My personal opinion is that retail investors love dividend stocks and they are more expensive than non-dividend stocks.
Further to this, I have strong preference for firms which re-invest their cash flow resulting in capital gains which is much more tax efficient than a dividend.
> My personal opinion is that retail investors love dividend stocks and they are more expensive than non-dividend stocks.
This is absolutely not true, there's plenty of stocks around here with low P/E ratio and dividends. You just have to look outside of tech to find them.
I made a generalization so there will be counter examples and I appreciate that some stocks/sectors will have attractive dividends. I would put REITs in the expensive dividend-focused sector...
The main issue I have with a dividend paying stock is that they pay corporation tax and then I pay income tax on the dividend....with a group which re-invest its earnings, I do not pay income tax on that and if I need cash, I can sell stock and pay capital gains tax at a lower rate.
The main issue with dividend stocks is that when the dividend gets cut there's forced seller by the dividend ETFs and stared retail investors so the drop in share price gets exacerbated which is unfortunate.
I think retail guys love div stocks because they don't realize that when a div gets paid the stock price drops by the same amount. You wont't believe how many people think its just "free money". You even see strategies where people buy the stock before ex-date and sell after. Bonkers.
Could you make money by buying a div stock a bit of time before the dividends are distributed, but then sell BEFORE dividends, then short it until after dividends and people sell?
Good remark. I always tell people that a trade exists because a trade exists. In this case you're trying to game the "dumb" money. Question is how much alpha is there? If any, is it arbitraged out by people who have made the same observation as you? So something that worked in a backtest may cease to work when you implement it.
Stock splits are famously positive alpha events. The mere fact that a stock has now become more "affordable" because of a lower per share price causes people to buy it. But I don't think any professional investor in their right mind would trade such a strategy.
The pre ex date div strategy you suggest may be more relevant because there's a higher frequency of events. The effect may be more pronounced in more "retail" investor focused names. I wouldn't trade it in its own. But maybe group it together with a suite of other signals in a stat arb like strategy.
I don’t disagree, but the question was specifically about passive income. Buying and selling stocks isn’t what I would consider passive income since it’s not recurring. As with most things, there’s a tradeoff for the payout schedule. I’m perfectly willing to take the small total return hit in exchange for regular cash injections I can use for other things.
Of course, my portfolio is more than just dividend stocks, but it’s a good passive income source.
I am in this case..I don't really day trade, have dividends auto-reinvested and rarely sell.
The market does sort of concern me right now though. We're sitting at all time highs for the S&P but there's worrying signs everywhere. I don't know how it'll all play out next year, so I might gradually sell some to lock in gains before end of year.
interesting, I don't auto-reinvested my dividends, I use those to slowly but surely diversify my portfolio with different companies and industries (which is still a reinvestment I guess)
It's kinds interesting and even exciting to "shop" for new investment opportunities when dividends are posted.
agree about the market and all time highs and it feels dangerous. The thing is that no one can really predict what will happen, the only decent advice is, again, to diversify? Diversify with assets outside of the regular market fluctuations, e.g with cash savings, real estate, precious metals
only do this if you need the money < 5 years. Timing the market is not possible, and while I agree many troubling signs, it's impossible to time when to buy back in, and you lose dividends and potential gains during the time on the sidelines.
If you need the money short term, then it shouldn't be invested in equities.
In theory I agree...but it's been a 10 year bull market and I would really not want to see any of my non-retirement or retirement accounts halved if I can help it.
My amateur "macro" view is we're in for heavily volatile times in the next 5 years.
I tend not to follow textbook personal financial advice shrug
I cashed out in September 2018 and I am most certainly not crying about missed profits :) That money is happily deployed elsewhere for better uses and the next time I have excess savings it will go into stocks when they're at the bottom of the market
Yes, but there's also no need. When 2008 happened, not only was it in the news 24/7, anyone looking at the chart understood they were getting a 30% discount on an index of the US economy.
I don't count my investments as income until I put the money in my checking account. I invested ~$40,000 some years back (over time), sold $20,000 a few years ago for a one time purchase (to get some family heirlooms back in the family), and have $120,000 left. The current plan is to retire on that money for a year before I start touching my actual retirement funds - of course once I get closer to retirement I'll actually calculate how taxes impact this plan.
For the most part though I ignore it. The best returns consistently go to investors who have forgotten about their account.
I just feel like I'm playing a game of chicken with a 10 year bull market. I usually leave it alone but I'm not going to wait around if the next recession turns out to a bad one.
I plan to wait out the next recession - history shows most people lose more trying to avoid recessions than if they wait them out.
Of course if I was closer to retirement that wouldn't work out. However that is why financial managers suggest a regular plan of diversifying into less risky (but lower return) investments as you get older. Target date retirement plans do that for you.
If it is a liquid asset, you should count unrealized gains as income. If you invested $100k in VOO last year, and it is worth $120k today, then you have definitely made $20k in the last year. That's $20k that you can choose withdraw and spend, at any time. Just because you choose to reinvest the $20k (ie, by letting it ride) doesn't change the fact that you've made $20k. It's really the same as collecting $20k in dividends and then enrolling in the dividend-reinvestment program.
Stable or slightly declining, but that is a personal choice I made as I focused on my career.
Unlike many, I don't update or A/B test anything after a product launch, so once a product is out launched, it's done from my perspective.
With some more effort, I could be growing, either by launching new products (last product launch was in February) or by starting up my ad campaigns again (I cancelled most of them in April to improve profitability at the cost of slower turnover).
I was let go about two weeks ago, if I can't find anything I love working on, I'll take this full time and (hopefully) go back to growing.
Are you selling a product you found and posted to Amazon, or did you create/assemble an FBA pack?
My partner and I have two related product assemblages that we think are under-represented on Amazon, but for which we think we've identified a reasonable demand.. and for which content/instruction/information are not consolidated/accessible.
More or less than former. Either I find something interesting, or I have someone reach out to either of my buying agents. We go back and forth a little if any packaging / product customizations are needed and go from there.
I do offer two "FBA packs" for my own private labelled products but will not be restocking them when they sell out because of packaging challenges.
One big issue is discoverability. You will always be outranked by the sole product(s) as that's what people will search for. Customer acquisition costs are the major piece that many new sellers miss, and can easily sink an otherwise great listing.
That said, the great thing about selling on Amazon is the low barrier to entry. I would recommend you give it a shot and see if it works. Better yet, see if you can private label the product and have complete control over the packaging. (assuming branding is not an asset)
Seriously, send in 5-15 units and see what happens.
Many people can outsource to management companies that handle this for you in exchange for a percentage. I've seen averages around 10%, with some outliers (PenFed credit union I believe?) doing 7%.
I actually set things up slightly different but essentially it follows the same process. I have service providers I negotiated and setup that manage different aspects for me, so most all I have to do is make an approval or call and I don't have to pay a percentage fee each month. I learned how to do this after I had a bunch of properties in the past and was paying 8-12%/month in fees for each property but all they were doing was making calls on my behalf or setting up service providers to do it. Once I figured that out, I setup all my own service providers once and cut out the management fee. There are even people that cover the stuff like evictions etc as a service so you don't have to be involved on it.
It requires maybe a few hours of my personal time every couple of months as an average.
Do you have any advice on finding service providers or contractors? It seems like it's mostly word of mouth but people with dependable providers/contractors don't want to lose them to other landlords or developers.
It is somewhat trial and error but a lot of it is based on recommendations. It took me 4-5 years before I found a handyman type that I trust to just take care of little things. But for other things I signed up with larger known brands. Like our AC maintenance contract is with one hour AC for all our units, this means they take care of preventative maintenance as well as fix things as needed at a reasonable rate.
Plumbing I found through trial and error, and to be fair for any job where I see a bigger repair bill, e.g. > $500 I'll generally get quotes to keep everyone honest. There are exceptions of course, but when I start seeing bigger repairs being requested it sends up some red flags because we maintain everything really tightly.
Our lawn service and our pest service are the same ones we have do all the units and our own home too. We found both of them through a referral and tried them at our home first. Then slowly gave them more.
I pay 7% and the property management takes care of renting out, collections, notices etc. They have a list of contractors to do work but I always seek out multiple bids.
This is usually my recommendation for anyone starting out too. It buys you time to learn and prevents simple mistakes that can cost you money. Once you have done it for a few years you'll have seen a lot of the basics and can start doing things differently. That is exactly what I did, started with a real estate company that did my rental management and then as I grew more comfortable and had built up my list of trusted people I stopped renewing with the agencies.
I actually found out that in many cases my background checks were catching stuff the rental agency did not which really pissed me off. I use the local sheriff's office to run the background for $20, and then credit check with an online company for $15. I get a true picture of the person/people this way, the rental agency wasn't doing a background check, it was only a want/warrant check and credit check. I prefer knowing the background of people and being able to deny for valid concerns, like the one I found out had been evicted from their last 3 places but lied on their application about prior evictions. The real estate company running my old checks would have never seen that since they just did a wants/warrants check, but I did and denied these people the rental for lying on the application about prior evictions. That said, I had a young family rent a house from me one time that had been evicted and gone bankrupt the prior year. They never lied to me, were honest as best I could tell, and upfront with me about everything so I rented to them after meeting with them. I only required them to provide a full months rent as security instead of a reduced amount, which they totally understood. Never had a problem with them and they got their security deposit back cause they took care of everything.
Email or text. I setup Twilio as my go between so I can receive and send texts (or calls) to renters without them having my personal number. There are a couple of long term renters who I have had for many years that have my personal cell, but most don't.
I have myself setup where no, I don't personally do any active work as a landlord. I get payments deposited into my account every month and I have some loan payments go out but outside of that I am not active month to month doing anything.
When things to break or need service (usually a few times a year something minor pops up), my involvement is approving a repair or calling on a company I have used prior to take care of it for me. I have service providers for each property that maintain it for small fees, so like lawn, pest, sprinkler, AC is all taken care of on preventative maintenance plans.
Yes, but only short term. For example, I only do rentals when I can make them cash flow positive monthly. But there are times when say, you need to replace a water heater and that requires a permit and licensed plumber, so say $600-$1200 in my area depending on the unit etc. So I might lose my cash flow positive side for the next few months to pay that back, but in the end the net/net of the unit will be cash flow positive.
I did have one home we sold at a loss because of the housing crash. It sucks, but it also taught me a number of valuable lessons, and really improved my game.
With real-estate, there is a cliche saying, you make the money when you buy the property not when you sell. This is so true. If you buy it right, you will do well, when you buy it wrong it will almost always bite you.
Flipping is an easier place to lose money if you aren't careful. But if you are flipping you aren't doing it for passive income. I do like flipping but it is not passive and in my area has been hard the last few years because of the local market trends.
I thought about getting into real estate like this, but my experience being a poor renter made it feel too parasitic. Does it bother you being a landlord who sucks money out of the situation while adding essentially no value to the people from whom you are taking regular income?
What would you recommend as training/resources to get started in real estate investing? I was thinking of getting a real estate dealer license as a way to get a better idea of how the system works and go from there, but any words of wisdom from someone already doing it successfully would be most welcome.
There's plenty of "real-estate investing" information online but most of it looks scammy as hell.
Kind of OT but I don’t understand why everyone with some spare time doesn’t get licensed for real estate to circumvent the cartel fees. It costs about $300 + the fees for the classes and 135 hours of time. But it can save you tens of thousands, gets you privileged access to listings, plugs you into the whole real estate ecosystem... it’s kind of a no brainer, as far as I can tell
Here is the simple reason. It is better to team up with or employ someone with the license then to hold it yourself. There are lots of legal obligations and other issues that trigger when you are a licensed agent. Not that you are trying to do anything illegal, but simple mistakes become much bigger issues when you are licensed. Also, when licensed you have a ton of disclosure rules you must follow and missing one can be a major issue, so better to employ someone or team up with them than to be licensed yourself.
I do agree in reference to fees from brokers etc, but if you do some deals you will find someone you can work with and honestly at that point they'll work with you on the fees and you won't care as much either because they'll take the liability so their fees are fair.
Here's a couple of reasons why I don't want to do this:
1. 135 hours is a LOT of time to invest for even tens of thousands of dollars return. I could build and market a side project or two in that time, which could have potential for significantly higher return.
2. To recoup that return, I have to take a big risk, using a highly inexperienced agent (me) in a huge dollar transaction where everyone I speak with will have much more experience.
3. Worst decisioning -- if I am my own agent, I'm not in a good environment for optimal decision making.
There are other reasons outside the scope of your question (some people prefer lower touch investments), but those are a few.
Yea, to add one major point to that list, a real estate agent most states require you to house your license with a broker. And you cannot become a broker in most states until you have usually some period of time working for a broker. In my state you need 2 years under a licensed broker before you can apply to be a broker (there are some other things you can do to qualify too but it is still a lot of time). So in the end that means, you get your agent license (pretty easy <$1000 generally), work as an active agent in some fashion for 2 years before you can get your broker license and then, finally, you can eliminate 50% of the transaction fee.
The math just doesn't work out, if you get to the point you are doing that many deals, just hire a broker for your business.
Getting access to the MLS isn't that hard. And finding a good agent/broker to work with is very doable as they want to work with investors since it is a source of recurring income usually for them.
That all said, I am always interested in other peoples approach to minimize transaction fees, but most investors I know in real estate use this approach as it just works and minimizes liability.
Real estate is local, so I would be wary of any "system" that purports to be able to identify undervalued properties using a one-size-fits-all approach. I would not recommend buying a property that's far away from you.
As far as landlording a small number of properties, most of the knowledge involved is how to be handy, or knowing trustworthy people who are handy. One piece of advice I would offer here is to charge slightly below-market rent to get better tenants, especially if you're an amateur.
And something a lot of people misunderstand is the relationship between appreciation and cash flow. They're inversely related because lots of appreciation attracts more buyers who drive down rental margins by bidding up purchase prices. Rapidly appreciating properties in a place like Seattle may have lower cash flow than you would anticipate given the demand, and properties with very little appreciation in a state like Ohio may have much better cash flow. But as I said, you should buy a local property and just accept the market conditions. If you want to invest in real estate elsewhere just invest in a REIT.
I wouldn't get a license. There are a number of reasons why but one of the keys is your level of responsibility goes up in the eyes of the legal system. So a simple mistake goes from being something minor to being much larger liability.
There are lots of classes you can go to. The first thing I'd do is talk to local real estate brokers and ask them about the market and how things are going. Then see if they can introduce you to another investor that is local. Local knowledge is pretty key for real estate. Also, check into local real estate investment groups, the good ones are pretty selective but if you can meet someone on it you might be able to tag along and get some "free" education until you are ready. This is actually how I started way back when.
Also, one bit of advice I have found true in most states (but NYC may be different). Avoid home owners associations (HOA), they are almost always the death of a successful venture. I have only one property left in an HOA and we have been trying to sell it for 2 years but the HOA is known as an activist HOA so selling in that neighborhood, even at a discount, is hard. HOA's make rentals really hard, make flipping hard and drive the costs of everything up. And most investors will tell you the place you make money in real estate is in the older neighborhoods which are established, free of HOA's and are either being revitalized or have been already.
Townhomes and Condo's are a little different because you will always have a board for those, and I have had some good luck with Condo's but in general I avoid anything where another entity besides the local city/county can dictate what I can or cannot do.
Same, although I have four rental units and one AirBnB. I wasted years of my 20s trying to come up with a monetizable SaaS product until I realized that I could earn passive income through "boring" businesses like rental properties.
Now that I've had a taste of passive income through real estate, I've come to despise the tediousness of writing software. I can barely bring myself to do it anymore now that I don't "need" the income from my job to survive. My plan is to keep acquiring rental properties over the next fews and then quit the tech industry for good once I have enough to live comfortably.
I am in a similar position and would like to know how you got started with rental units. Are you using a property manager like it was mentioned in a previous comment? Do you recommend AirBnB vs. long-term rentals?
I used equity from my primary residence to finance my first investment, since I couldn’t find other means of financing. I don’t think my area would be good for AirBnb although I haven’t tried, should probably read more about it. I am doing everything myself for now, since I get better ROI, but will probably move to prpty mngmt once I have more properties.
I self-manage since my properties are in the same small city that I live in. It's not the much work. I love AirBnB but you have to be careful with it - a lot of towns and cities have outright banned short-term rentals or at least made it very difficult to operate them legally.
A coworker who lives in PA sold his unit after laws were changed that would no longer allow his AirBnB to be profitable. He would have to add a sprinkling system and other things that cost 30k+
Game DB (https://gamedb.online/) - I take data from Steam APIs and show it in a friendly format. I am currently losing money, but hope to change that soon.
Hi, I think the page you are looking for is here: https://gamedb.online/apps/trending.
It could be more accurate with a higher sample rate, but would cost more.
Are you concerned about something specifically, or is this just another Reddit-like comment to be ignored, and that shouldn't have been made in the first place?
Launched this a few months ago. I've made about $14 a month. In terms of return on investment I would have been better picking up pennies in the street, but it was a fun side project. Also, haven't done any real marketing yet... All sales have been organic discoveries through Unity store.
Looks great! Good job, I don't have any clue what the unity already provides but the snapping and the flow that you created this house it really great. I was working on a Architecture building software long time ago and it was nothing close to that fun as i see here!
Couldn't you use this plugin, the unity editor, a bunch of ready made objects, walls, doors, floors etc and bundle them into one autonomus executable and sell it?
I run a business automation services site (https://www.mergeyourdata.com/). Basically I build an automation for small businesses and schedule them to run. Took years of learning the ins and outs of the biggest pain point areas for businesses and the technical solutions that would solve those. The learning all pretty much took place at my regular day job and I was just able to expand on those lessons.
Very interesting. If you wouldn't mind sharing some more details: Are you receiving fairly steady order flow now? Where do most of your customers come from?
Orders come and go inconsistently since almost all of them come from referrals and/or organic site traffic. This does result in a wide range of requests which keeps things interesting.
Basically all of the work is in the beginning then it’s just subscription based for the automation refreshes (or an agreed upon amount if services are continuously running) and any minor updates.
How did you get started with this? I remember reading somewhere that stock photography is a nickel-and-diming business given that almost anyone can produce a half decent picture with modern cameras.
By no means am I making large amounts of money. I get about $1 per day from photos on Adobe Stock. I have a portfolio of about 300-400 images taken over the past 8 years. Every so often I’ll upload some new shots.
About 1-2 times a year I’ll get a large buy (eg. $75+) from 500px, but I don’t upload there very often since they broke their Lightroom plugin.
I mean, it's worth asking, but anyone with a good niche would be smart to not post it publicly unless the benefits of publicity outweigh the risk of competition.
Sure. But most good passive income ideas are good because of how easy they are, and because they're the perfect size for a small market. Usually even one more competitor entering the market is enough to significantly disrupt them. If you are sitting on one of those, why would you post about it in an HN thread that will be archived and trawled by capable competitors specifically looking for ideas? If it only takes one competitor to disrupt your golden goose, why would you post about it here?
While there are many interesting ideas in this thread, I expect there are a fair amount of people lurking with much more profitable and higher leverage products. So maybe just take the thread with a grain of salt and don't think of it representative of a ceiling on what's possible to build in 2019.
If you have a good idea you already have a lot of competition. Bad ideas have no competition because they are bad ideas that return every few years to fail again.
I agree there's niche websites that generate tonnes of money and have been around for years but nobody really knows about them... And the webmaster likes it that way
This looks really cool, I was disappointed when Kimono was shut down. Please reach out to me (email in profile), I would like to learn more about your product.
Curious, because I've looked on pixabay for some things that were wildly under-represented, and I had half a thought to fill those gaps, mostly for fun and I'm... close to it.
Just the same landscape/architecture photography I do anyway. It's more than I made from Shutterstock. Probaly $100/year? So it's definitely on the level of "beer money."
Why have you chosen to upload photos to an "agency" that pays via donations? This doesn't seem like a guaranteed income for each photo that is licensed - particularly with the generous licence that pixabay places on each photo.
I run https://bannerjs.com which is a configurable banner announcement service for websites that currently brings in $220 MRR.
I also run https://www.junior-to-senior.com which is a career advice newsletter for programmers that currently brings in $0 MRR, mainly because I'm focusing on content and growing the audience right now and haven't looked into sponsorships or paid subscriptions yet. I'd like to get it to a point where I can run it as a publication with multiple authors.
I work on a handful of different ecommerce sites for my day job. BannerJS looks like it could be useful when we run promos and sales across our sites. Thanks for sharing!
I've always been interested din how people monetize email lists. What's your plan? I see from the site at the moment it's just a sign up box. IS that what you intend on it being forever, or do you eventually plan to have other content like a blog on the site to pull organic traffic?
I started a company that publishes email newsletters, we now have about 10, and there are several of us in the company. We make 95% of our money through sponsorship/advertising in the newsletters.
Not sure how to properly put an adjective to it, but I'm doing some side money on crypto trading.
I started with a rather small amount of money (~0.15 btc) that grew to around ~0.21 in two months before the shitcoin I was playing with went literally to shit (They are not called shitcoins for nothing) and was left with around ~0.12.
I'm testing the waters now with a more stable shitcoin.
FWIW mine is (seems to be, at least) a very stable brute force approach. That I'll make no comments about ;)
P.S.: I obviously have data to back up my claims - the transactions log of my crypto exchange account - but as well the "method" I'm employing can be inferred from there, as it's rather obvious.
I built an escape room! Startup Escape (https://startupescape.com), a parody of startups where you have "$1M to launch your startup" (1 hour to escape).
It's a physical game in San Francisco, but it's run day-to-day by a manager. Overall it makes about $15k/mo, and after rent/labor/etc I just make a few thousand dollars a month.
"North SOMA" would mean "North South Of MArket" :)
(For those not as familiar with San Francisco - SOMA is a neighborhood south of Market St. where a lot of tech companies in SF are found. Tenderloin is another neighborhood that has a reputation as the most dangerous in SF and is nearby but north of Market St.
Do you actually sign up for these services and test them out? Or is there some other way to legitimately compare them?
Asking because there are so many Amazon "affiliates" that just write reviews without ever trying the physical products. Not sure if this is the case with web hosting review sites though.
1500 is good amount, depending on the effort you put into it. Kudos!
Please don't try to implement custom scrolling methods in JavaScript. It never works properly on all platforms and just breaks things. It's also highly infuriating.
I have a website that attracts about 100 unique visitors a day and it brings me <$100/mo via Amazon Affiliate. Getting bigger than that requires a lot more traffic, which requires doing things like SEO research and marketing work which I'm generally too lazy to learn how to do.
$25/month from Patreon for a very niche open source game. Not exactly passive, except that I was doing it already anyway, might as well have a Patreon for it. (https://spacenerdsinspace.com)
No idea how many hours, but coming up on 7 years in November. There's a long thread on freegamedev.net chronicling more or less the entire process. It starts off really simple and stupid, and then it just keeps going and going. https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3710 I'm doing it for free because it's essentially my hobby project. It's fun.
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[ 329 ms ] story [ 5251 ms ] threadCurrently around $1200/month with fairly linear growth. It's a fun project to work on and I get to make money on the side for doing it.
As of now I have private beta testers using it and while it's not enough to call passive it sure pays for some video games gg.
Further to this, I have strong preference for firms which re-invest their cash flow resulting in capital gains which is much more tax efficient than a dividend.
This is absolutely not true, there's plenty of stocks around here with low P/E ratio and dividends. You just have to look outside of tech to find them.
The main issue I have with a dividend paying stock is that they pay corporation tax and then I pay income tax on the dividend....with a group which re-invest its earnings, I do not pay income tax on that and if I need cash, I can sell stock and pay capital gains tax at a lower rate.
The main issue with dividend stocks is that when the dividend gets cut there's forced seller by the dividend ETFs and stared retail investors so the drop in share price gets exacerbated which is unfortunate.
I would agree with you that div stocks are more expensive on a Price-to-Earnings basis. Check this comparison: https://pages.etflogic.io/?compare=DVY|SPY|XLU
High yield (3%+) div ETFs like DVY and XLU are trading near 25 P/Es whereas the S&P is closer to at 22 PE yielding just above 1%.
As interest rates tick down people look for income/yield. So high div stocks get bid up because of this
Stock splits are famously positive alpha events. The mere fact that a stock has now become more "affordable" because of a lower per share price causes people to buy it. But I don't think any professional investor in their right mind would trade such a strategy.
The pre ex date div strategy you suggest may be more relevant because there's a higher frequency of events. The effect may be more pronounced in more "retail" investor focused names. I wouldn't trade it in its own. But maybe group it together with a suite of other signals in a stat arb like strategy.
Of course, my portfolio is more than just dividend stocks, but it’s a good passive income source.
Actually I had an allocation in Apple which has had a crazy year..up 60% or so to all time highs.
I also did some passive index fund investments but I only count cash dividends as actual "income".
The market does sort of concern me right now though. We're sitting at all time highs for the S&P but there's worrying signs everywhere. I don't know how it'll all play out next year, so I might gradually sell some to lock in gains before end of year.
It's kinds interesting and even exciting to "shop" for new investment opportunities when dividends are posted.
agree about the market and all time highs and it feels dangerous. The thing is that no one can really predict what will happen, the only decent advice is, again, to diversify? Diversify with assets outside of the regular market fluctuations, e.g with cash savings, real estate, precious metals
If you need the money short term, then it shouldn't be invested in equities.
My amateur "macro" view is we're in for heavily volatile times in the next 5 years.
I tend not to follow textbook personal financial advice shrug
Will there be an announcement?
For the most part though I ignore it. The best returns consistently go to investors who have forgotten about their account.
Of course if I was closer to retirement that wouldn't work out. However that is why financial managers suggest a regular plan of diversifying into less risky (but lower return) investments as you get older. Target date retirement plans do that for you.
https://www.personalfinanceclub.com/time-the-market-game/
It's been my "side hustle" for 2+ years now, with 2019 at $40K in YTD earnings. (Inclusive of all costs except my own labor, which I do not track)
AMA?
Unlike many, I don't update or A/B test anything after a product launch, so once a product is out launched, it's done from my perspective.
With some more effort, I could be growing, either by launching new products (last product launch was in February) or by starting up my ad campaigns again (I cancelled most of them in April to improve profitability at the cost of slower turnover).
I was let go about two weeks ago, if I can't find anything I love working on, I'll take this full time and (hopefully) go back to growing.
My partner and I have two related product assemblages that we think are under-represented on Amazon, but for which we think we've identified a reasonable demand.. and for which content/instruction/information are not consolidated/accessible.
I do offer two "FBA packs" for my own private labelled products but will not be restocking them when they sell out because of packaging challenges.
One big issue is discoverability. You will always be outranked by the sole product(s) as that's what people will search for. Customer acquisition costs are the major piece that many new sellers miss, and can easily sink an otherwise great listing.
That said, the great thing about selling on Amazon is the low barrier to entry. I would recommend you give it a shot and see if it works. Better yet, see if you can private label the product and have complete control over the packaging. (assuming branding is not an asset)
Seriously, send in 5-15 units and see what happens.
But really, just try it and Google every question you have.
I actually set things up slightly different but essentially it follows the same process. I have service providers I negotiated and setup that manage different aspects for me, so most all I have to do is make an approval or call and I don't have to pay a percentage fee each month. I learned how to do this after I had a bunch of properties in the past and was paying 8-12%/month in fees for each property but all they were doing was making calls on my behalf or setting up service providers to do it. Once I figured that out, I setup all my own service providers once and cut out the management fee. There are even people that cover the stuff like evictions etc as a service so you don't have to be involved on it.
It requires maybe a few hours of my personal time every couple of months as an average.
Plumbing I found through trial and error, and to be fair for any job where I see a bigger repair bill, e.g. > $500 I'll generally get quotes to keep everyone honest. There are exceptions of course, but when I start seeing bigger repairs being requested it sends up some red flags because we maintain everything really tightly.
Our lawn service and our pest service are the same ones we have do all the units and our own home too. We found both of them through a referral and tried them at our home first. Then slowly gave them more.
I actually found out that in many cases my background checks were catching stuff the rental agency did not which really pissed me off. I use the local sheriff's office to run the background for $20, and then credit check with an online company for $15. I get a true picture of the person/people this way, the rental agency wasn't doing a background check, it was only a want/warrant check and credit check. I prefer knowing the background of people and being able to deny for valid concerns, like the one I found out had been evicted from their last 3 places but lied on their application about prior evictions. The real estate company running my old checks would have never seen that since they just did a wants/warrants check, but I did and denied these people the rental for lying on the application about prior evictions. That said, I had a young family rent a house from me one time that had been evicted and gone bankrupt the prior year. They never lied to me, were honest as best I could tell, and upfront with me about everything so I rented to them after meeting with them. I only required them to provide a full months rent as security instead of a reduced amount, which they totally understood. Never had a problem with them and they got their security deposit back cause they took care of everything.
When things to break or need service (usually a few times a year something minor pops up), my involvement is approving a repair or calling on a company I have used prior to take care of it for me. I have service providers for each property that maintain it for small fees, so like lawn, pest, sprinkler, AC is all taken care of on preventative maintenance plans.
I did have one home we sold at a loss because of the housing crash. It sucks, but it also taught me a number of valuable lessons, and really improved my game.
With real-estate, there is a cliche saying, you make the money when you buy the property not when you sell. This is so true. If you buy it right, you will do well, when you buy it wrong it will almost always bite you.
Flipping is an easier place to lose money if you aren't careful. But if you are flipping you aren't doing it for passive income. I do like flipping but it is not passive and in my area has been hard the last few years because of the local market trends.
There's plenty of "real-estate investing" information online but most of it looks scammy as hell.
EDIT: I'm based in NYC, FWIW
I do agree in reference to fees from brokers etc, but if you do some deals you will find someone you can work with and honestly at that point they'll work with you on the fees and you won't care as much either because they'll take the liability so their fees are fair.
1. 135 hours is a LOT of time to invest for even tens of thousands of dollars return. I could build and market a side project or two in that time, which could have potential for significantly higher return.
2. To recoup that return, I have to take a big risk, using a highly inexperienced agent (me) in a huge dollar transaction where everyone I speak with will have much more experience.
3. Worst decisioning -- if I am my own agent, I'm not in a good environment for optimal decision making.
There are other reasons outside the scope of your question (some people prefer lower touch investments), but those are a few.
The math just doesn't work out, if you get to the point you are doing that many deals, just hire a broker for your business.
Getting access to the MLS isn't that hard. And finding a good agent/broker to work with is very doable as they want to work with investors since it is a source of recurring income usually for them.
That all said, I am always interested in other peoples approach to minimize transaction fees, but most investors I know in real estate use this approach as it just works and minimizes liability.
As far as landlording a small number of properties, most of the knowledge involved is how to be handy, or knowing trustworthy people who are handy. One piece of advice I would offer here is to charge slightly below-market rent to get better tenants, especially if you're an amateur.
And something a lot of people misunderstand is the relationship between appreciation and cash flow. They're inversely related because lots of appreciation attracts more buyers who drive down rental margins by bidding up purchase prices. Rapidly appreciating properties in a place like Seattle may have lower cash flow than you would anticipate given the demand, and properties with very little appreciation in a state like Ohio may have much better cash flow. But as I said, you should buy a local property and just accept the market conditions. If you want to invest in real estate elsewhere just invest in a REIT.
There are lots of classes you can go to. The first thing I'd do is talk to local real estate brokers and ask them about the market and how things are going. Then see if they can introduce you to another investor that is local. Local knowledge is pretty key for real estate. Also, check into local real estate investment groups, the good ones are pretty selective but if you can meet someone on it you might be able to tag along and get some "free" education until you are ready. This is actually how I started way back when.
Townhomes and Condo's are a little different because you will always have a board for those, and I have had some good luck with Condo's but in general I avoid anything where another entity besides the local city/county can dictate what I can or cannot do.
Now that I've had a taste of passive income through real estate, I've come to despise the tediousness of writing software. I can barely bring myself to do it anymore now that I don't "need" the income from my job to survive. My plan is to keep acquiring rental properties over the next fews and then quit the tech industry for good once I have enough to live comfortably.
Hi, I think the page you are looking for is here: https://gamedb.online/apps/trending. It could be more accurate with a higher sample rate, but would cost more.
Launched this a few months ago. I've made about $14 a month. In terms of return on investment I would have been better picking up pennies in the street, but it was a fun side project. Also, haven't done any real marketing yet... All sales have been organic discoveries through Unity store.
Couldn't you use this plugin, the unity editor, a bunch of ready made objects, walls, doors, floors etc and bundle them into one autonomus executable and sell it?
Thanks!
Basically all of the work is in the beginning then it’s just subscription based for the automation refreshes (or an agreed upon amount if services are continuously running) and any minor updates.
About 1-2 times a year I’ll get a large buy (eg. $75+) from 500px, but I don’t upload there very often since they broke their Lightroom plugin.
Are you uploading to any other stock agency?
Most people are basically lazy and will talk a good game, but not actually do anything.
While there are many interesting ideas in this thread, I expect there are a fair amount of people lurking with much more profitable and higher leverage products. So maybe just take the thread with a grain of salt and don't think of it representative of a ceiling on what's possible to build in 2019.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1141937787442098176
Tryna fill the gap that Kimono left.
Aim to post as a Show HN once I polish it a little more.
Are you kidding? the home page at least looks really polished! great work.
> We surveyed the landscape of complicted web scraping tools
Curious, because I've looked on pixabay for some things that were wildly under-represented, and I had half a thought to fill those gaps, mostly for fun and I'm... close to it.
https://pixabay.com/users/derwiki-562673/
I also run https://www.junior-to-senior.com which is a career advice newsletter for programmers that currently brings in $0 MRR, mainly because I'm focusing on content and growing the audience right now and haven't looked into sponsorships or paid subscriptions yet. I'd like to get it to a point where I can run it as a publication with multiple authors.
I started with a rather small amount of money (~0.15 btc) that grew to around ~0.21 in two months before the shitcoin I was playing with went literally to shit (They are not called shitcoins for nothing) and was left with around ~0.12.
I'm testing the waters now with a more stable shitcoin.
FWIW mine is (seems to be, at least) a very stable brute force approach. That I'll make no comments about ;)
P.S.: I obviously have data to back up my claims - the transactions log of my crypto exchange account - but as well the "method" I'm employing can be inferred from there, as it's rather obvious.
It's a physical game in San Francisco, but it's run day-to-day by a manager. Overall it makes about $15k/mo, and after rent/labor/etc I just make a few thousand dollars a month.
But, um...
> Startup Escape is in <strike>the Tenderloin</strike> North SOMA! The address is 447 O'Farrell St, San Francisco CA
That's... literally the Tenderloin. Or is this (and the oxymoron that is "North SOMA") a joke that just went over my head? Haha.
(For those not as familiar with San Francisco - SOMA is a neighborhood south of Market St. where a lot of tech companies in SF are found. Tenderloin is another neighborhood that has a reputation as the most dangerous in SF and is nearby but north of Market St.
haha
There's decent money to be made but a ton of competition, so for newbies I'd recommend easier niches to start!
Asking because there are so many Amazon "affiliates" that just write reviews without ever trying the physical products. Not sure if this is the case with web hosting review sites though.
1500 is good amount, depending on the effort you put into it. Kudos!
Please don't try to implement custom scrolling methods in JavaScript. It never works properly on all platforms and just breaks things. It's also highly infuriating.
EDIT: Here's some good rants on not messing with scrolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883433
The whole one income stream thing is starting to worry me out of principle rather than $$$.
OSS developers are the carries of our civilization.