of if you were to start working on it. This will help a lot if you have to push yourself to create your source of passive income. It will be work in the beginning. It will most likely be have to done along with your job – which means you need to cut down on your non useful activities like watching TV or playing online poker (unless you are earning passive income by winning in online poker. On a side note, if you are, I’d like to learn that from you).
Passive Income from Real Estate:
One of the longest known sources of passive income is Real Estate. This has been around for years. Over 70% of millionaires have real estate as a source of their income and wealth. The way real estate passive income works is that you buy a property, rent it and keep a small portion of money after all mortgages are paid. The key here is positive cash flow. You need to buy something where the mortgage and all other expenses combined are going to be less than the rent you are getting from the property.
Example: Mortage = $1000 Expenses= $300 Rent = $1700, gives you a $1700 – $1300 = $400 in passive income. You don’t need to be actively involved in this process as you can hire a management company (expense) to do the work and you can be the boss. It will take some capital initially to buy a property and set it up on autopilot. Once you learn the ropes, it can be on autopilot. If you are young and start early, this can be a powerful source of wealth building as well – because each real estate has equity that will turn into leverage for you once you have enough equity. You can continue to add more properties to your portfolio, and earn “portfolio income” from it. If you do this right, you can have a real estate portfolio that can earn you 5 to 10,000 dollars or more per month without doing much. its all passive income! You can even retire early.
So how do you do this in 7 days?
I am assuming you have some cash savings stashed away that you can use fo downpayment on your first real estate investment, If not, then you should start on that “saving” process first before building a real estate passive income. Once you have it, these steps can be followed.
Step#1- Go to an online real estate search tool like Realtor.com, Har.com, Zillow.com, or Roofstock.com to find a property you want to invest in. Here is an example of a property from Roofstock.com where you can earn a $1600 rent from a $190k property in TN.
Step#2 – Once you have identified a property you want to invest in, start the process by putting an offer. After a negotiation, you can sign the papers to start the home buying process. There are things you need to be ready with – like a preapproval letter that you can get for FREE at Better.com
Step#3 – In parallel, get your documents and cash ready to close on the property. Shop around for best Mortgage rent based on your credit score.
Step#4 – Find, research and talk to a few property management company in that area. They would charge anywhere between 6 to 10%. If you are a DIY kind of person, you may want to manage it on your own – but remember we want PASSIVE no ACTIVE income!
Step#5 – Close on your investment property! This can be even done remotely.
Step#6 – Rent, Collect and Repeat. AUTOMATE!
(I am providing a high level intro to this process here, but will be posting detailed article on how do this in another post soon).
I know it may take longer than a week to get the property closed an getting everything ready. It took me about 15 days to get my first property on Roofstock searched, purchased and rented. To keep it simple, you can find properties that are already leased. A word of caution – with any investment, there are certain risk associated. What if you are not able to rent the house? What it eh renter doesn’t pay on time? All these are valid risk and you’ll need to learn how to mitigate them. Remember, these risks are small compared to risking your entire life and your family’s happiness to one job. That is a bigger risk!
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2. Passive income from REIT (Real Estate Investment Trusts):
So, you read the first passive income stream from real estate and decided that its not for you. Fair enough. You can still get benefitted from the real estate growth and don’t need to do the work to buy and manage a rental property. Let’s talk about Fundrise! There any many platforms like Fundrise.com, where you can invest in a real estate investment trust (eREIT) online. They’ll invest and real estate and you’ll earn dividends based on the investment returns. Another such example would be syndicated real estate investments (crowdfunding) from Cardone Capital (Grant Cardone, 10x rule) or Nitya Capital by my dear friend from Houston, Swapnil Agarwal.
These REITs will provide you quarterly dividends as they get returns on real estate investments, mostly multi family housing apartments.
Now, you may say that why not just invest this money in stocks instead, and earn dividends income. You should do that too. But those are riskier and you need to invest a lot to make a decent dividend from stocks. With one of the REIT deals, you can expect an 8-12% dividend yearly and your principal investment is more secure. Moreover, if the real estate in these investments appreciates, in a few years you may be able to roll over your money into other deals and save on TAXES too!!
This one, you can start in 1-2 days – and do not even need 7 days. Its pure passive income from your investment. Note here though that whichever REIT you choose, they’ll charge a fee to manage the deal and get their share of the deal – that’s how they make money.
3. Passive income from Online Training:
Do you have a passion for teaching? Do you have expertise in a subject, a tool, a topic that you think will help others? Most importantly, do you think that you can make someone pay for what you have to share, and that will add value to them? If answers to at least two of these questions is YES, then read on. This income stream may be for you.
There are a lot of platforms like Udemy, where you can publish your online course and if its a subject that people want to learn, they’ll pay you for it. You get a percentage of the total earning based on where the students came from. When you bring a student, you get a higher percentage. Here are steps to get started with this stream of passive income.
Step 1 – Decide on the subject that you want to teach. Start with a niche area before you expand. Check if already existing courses are available to do some research and finalize what you are going to teach. For example, if you are a React developer. You may find that there are a number of React courses on Udemy. But if you have specialized skills in building React apps with MySQL for Hospitality industry – thats a niche.
Step 2 – Create an outline and content for your course. Setup your course structure in Udemy to get this refined. Once you see the outline in front of you, it will start to make sense – and will motivate you to keep going.
Step 3 – Create course material and record the videos. You can use free software for this such as Camstudio or paid software like Camtasia.
Step 4- Once your content is ready, upload it to Udemy and setup your course. Publish it!
Step 5 – Now promote it to your network, your friends, your Twitter followers. Ask them to promote it further.
Step 6 – Answer questions from users, help them if they get stuck.
Step 7 – Receive monthly revenue share from Udemy for the course you sell.
Step 8 – REPEAT!
Just to get an idea of the potential of this passive income. There are courses on Udemy which sell for $99. Even with their discounts and promotions, lets say it sells for an average of $40. If a modest thousand of those sell per year it is still $4000 and you get 80% of it which is $3200 that you did not have before. But this is just the beginning! If you keep your course relevant by putting in just 10% of more effort, you can continue to increase that stream.
Now, let’s talk about generating a new stream of income from the existing stream, which will take us to our next step. Once you have a successful course and a number of students – ask them to signup for your newsletter or your blog…or even sell them an eBook on the subject that you wrote. How about creating video content for the material you already have in your course, and sharing for FREE on YouTube and earning ad revenue! That makes the three next Passive Revenue streams for you – detailed below.
4. Passive income from Blogging
Creating an online blog takes 5 mins. Searching and booking a domain name takes 10. Creating content that people will like and come back for – will take a lifetime to master. Don’t let that discourage you. Get started, and you’ll learn along the way. If you don’t start you are not building anything , anyways. That binge watching on Netflix is not going to generate any passive income – except if you plan on writing a critic reviews of those shows – in which case, binge on!
5. Passive income from YouTube/TikTok
How many times have you watched YouTube this week? Every view, every ad that shows up on a YouTube video adds a few cents to the back account of YouTuber. From an 8 year old earning $26 million a year to 80 years old singer getting thousands of fans there are plenty of YT success stories.
6. Passive income from eBook / Book
This is another long-term revenue stream that will need some discipline to get started – but if you keep at it, you can sell your eBooks via Kindle. It’s very easy to get published via Amazon Kindle Desktop Publishing (KDP).
I published my first kids eBook on Amazon Kindle in 5 days. I wrote the story. Got an illustrator from Fivver who created the visual for $25. Putting it all together took another few hours.
7. Passive income from Affiliate Marketing
These three Passive income streams for you are related to one subject – making you an expert in that subject. It can get you more future revenue that I’ll share in my upcoming posts. Subscribe to my Newsletter for more such insights.
Furthermore, if you are able to get a good follower base on Twitter or your blog, you can start selling products from affiliates who are trying to reach the same customers. Thats’ Affiliate Marketing for you. Taking our React example further, you can affiliate yourself with online platforms or services that are useful for React developers and sell them those services, earning a percentage in this process. The key is to keep this AUTOMATED as much as possible so that it does not become another job for you. Remember – we are looking for PASSIVE INCOME not Active Income.
I am not going to go into the details of 4, 5, 6, 7 as a lot has already been written about them. But one thing that I am going to tell you is that all of this is POSSIBLE. All of this will take some work and commitment on your part – FOR SHORT TERM. If you do it, it will have lasting LONG TERM Results that you can not even imagine right now.
I hope you liked this post. Please share your feedback and let me know what else would you like to hear about?