Passive income

One of the ways to become financially independent is to generate income whilst you sleep, passive income. The idea is that you invest either some time or money into a certain idea or thing, and that will generate income for you without any further time or effort. This is how generally the super rich, got super rich. People only have a finite time in which to earn (governed by how much you stay awake) so if you can earn whilst you sleep or do something else, that is the dream of many people I'm sure.

However, not all passive income ideas are straightforward or easy. A lot require a good amount of effort to start with or a good amount of money (and luck). I hope to build up a good income stream in a few years, currently it has generated literally only a few pennies. Here are some of my experiences with passive income. 

Investing in Stocks

Probably the most boring but reliable methods. You put your money into stocks that generate dividends (profits that the company gives to shareholders) and take the dividends as payment. You can alternatively use those dividends to buy more shares, to enable you to get more dividends in the future. This method generally requires a lot of money to be invested to generate enough dividends to really live off but its a relatively easy method to generate passive income. I did use to do this but I thought it was too much hassle reinvesting it, so I mainly use vanguard accumulation funds that do all this automatically. It is best to do it in tax free wrappers such as ISAs and LISAs so you don't have to pay tax on the capital gains or dividends. As such, it's not so much an income but more increasing capital gains. 

Crypto

Interesting most of the crypto market is down by a lot at the time of writing this. A lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) has entered regarding Bitcoin and altcoins being banned in China. However long term, I still think it's a good investment. 

The way I earn passively is through BlockFi (referral link), a company that pays interest on your cryptocurrency. It does this in the same way a bank may pay interest in a savings account, it uses your holdings with them to lend of people (charging them interest). Currently they pay 5% interest on Bitcoin and 4.5% on Ethereum paid monthly. 

The other method is through staking in Cardano staking pools in my Yaroi Wallet. There you can get roughly 5% annual interest but that is paid every 5 days. As Cardano is my favourite crypto at the moment, I am optimistic about its potential, though as I mentioned it is down 50% from its all-time high just a few months ago.

The other way is through mining cryptocurrency. I won't go into huge detail but it is possible to mine the cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) on most normal computers. It is a privacy coin which is not listed on most crypto-exchanges but has a place in the cryptocurrency space (mainly used by criminals supposedly). Whether I actually made money with this is hard to know as the running of my laptop 24/7 definitely ate up a lot of electricity for the month I tried it. Hopefully if we install solar panels on the house, this might be a worthwhile venture in the future...

Interest and capital gains on cryptocurrency are liable to taxes so it will be interesting to see how to best negotiate that when it comes round to it.

App 

I built a cancer referral app almost a year ago during the pandemic when I had more free time (sadly a 2nd child stopped any notion of free time for the next couple of years). I did put ads on it but made it free as I felt it genuinely would be a useful app for doctors / public. To generate any meaningful income from apps, it requires regular engagement, likely advertising of the app, numerous more installs and also release onto the Apple App Store (which I have not done yet as it needs further tweaking of the code plus £99 a year which I can't justify spending at the moment). It currently resides on 19 devices which I think is not bad. It's lifetime earnings is £0.07 so it'll need a lot more numbers to create any form of revenue (plus it needs I think £100 to payout).  However, it is a app I am proud of as I still use it occasionally to check cancer guidelines and still pretty up to date even now. I do plan on keeping it updated and releasing more apps when I can get round to it, definitely quite fun solving problems related to app development. 

Stock Photography

There are many companies that will sell your photos to other people so they can use them for their work. This is called stock photography and the two websites I use are 123RF and Shutterstock. I have thousands of holiday snaps from the years of travelling pre-covid so I thought it would be a good idea to see if can make some money from them. It does require trawling through the thousands of photos I have backed up in the cloud, downloading the ones I think may be relevant, cleaning them up in Photoshop and then uploading to the respective websites. Then you have to name, label and tag the photos which does take a long time, and is very repetitive. The websites then can decide to accept it or reject it based on how good the photo is (or if its really boring). I only have roughly 20-30 accepted so far on their websites. I have sold a total of one photo since starting in April this year for a total of $0.53 which I am pretty pleased about, but the website only pays out once you hit $100 so it'll be very long time yet before I get close to that. I do enjoy taking photos so it's not something I would go out of my way for as I already have a few nice lens, but it will be the trawling through old photos which will be the trivial part. 

Blog

This honestly is more to randomly put mind-to-keyboard on various topics that interest me or feel would be interesting to others. I enjoy viewing on youtube or reading about like minded individuals so there is no monetary element to it. However it is possible to monetise blogs, and the biggest in the world make a lot of money from it. Normally blogger.com - the platform I am using currently isn't the way to do it, normally people set up a wordpress website from scratch and get full control over it. I did try set one up and did manage to get it working for a bit but I felt it was too annoying for me to learn and design and I just wanted an easy way to put mind-to-keyboard. You can put ads onto blogger websites, but you need supposedly 50 posts at least with decent traffic to your website.  I'm far away from that currently so it'll be a long time before I can dream of making any pennies from this. I actually currently am at a loss as I pay £9.99 annually for the domain!

That's it, pretty poor returns so far! Hopefully I will have time to update my app, release it onto the Apple App Store and then work on a second app. I need to sort out my old photos and get them reviewed by the stock photography websites. I do hope to be more regular with the posts to try get to the magic 50 posts and put some lovely non-intrusive ads onto the page! Hopefully I can follow up ina years time to see if there has been any progress with these things.

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