Big Picture, Financial Planning, Millennials

What Is Passive Income? And Should It Be Your Goal?

It seems as if every millennial’s main goal is to start generating passive income. I get it, who wouldn’t want to make money doing nothing? The idea of passive income sounds and is amazing. In this blog post, we are going to talk about what passive income is and is not, as well as some passive income ideas for you! 

What Is Passive Income?

Passive income is earnings from a rental property, limited partnership, or other enterprise in which a person is not actively involved. The key point here being that you are not actively involved. It’s all about generating income on a regular basis without having to put much time or effort into something. 

Most people believe that passive income comes from doing no work, but it definitely takes work, especially up front. An online course is a perfect example of this. It takes time to create, edit, deliver, and market it, but the goal is that overtime it starts to sell itself and generate extra income for you without much effort. 

Passive income can be a great strategy to fast track your wealth building journey. Many people have the goal of building up enough passive income where they do not need to work in the future and can just live off of the income they produce passively. I personally love this goal! But…people just have to come into it knowing what to expect. Let’s look at rental properties for example. In no way are rental properties passive unless you hire a property manager, but that comes at a cost and will eat into your profits. If you do it alone, you have to find renters, do background checks, make sure they pay, fix things up, etc. which all takes time and some hard work! You have to accept this from the beginning and go into it knowing what you will have to put in. 

What Passive Income Is Not…

  • It is not income that comes from your main job. Passive income does not come from something you spend tons of hours on. That is just regular income. 
  • It also does not come from your second job or side hustle. Neither of those are passive if you are involved and work regularly in it. 
  • It is not from investing. Unless the investments are paying you interest or dividends, it is not passive income. 

Passive Income Ideas

  • Write and sell an Ebook
  • Create a House 
  • Own long term rental properties
  • Own short term rental properties/AirBnb’s
  • Rent out your car or boat with VRBO or another app 
  • Buy crowdfunded real estate
  • Lend money to others through peer-to-peer lending
  • Dividend stocks 
  • REIT’s
  • Sponsored Posts on social media
  • Use high yield savings accounts or CD’s
  • Rent out your house when you are gone
  • Create a blog or YouTube channel
  • Sell products online 
  • Receive royalties from something 
  • Affiliate Marketing 
  • Sell your own digital products

Those are just some ideas for you to get started in generating passive income. The goal is to be making money while you sleep! See if you can find 1 or 2 ways to do so in the near future!