- Creating passive income takes work,
but once you implement those processes,
it's one of the most fruitful income sources
that you'll ever have and it's also very rewarding.
Today, I wanna share my 11 most favorite
passive income sources that you can start today.
(lively music)
Okay, the first idea is pretty well a no-brainer
especially if you know that I'm a financial planner
and have been working with clients for over 15 years now.
But, the first passive income source that you can derive
is from investing.
Now, I know many of you watching this might think,
"Well Jeff, I don't have a lot of money to get started."
I get it, I was there too.
But, let me tell you, it doesn't take a lot of money
to get started.
Whether it be 50 bucks a month, $100 a month,
anything that you can start investing,
you can start making gains, start making interest
off your investment.
So, whether if you're making capital gains
off of your mutual funds, your ETFs or your stocks,
or if you have dividends that pay out on a consistent basis,
these are all sources of passive income that you can get.
If you're not sure where to get started investing,
there are a ton of online providers nowadays.
There are Robo Advisors such as Betterment,
Wealthfront, Acorns, Robinhood, Ally Invest, E-Trade.
If you know nothing about investing and you want somebody
to pick those investments for you, that's why
I have to recommend Betterment.
Betterment doesn't have any money to start
and they will chose an ETF model for you.
So, if you're putting any money in, they're gonna choose
those investments and then you'll sit back
and start making those capital gains in dividends,
otherwise passive income.
Now, another form of option that I love when it comes
to investing is peer-to-peer lending.
I started doing peer-to-peer lending over six years ago
and it has been one of my most favorite investment classes
to put your money into.
Now, peer-to-peer lending is just like as if
you're acting as the bank.
So, instead of somebody going to the bank
and getting a loan, you are giving them a microloan.
So, you become the financial institution.
And, since these are microloans, you're only giving up
about $100 per loan, sometimes less.
And, I don't know if you've ever taken out a personal loan
from a bank, but you know how much interest they charge.
So, imagine now you're sitting on the side of the bank
and you're collecting that interest.
The top two peer-to-peer lenders to check out
are LendingClub and Prosper.
I have accounts with them both and I really don't have
a preference either which one.
Well, I'll tell you, I've been sitting back
and earning those interest checks since I've started
and I love it.
My second passive income idea is taking advantage
of deal sites and/or survey sites.
So, sites like Swagbucks, InboxDollars, or MySurvey.
Signing up for these sites allow you to do
your normal shopping that you do online
and make a little bit extra money on the side.
Or if you're sitting on your couch watching Netflix,
your favorite TV show or some sports game,
if you have your laptop handy, you could fill out surveys
as you're wasting time, killing time,
and make really good money.
All right, my third passive income idea,
and this one's a little bit outside the box,
but hear me out.
Taking advantage of cash-back reward points.
Now, I know, I'm sure you're thinking how is that
really passive income?
But, check this out.
Before I started using credit cards to pay
all of our bills, we used to use debit cards all the time.
Because I always subscribed to the idea of like
you shouldn't have credit cards
because credit cards are evil.
They're not that evil.
But, when I started talking to others that were truly
taking advantage of all the different reward points
that you have to offer, I realized that we were missing out
on a ton of free cash.
So, we've started using reward points, specifically
for cash back, airline miles, or hotels,
anything like that that we knew that we'd be using
on a frequent basis.
So, now everything that we buy, whether it's
our cell phone bill, our satellite bill, Netflix,
groceries, gasoline, we run all of our expenses
through our credit cards and we get back
tons of reward points.
And, with these reward points, we've cashed in
on airline miles, hotels, and a variety of other things.
A couple years ago, we took our entire family to Jamaica
and didn't have to spend a single dime
other than some snacks in the airport.
So, using your credit cards to taking advantage of
these reward points is so passive
because you don't have to do anything.
You're doing something that you're already gonna do
to begin with.
You just sit back and enjoy the cash.
Cha ching!
All right, on to passive income idea number four.
And, this is a fun one.
Doesn't really apply to me, well, it kinda does.
Ah, let me explain.
So, one of my good friends is a photographer
and when he started taking pictures for me and my family
and for my business, he asked,
"Okay, I will take your pictures and I won't charge you,
"but, I wanna be able to use you
"for my iStock photography account."
At the time, I didn't know really what iStock was
or what stock photography was, but I thought,
you know what, if I'm getting free pictures, sign me up.
So, he would upload my pictures to iStock
and businesses from all over the world were using my picture
on their websites, brochures,
and all their marketing materials.
I've had so many people contact me because they saw
my picture on some brochure or website and asked like,
"Jeff, is that you?"
It's like, yeah, that's me.
Now, I don't get any royalties for that
because all I got was free pictures.
But, my buddy who's a photographer is still making
royalties off pictures that he took several years ago.
So, if you have a knack with a camera
and love to take pictures of people, things, whatever,
consider using iStock or any stock photography service.
All right, number five is for all my artists out there.
And, this is something that's not me
because I'm definitely musically challenged.
So, there's this cool service called Patreon.
It's for any artist that has a community,
a growing community, and you wanna get paid for your work.
And, you have a community of people that love your art
whether that be your drawings, your music,
whatever that art may be.
And each time that you release a new item, you can get paid
a fee for that.
And you get to determine what that fee is.
So, let me give you a few examples of some friends of mine
that really have taken advantage of Patreon.
A good friend of mine, Evan Burse, also known as
the Cartoon Block, is a very popular artist
and has a thriving YouTube channel.
And, he loves showing people how to sketch superheroes.
So, with Patreon, any time that he creates a new image,
a new sketch, his community will pay him a fee
every time that he releases a new image.
Talk about getting paid for what you love to do.
Another good friend of mine, Chris Greenwood,
a musician and in the band Manafest,
gets paid by his community
every time he releases a new music video.
See, these are things that these artists were doing anyway.
But, now instead of just releasing something
and hopes that somebody will discover it
or that you hope that you might get paid for your work,
with your community that is looking forward
to the next piece of art that you're going to release,
you're going to get paid and they're excited to pay you.
Check out Patreon.com for other ideas especially
if you're an artist that wants to get paid for your work.
All right, number six.
And, this one takes a little bit of time,
but once you get it out there, you can really sit back
and start earning that passive income.
So, what am I talking about?
This time I'm talking about writing a book.
Shameless book plug.
So, I had both the wonderful and stressful experience
of writing a book, Soldier of Finance, back in 2013.
But, here's the cool thing, the book has been out
for almost four years and guess what?
I'm still getting paid on sales.
I can log in to Amazon and see how many sales of my book
are occurring each and every week.
But, maybe you're not ready to do a physical book.
You could also sell an ebook.
There are tons of authors that release books
all the time on Amazon.
Writing and publishing books in the Amazon Kindle program
is so much easier than it ever was.
So, if this is something that you wanna do,
think about it very hard.
Another blogger that I know in the personal finance space
named Mike Piper, blogger at obliviousinvestor.com
is making over six figures a year from his ebooks
that he sells.
And, guess what?
He doesn't have a ton of ebooks, but he has enough.
And, the ones that he does sell, yields him
over six figures every single year.
As you could see, writing a book, whether it be
a physical book, like Soldier of Finance,
or an ebook, can be very lucrative.
You just have to get the book done and get it out there.
All right, number seven.
♫ We're about get physical, physical
♫ We're about to get physical
♫ Come on and get physical
♫ Let's get into physical
- Okay, so maybe not that kind of physical,
but we're talking about physical products.
So, this could be a variety of things.
This could be t-shirts, mugs, blankets.
It's amazing what you can create and sell online,
especially with the Amazon FBA program.
But, maybe you don't wanna go that route
and you actually do have a physical product
that you wanna sell.
One of my most favorite success stories
is Steve Chou from the blog mywifequitherjob.com.
So, with Steve's case, his wife is getting ready
to quit her job, a six-figure salary
living in Northern California
and he wanted to find a way that he could replace that
so she could still spend the time with their kids,
but also not lose out on the income.
So, what do they do?
They created a digital online store
selling physical products.
In this case, it was handkerchiefs.
You could check out his site at bubblebeelinens.com
and see everything that they sell.
Now, their store has evolved a lot from the handkerchiefs
so they offer a lot of different things.
But, here's the cool thing about that story.
Within the first year of launching their online store
and selling these physical products,
they replaced his wife's income over $100,000.
Did you hear that?
$100,000 after their first year of opening their doors.
That's amazing.
And, the best part, it is passive income.
All right, on to number eight.
Let me tell you, number eight was one that didn't work out
quite well for me, but I know it's worked out
for a ton of other people.
So, where does this one?
Real estate.
Now, there are many ways that you can get involved
in real estate.
You can flip houses, you can buy 'em and sell 'em wholesale
or you can become a landlord and have tons
of rental properties.
And, that's the path that I started.
But when I started down that path,
I realized I had no idea what I was doing.
Now, thankfully, I didn't lose my butt on that investment,
but it did allow me to explore other passive income ideas
that I'm currently implementing.
But, let me tell you, I have a local friend here
who is in his early 30s and is making
over $250,000 a year from his real estate properties.
He has a lot that he does flip, but he has a good chunk
of his real estate portfolio that is completely passive.
I will tell you if you want to start getting involved
with real estate, make sure that you have a good mentor,
because you can lose a lot of money very quickly
if you don't know what you're doing.
So, if you're not completely comfortable
investing into physical real estate,
there are other options.
One option are real estate investment trusts
which you can buy through ETFs.
Other options include sites like fundrise.com.
So, with Fundrise, they will take your money
and you'll put that in a pool
with other real estate investors
and then somebody's in charge of choosing
those physical locations for you.
So, that way, you're not in charge of picking
those locations or having to collect rent
and making sure that they're taking care of the upkeep
on those buildings.
All you do is sit back and collect
the interest and dividends.
Either which way that you look to explore into real estate
is going to yield you some sort of passive income.
Passive income idea number nine, take 17.
So if you're comfortable putting yourself on the world
getting in front of a camera kinda like I'm doing right now,
you can publish content to YouTube and sit back
and make money.
So, how exactly are you making money on YouTube?
The most easiest way is the ads that you see.
You know, those annoying skip here ads
the first five seconds of every YouTube video
that you watch?
Yeah, those ads.
Anyway, YouTube publishers get paid any time
that you watch any of their videos.
So, YouTube's always looking for content creators
that are willing to put in the time and effort
to create good video content.
One of my favorite local stories here is Emily
from Beauty Broadcast.
When she started her YouTube channel showing her community
how to apply makeup, she started making a little bit
of money with the ads from her videos.
The next thing you knew, those ads kept increasing
as her viewers gained and her subscribers gained.
Fast forward to three or four years later,
she was able to quit her day job because she was making
more money than her day job with her YouTube videos.
Now, she makes almost six figures every year
just by putting on makeup every single day.
Pretty sweet, I like it.
I don't really wear makeup, but you know, whatever.
It works.
So, whether you wanna create makeup videos,
prank videos, or crazy workout videos,
if you're willing to put in the work and upload those
to YouTube, you can get paid.
All right, number 10.
And, number 10 is definitely one of my favorites
'cause it's near and dear to me.
But, it is blogging.
So, I started my blog back in July of 2008,
goodfinancialcents.com, holla.
And I'm still amazed at not only the amount of money
I've been able to make from my blog,
but just all the connections I've made with so many
amazing people over the years.
Now, my blog brings in over seven figures a year.
What?
And most of it is passive.
Yes, like a landlord, it does take some upkeep
and there are things we have to do,
but I put in very little work for the base that I built up
over the years.
You can check out other bloggers like Pat Flynn
from smartpassiveincome.com or food bloggers
Lindsay Bjork Ostrom from pinchofyum.com.
And, even my wife, Mandy, from houseofrose.com.
All these bloggers are making really good money
and most of them are from blog posts that they wrote
over three years ago.
It's amazing and it is almost completely passive.
If you're interested in making your first $1000
from blogging, be sure to check out my free Email Challenge,
the Make 1K Challenge.
You can check out more details at make1kchallenge.com.
In this challenge, I show you how to start your first blog,
publish your first blog post, and give you behind-the-scenes
peek of how I made my first $1000.
Yes, it can be done.
So, go check it out at make1kchallenge.com.
All right, here is the last one and I don't know
if this is my favorite, but it definitely is
one that I'm pretty excited about.
So, what is it?
What I'm talking about here is creating
your own online course.
Now, this is something that I fought forever.
I've always wanted to create a course,
but I kept struggling with what do I wanna create,
what's the idea?
Who are the people that I wanna serve?
And, I kept coming up with idea after idea after idea,
but unfortunately, I never actually launched
any of those ideas.
Now, let me tell you, to make passive income,
you don't make money off ideas.
You make money off implementing those ideas.
Finally, about two years ago, I released my first course,
The Online Advisor Growth Formula.
In this course, I'm showing financial advisors
how to use online marketing to grow their businesses.
I launched that course last year
and I've created the course, I've just recorded
all the videos, and now all I do is market,
which most of it is automated using Facebook ads
and email marketing.
Last year, we made over $100,000 off that course,
all because I took an idea and actually implemented it.
This year, we're on track to beat that by at least 50%
if not double it.
Now, remember, I've already created the course.
This is not something new that I have to redo or reshoot.
All the information is there.
Now, it's just a matter of getting that course
in front of the right people that are willing to buy it.
Out of all the ideas I've shared with you,
I love the creating an online course idea the most
because the margins are ridiculous.
If you're selling a course for $1000,
your cost in that course may only be 100 buck, 200 bucks.
But, as you go along and make more sales,
your margin decreases which means your profits increased.
So, you start making more money and more money
and more money.
And, guess what?
It's completely passive.
Now, as you can see, there are a ton of passive income ideas
you can start.
I've only shared 11 with you here today.
On my blog, goodfinancialcents.com,
I share 25 passive income ideas that you could start
in addition to the 11 I've shared here today.
Now, we're constantly adding to that blog post
so if that number is bigger by the time you actually
watch this, just know that we must've found
another great passive income idea that we've added
to that post.
All right, now I wanna hear from you.
What passive income idea have you implemented?
How much are you making?
How long did it take until you started
earning passive income?
I want you to share with the GFC community
so others can benefit and start making
some real passive income.
Let's go make some money.
Jeff Rose for goodfinancialcents.com.
Take care.
All right, onto passive inki--
So I had the wonderful and...
Oy goy, bar right services.
Starting over, that doesn't make sense what I just said.