The Silver Bloggers community and Dreemport have a new initiative out for this week, in which we are to write about passive income:
Well, this got me to thinking, what is passive income in the first place? So, I looked it up:
According to this definition, passive income is finances of some sort that we have to do little or nothing to receive. Interest is an obvious form of passive income, and the only income I would say I do nothing for. Bank account yields have been insignificant for years and years now, so I don't think those few pennies I make a month are going to change my lifestyle. The interest that I make and look at every single day is here on Hive; I make a whopping 67 cents a day in interest here.
Social security payments is another passive income for me, although I believe it comes from taxes I paid on my income while I was working, so I'm not sure it counts, but I'm including it anyway.
I invest some in tangibles. Real estate mostly, but I have a few valuable musical instruments, some original art, and a tiny bit in precious metals. These, hopefully, will all appreciate, resulting in passive income.
A couple years ago I removed all funds that I had invested in stocks long ago, because I no longer wanted to support that scam of a system, nor the entities mutual funds invest in, which are nearly all connected in some way to war. I bought a house with the money instead.
I am a NYC landlord. I own an apartment building in Brooklyn NY, and have for nearly 30 years. The building started making more than its expenses twenty two years ago, when we sold the business that we had operated there for fourteen years. When we sold that business, stopped working like fools, and charged rent for the commercial space instead, we suddenly had income that seemed passive in comparison. But I gotta tell ya, as good as that money is, I don't do nothing for it. I have to fill out reports and returns regularly. I have to arrange and pay for expensive repairs all the time. I have to pay bills bills bills. I have to write out leases, and annually inform the tenants that there have never been bedbugs, but that there is definitely lead paint, in the building. I have to go to court to contest pedantic and unknown violations, I have to file the apartments with the rent stabilization agency every single year, and I have to keep abreast of new regulations which is no easy task in today's regulations-for-regulations'-sake society.
So that got me to thinking about what the meaning of "passive income" really is here. If rental income is passive, then passive really means some way to make money without earning it as an employee. Or better yet, money earned or saved via pleasurable activities. In addition, saving on expenses is the same thing as income when you look only at your bottom lines. If we augment the definition of passive income to include money earned or saved via pleasurable, non-mandatory actions, we open up a whole lot of opportunities to make passive income. I am adding a few methods to the definition:
- DIY tasks
- Value added activities
- Foraging
- Growing your own food
- Blogging
- collecting tangibles that will appreciate in value, such as real estate, instruments, art, and precious metals
Here are a few examples:
@thebigsweed and @farm-mom earn passive income by milling their own wood. Many of us have our tree guys carry off the wood that has to come down on our properties, burn it, or turn it into mulch. Those of us who can mill our own wood will save a tremendous amount of money!
Cheese or yogurt made from raw milk before it sours and needs to be discarded.
Publishing poems on Hive. OK maybe not poems, they tend to make very little sadly, but blog about your yummy meal, or your spectacular walk, or what you bought in a market or heard in a club, and you get triple your pleasure: you enjoy the event, you get to relive it by telling us about it, and you earn rewards. That counts as passive income to me.
Waiting to thin your peas until the shoots are 5 or 6 inches high so you can eat them! This is some passive income I hope to earn in the next couple of weeks.
We focus so heavily on simple dollars and cents, that we miss the bigger picture here. Passive income in its purest sense - increases in finances that require no effort at all, is not all that easy to earn because we need money in order to make that kind of money. But those of us who have skimpy funds need not despair! There are many many ways to increase value if you just put it out of your head that value is determined by exchanges of money.
Of course, I am hoping to make millions on various crypto investments, but that remains to be seen.
This is my entry to The Silver Bloggers community's recent collaboration with Dreemport. Come tell us how you plan to make money from nothing!
footer by our dear SilverFish, @mondoshawan