There comes a time when you get tired of doing the same nine-to-five job and living from paycheck to paycheck. Everyone wants to earn money, with as little work as possible. Making money without working may sound like a pipe dream, but that’s what passive income is all about.
Passive income consists of money you earn without doing much work or from continuous payments for a job you’ve done once. There are many ways to make a passive income. Here are some ideas you can try now.
Investment
Investing is the most popular and convenient way to make money without working. You don’t have to worry about which stocks to buy or which company to invest in. There are investment organizations or companies that can do the work for you. All you need is to provide the funds.
You can also use Robo-advisor, like Betterment or Blooom, to grow your money for you for a fee. Betterment charges 0.25 to 0.40 percent and provides automatic rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting.
If you own stocks in a company, you can earn a portion of their profits. This method is called dividend investing. Dividend investment provides a steady income, but the amount you receive will depend on how much stock you own.
Peer-to-Peer Lending
Grow your wealth without doing much by trying peer-to-peer lending. You earn by lending money to somebody and charging interest on the payment. The process is done through a broker or a lending organization. The broker selects a reliable borrower for you by evaluating the individual’s credit score and debt-to-income ratio and arranges an agreement between you (the lender) and the borrower.
You can charge as much as 10 percent or a higher interest in peer-to-peer lending, which is more than what you may get from conventional investments. The broker will get their share of the profit, and the rest is yours unless there are other fees charged by the broker, which is something you should look out for.
Real Estate
Before, it was impossible for ordinary people to earn from investing in real estate unless they have $100,000 or more. Now almost anyone can earn a passive income through this method by investing in mutual funds or crowd-funded real estate.
You can buy stocks in a real estate investment trust and get a share of their profits. Or you can join an online investing platform, like RealtyShares, where you invest money in companies that need funding for their real estate projects and draw passive income.
Property Rental
Earn money from renting out a spare room or an unused property. By joining home-sharing networks, like Airbnb, VRBO, HomeAway, and Booking.com, you can put up your extra room, apartment, or home for peer-to-peer rentals to travelers looking for temporary lodging.
This way of drawing passive income will require more effort than investing your money on stocks does. At most, you will need to prepare; clean the place for lodging and explain to the tenant the house rules, how everything works, and where everything is placed; and inspect the room and pick up the keys on their last day of stay.
But if you’re renting out the place for longer than a few days or months, you will have to be more involved in managing the property and assisting the tenant.
E-commerce
Start an online business to draw passive income. Compared to operating a physical shop, running an online store is much less demanding. You can create a website through an online e-commerce platform and sell clothes, crafts, makeup, and all kinds of products online. Once the initial work in done, you will only have to check orders, notify customers, and ship the products.
If you want to something that requires lesser work, you can open an online store with drop shipping. You don’t even need to have the product with you.
All you have to do is to order the product from the manufacturer when a customer purchases something on your website. The manufacturer prepares the product and ships it directly to the customer. It doesn’t take much effort from running this kind of shop as long as you find reliable manufacturers.
Blogging
Draw passive income by monetizing your blog or website. The most common way to make money off your blog is by signing for pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and cost per mile marketing (CPM).
In PPC, you earn a certain amount everytime someone clicks an ad on your website while in CPM, you get paid a certain amount depending on the number of impressions or page views of your site.
You can also earn through affiliate marketing. For example, if you’re running a craft blog, you can recommend products to your followers and provide an affiliate link. You will receive a commision every time someone purchases a product through the link you provided.
Other ways you can make money with your blog include paid guest blogging, paid product reviews, text-link ads, and RSS adverts.
Final Word
Everyone gets old, and there will come a time when you won’t be able to work and earn a salary to sustain your lifestyle. That’s why it’s important to save money while you’re still able to. But with the rising prices of almost everything, relying on your salary for your daily needs and retirement savings may no longer be enough.
Passive income offers a way for individuals to grow their wealth without juggling a second job or doing a gig. As long as you know where you put your time and money, you can earn money and save more for your retirement without doing much.
