The coronavirus crisis has cost many their jobs. It has renewed interest in passive income ideas. There are many old and new passive income ideas and strategies can generate a steady income for you and your family. Unlike the misconception, passive income ideas do require an upfront work to earn, like writing an e-book or building and monetizing a blog. Some income ideas don’t take any physical effort at all, such as investing in stocks or real estate.
Passive income has been loosely defined as money that you earn with the least or zero amount of effort. People often associate passive income with dividends, interest as well as lottery winnings, and capital gains from real estate. Passive income or residual income can also be derived from a business where you do not have a substantial investment in terms of labor. It’s easy to see why people like the idea of passive income. You can do the work once and get that passive income forever.
Passive income is the opposite of how most of us earn a living. Through it, the money comes in without much work on your part. The question for many is how to earn a real passive income. What does it take to earn passive income? What are legitimate strategies for earning a real passive income? Let us answer all these questions and discuss some of the best passive income ideas that can be used to make extra money in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Do Passive Income Ideas Really Work?
Yes, all these passive income ideas do work and can supplement your existing income. Even better, you could use some of them as the main source of income. You get to earn without having to exert a lot of effort. All you have to do is find the right one for you. The best passive income ideas combine decent returns with little effort on your part once you’ve sealed the deal.
You aren’t left worrying about the state of the financial market or struggling to manage a small business. You’re free to search for the next deal, but you don’t have to, and that’s the point of passive income. While there are many ways to generate passive income, it is important to further diversify your portfolio and look for alternative vehicles to earn more money. We’ve shortlisted some of the best passive income ideas & strategies which are apt for beginners who want to make more money or build wealth.
Active Income vs Passive Income Idea
The difference between active and passive income – Your business associate who does most of the work will consider the income that they earn from the partnership as active income. This is the polar opposite of passive income because the former is money earned from rendering a service. Your salary is considered as an active income, so are tips and commissions.
Let us assume that you have a 50% interest in a business venture, you have invested more than 100 working hours to make the enterprise prosper. In this scenario, you consider this as an active income whereas a passive income is earnings derived from any form of business or partnership in which a person is not actively involved. A passive income can also be referred to as residual income.
Importance of Passive Income For Financial Freedom
The coronavirus has not been the major killer they feared it would be. This is in part due to the massive government-mandated shutdown of most of the private economy and stay-at-home orders. This unprecedented near-total quarantine of the healthy is going to weigh on the economy for months if not years. For example, unemployment has already surpassed 15 percent due to the shutdown and could hit the Great Depression levels.
This has proven the importance of building multiple sources of passive income. After all, those who lost their job due to a government-ordered shut down out of fear of a future Chinese virus-like COVID or SARS don’t want to deliver pizzas or stock grocery store shelves to make ends meet. Here are a few new passive income ideas for 2020.
What does it take to earn passive income? The best passive income ideas require little to no work on your part after you’ve set up the deal. They certainly require far less work than trying to day-trade stocks, manage your own small business, or work for a large firm.
The best passive income ideas will generate revenue while you’re asleep or on vacation. This includes ad revenue from a blog, royalties from a book or online course, and the rent from a rental property. People promoting passive income systems or frauds will tell you that it is so easy that you’ll earn money while you sleep.
In reality, it may do so, though you’ll always want to check in on things periodically, and there will be work to do at the very beginning. One of the misconceptions about passive income is that you can do so by trying to game the stock market or another financial institution. Day trading stocks, trying to trade cryptocurrency and other methods are touted as the best passive income ideas, but in reality, they require work on your part and put your money at far greater risk than most investors are willing to take.
Considering the nature and benefits of passive income, a lot of people are attracted to it. A passive income can be very rewarding because you become your boss. This equates to the ability to manage your time. You can still financially gain on a business transaction while you spend time with your loved ones.
Even better, you can go on vacation and still earn money. Although you earn paid leaves in a regular job, the vacation time is counted. As you probably know, this carries a lot of risks because you are not actively doing something to ensure the success of the endeavor.
But you can lessen such risk by investing in passive income ideas that have been tested and proven to be successful. Passive income will give help you in making a safer retirement plan. Creating passive income streams means you have cashflow. Cashflow is different from savings because you’re getting an amount regularly. Something is coming in and it’s not much different from getting a paycheck. Except you’re not actively working.
Passive income in most incidents are taxed at a lower rate or can be easily deferred for a later date. Getting taxed at a lower rate means you can leverage your cash flow better, which is an important benefit of passive income. You can create multiple streams of passive income.
If you can successfully build a blog from scratch and earn through Adsense or affiliate marketing commissions, you can surely repeat and add multiple blogs in your portfolio. The effort for building successive affiliate blogs or websites is gonna be much easier than before. Similarly, after breaking even on your first rental property you buy another and so on.
19 Best Passive Income Ideas To Make Money And Build Wealth
Passive income is money that is usually (but not always) received regularly without any or only little effort. You either have to do much, in the beginning, to set up your passive income stream or/and you regularly have to invest at least a bit time, effort or money to maintain that income.
There are thousands of best passive income ideas you can come across on the internet for earning monthly residual income. But we can filter these down to some easy passive income ideas and strategies that work. Here is the list of 19 passive income ideas and strategies that can help you make more money in the time of pandemics like COVID-19.
1. Passive Income Through Real Estate Crowdfunding
Among the rather new passive income ideas is crowdfunding rental real estate. We are not suggesting using crowdfunding instead of applying for a mortgage. Instead, we’re suggesting you loan money to other real estate investors through crowdfunding sites. What are the benefits of this passive income approach? You can vet each investor’s project individually, but you aren’t dealing with individual investors personally.
This eliminates high-pressure sales by investment groups and the emotional appeal of aiding a friend who wants to buy a house. You can diversify your holdings, loaning several hundred or thousand dollars to each would-be investor. You get a higher interest rate than you would if it sat in a money market account.
The crowdfunding platform takes a slice of every loan issued. However, they also administer the loan payments. If someone doesn’t pay the payment, you don’t have to call them up demanding payment. The crowdfunding website will pressure the person to pay up. Lending money through the crowdfunding site eliminates the need to have a detailed contract with the borrower or having an equity stake in the property itself.
You can choose the loan duration, whether they’re using crowdfunding to save money on hard money loans or in place of a mortgage. You can choose which lending platform you go through, too. Furthermore, those seeking passive income ideas will appreciate the low cost of entry. For example, you could join a crowdfunded real estate project for just a few thousand dollars. If you wanted to join private developers in property investment groups buying houses or apartment buildings, multiply that by a factor of ten.
If you’re looking for new passive income ideas, know that crowdfunding sites allow you to diversify in other ways, as well. While you might invest the bulk of your money in real estate projects, you could put some money into someone’s new restaurant or debt consolidation loan.
2. Passive Income Through Fixing & Renting Property
There are many ways to make passive income in real estate. Many people get involved in house flipping to make more money because it seems straightforward. Buy a run-down house, make repairs, fix it up, and sell it for a profit. This approach can yield 50,000 to 150,000 dollars a year in income if you handle several houses a year, earn the standard 15,000 to 30,000 profit on a property and nothing goes wrong.
There are several problems with this approach, especially in the down housing market due to the economic impact of the Wuhan coronavirus and related shutdown. It is very difficult to sell a house when people are afraid to tour it. Yet you’re legally obligated to pay the carrying costs such as the payments on a hard-money loan, mortgage, and insurance.
Why is “fix and rent” one of the best new passive income ideas? It is a solution for those who’ve fixed up a property but don’t think they can sell it for a profit in the down housing market. They can find renters because real estate is an essential activity and people still need a place to live. Renting out the property gives you a source of income to pay bills like the mortgage and insurance.
A potential side benefit of this approach is that you may hold the property so long that the tax bill on the capital gains is dramatically reduced. Alternatively, you could buy houses from struggling fix-and-flip professionals to serve as rental properties. The odds you’ll get a bargain to go up the longer the housing market is in the doldrums.
Some people chose the fix and flip approach because they don’t want to find tenants or maintain properties. You can solve this problem by outsourcing that works to a good property management company.
What if your end goal remains selling the property? Putting in a tenant allows you to generate income until the housing market recovers. It also increases the value of the property if you choose to sell it to another investor. For example, turnkey investors will love to buy an affordable property that already has a paying tenant in it.
3. Own Rental Properties Indirectly For Cash Flow
There are several ways you can own rental properties indirectly. One is to be an investor in a rental house, owning a share of it while someone else handles the maintenance and collects the rent. This is truly a passive income. The downsides include lower returns than if you owned the property outright, illiquidity, and potential problems if your business partner makes mistakes.
If they choose bad tenants, there’s no income and you have limited say. If they are sued or go into bankruptcy, you’re joined at the hip as their business partner. One alternative is owning shares of a real estate investment trust or REIT. The shares are often as liquid as shares of stock. The rates of return are lower than if you owned the apartment buildings they built and manage, but you don’t have any liability, either.
You can invest in REITs in a variety of different ways, including purchasing shares of publicly traded REIT stocks, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds. REITs generally own and/or manage income-producing commercial real estate, whether it’s the properties themselves or the mortgages on those properties. You can invest in Retail REITs, Residential REITs, Healthcare REITs, Office REITs, and Mortgage REITs. REITs will provide you high dividend yields along with moderate long-term capital appreciation. Investing in REITs is one of the best passive income ideas for investors.
4. Passive income from Airbnb
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Airbnb provides a passive income system to monetize living space. Airbnb makes it easy to earn passive income from renting a room, an apartment, or an entire house. Their systems handle, the bookings and the payments while the hosts handle all the rest. If you have a spare room in your house, then you can have it rented it out. This is one of the passive income ideas where the risks are quite minimal. All you have to do is put up an advertisement online that such a room is available for rent. You will just have to wait for people to check your spare room and rent it. You can partner with Airbnb and earn passive income as an Airbnb host by renting your room.
The sharing economy is based on people renting out assets they aren’t fully utilizing to earn income. This can be a rather passive income, or you can be an active player. The best passive income ideas in this space require almost no work from you, such as when you rent out your vacation home on Airbnb while the property manager maintains it as they always do. There are many turnkey AirBnB management companies out there that can make your short-term rental passive income hassle-free.
Renting out a spare room in your house is a little more work, but it is open to almost everyone. Passive income is renting out your car by the hour on rental sites, whereas active income is driving people around through Uber or Lyft. Note that there are many things you can monetize this way. Depending on where you live, you could rent out your parking space for the money. You may be able to rent out tools that you own. The questions you have to ask are what you’re willing to lend out and what demand for these items is like in your area.
5. Buying Bonds For Passive Income
This is often included in most passive income ideas because you can just sit back as the money rolls in. Buying bonds are considerably safer compared to investing in stocks because bonds are considered as liabilities by the company that issued them. Bonds are loans offered by corporations, cities, and governments. In exchange, there is a written and signed promise to pay a certain sum of money on a certain date and condition.
On the other hand, stocks are considered equity. If ever that company files for bankruptcy, they have to settle their liabilities first before anything else. Governments can also issue bonds but not stocks. To build a large enough passive-income stream you can invest in tax-free municipal bonds, government treasury bonds, and corporate bonds.
6. Passive Income From Stock Investment
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Owning stocks and bonds to many doesn’t seem like one of the best passive income ideas. Yet this is the very basis of private retirement accounts. You’re buying stocks, bonds, and mutual funds that contain both so that you can live off the passive income in retirement. Companies need money to finance their business so they earn it by either borrowing or sharing stocks through an IPO. An initial public offering (IPO) refers to the process of offering shares of a private corporation to the public in a new stock issuance.
Investing in stocks of a company, you become one of its “owners”. When the market is down, this is the best time to buy stocks. If you aggressively save money and seek good-value, dividend-paying stocks, you may be able to achieve a solid passive income before the traditional retirement age. Diversify your holdings to reduce the risk of losing everything because a company cratered.
We have separated this from investment in bonds because of the nature of the two. In the previous paragraph, it was mentioned that this is a share of ownership of a certain entity. Some entities pay their stockholders every quarter so it is an excellent way of making a living without doing anything. But you have to be careful in choosing the company to invest in.
7. Time Deposit Is A Good Passive Income Idea
You can earn passive income by investing money in fixed deposit accounts. This is one of the best passive income ideas that present very minimal risks. Unlike other savings account, a time deposit has a stated date of maturity. You cannot withdraw such a deposit before the maturity date. The interest rate of this type of savings account is considerably higher compared to other accounts, but it depends on the term and amount placed. Once you will withdraw your savings, you have to notify the bank at least 30 days before the said date. The higher and longer you park your money, the higher the interest rates will be.
8. Passive Income Through Affiliate Marketing
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Blogging is often seen as a great way to earn almost passive income. This isn’t completely passive income; you have to create content that will attract enough viewers for the ad revenue on the blog to be worth the effort. You have to write content, but you can hire others to write content for you, as well. You can use software to schedule posts to be published when your readers expect new content.
General ad revenue for blogs has been declining due to sheer competition. The alternative for bloggers is affiliating the blog. For example, a Mommy blogger could be paid to review various baby products, though she’s legally required to disclose the relationship. You could mention sponsors and post a link to their site or products for sale. On the other hand, you could do it yourself, doing product reviews, and sharing affiliate links to the product Amazon. Then you receive a few percents of every sale as a commission.
This is one of the best passive income ideas for those blogging consistently about a topic for which they can recommend related products. This is one of the passive income ideas that do not require any investment from you. This would be an excellent money-making venture especially if you already have an existing website and a band of loyal followers. In this scenario, you post a link that will send the viewer to a certain website where they can buy the item. If they do purchase, you get a commission.
A lot of new things have come up in affiliate marketing. For example, you could promote or run ads in an app you create. Or you could mention sponsors that helped pay for your blog or provided expert advice for your online course. That’s aside from the classic approach of putting affiliate links in a blog or emailed newsletter. One of the new passive income ideas is using various tools to set up affiliate programs on a one-to-one basis, whether you’re referring people to someone else’s online course or sending leads to a real estate agent.
Then there are the relatively classic passive income ideas like promoting books and products via an Amazon affiliate link. This is an option even if the app exists solely to connect your audience with you as an influencer. Promote your blog posts or podcast, and you can occasionally send out a link to your ebook or someone else’s book offered through the Amazon affiliate program.
9. Income From Lending Money
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Another one of the best passive income ideas is to loan money to others. We’re not saying to loan money to a broke friend who never pays you back. Instead, utilize peer-to-peer lending sites to loan money to others. The lending site collects the payments and provides more leverage when someone is late. You as a lender can lower your risk by diversification. Simply lend money to a variety of people instead of putting all of your money, literally, in one basket. This is a wise strategy if you’re pursuing the higher yields that beat stock market returns.
This is probably one of the few passive income ideas that involve high risks. But it is quite profitable. You can lend money to people who cannot qualify for conventional financing means. You could lend money with an interest of 6 to 10%. A good way to lessen your financial exposure is by investing in a company that will act as a mediator. They will ensure that you are paid back.
Another easy passive income idea through lending is called peer-to-peer lending in which you can give loans to other individuals who don’t meet all requirements for conventional financing. A crowd lending website is where you become someone who loans out money and you get paid interest. You’re like a bank now, getting paid interest. It’s an awesome feeling to be the lender instead of the borrower. You invest in portions of loans. With returns of 6-10%, investing with a company like Lending Club can get you substantially higher passive income than normal investment funds or bank interests.
10. Earning Passive Income As Silent Business Partner
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One of the best passive income ideas most people have never heard of is becoming a silent partner in a business. Instead of lending the business money, you buy a stake in the business. Then you’re paid a percentage of the profits, and your money is backed by a percentage of the assets of the firm. There are sites where you can search for businesses seeking silent partners. Instead of giving a friend thousands of dollars for a 10 percent stake in their restaurant, you can choose from thousands of startups or small businesses for one that looks good to you. Moreover, you can reduce your risk by investing in several startups.
This is one of the best passive income ideas for those who were thinking of starting their own business but decided they didn’t want to do all the work. Know that passive income ideas like this require doing your due diligence, vetting the business’ numbers, and verifying that your rights as an investor are protected. You can also bankroll the business of your friend or family. They will then be able to run the business for you.
If this is an ongoing operation, you must study their financial statements and other aspects of their business before shelling out anything. But if you are investing in a new entity, you must know if your business partner is trustworthy. Although this does not lessen your financial exposure, you can sleep peacefully at night knowing that your money is in safe hands.
11. Passive Income Idea: Vending Machine Business
This is one of the often underestimated passive income ideas. But it is a great way to make money especially if you have found the right place to install your vending machine. Consider the number of people going in and out of that place, you will stand a big profit if you have placed the machine in a strategic area. A well-placed vending machine can potentially earn $100 per week or even hundreds of dollars per day.
For example, if one vending machine in a prime location can bring in $50 to $100 per month. If you buy 100 vending machines, all in prime locations, you may be able to hit an average of $1000 per day. Like any business, most states require vending route operators to obtain proper permits and licenses required by their local ordinances. When planning to start a vending machine business, it’s important to check your local ordinances.
12. Income Through Cash Back Websites
This may not be considered as something that will help you go to early retirement. But you can still earn money with no effort required from you. Not to mention that this is completely free. All you have to do is sign up in cashback on shopping websites. They will give back a portion of the total amount that you spend on your purchase.
13. Writing Books For Passive Income
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Selling books can be an incredible way to create some genuine passive income in the form of royalties. In today’s day and age, once your book is accessible on a site like Amazon, you could get a check every month for doing nothing. The more time you spend promoting your books, the more cash you’ll make online and offline.
14. Income Idea Through Drop Shipping
With the blast of eCommerce, drop shipping has turned out to be extremely famous. Here is how it works: you make an online store that offers items from certain manufacturers. A person visits your site, orders an item, and your system sends the order request to the manufacturer of that product.
The maker at that point completes the order by shipping it directly to the person who had placed the order on your site. A cool aspect concerning this kind of business is that you don’t have to stock products that you are selling – No inventory required from your side. The customer pays for the item; you collect the commissions and the manufacturer or seller of the items stores and ships the items to the customer.
15. Passive Income Idea: Starting A Blog
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The passive income through blogging has allowed many to stop exchanging time for money. For example, as a travel blogger, you can set up a WordPress blog and share your experiences with your readers. Whenever you go to a new place, you can write about all the cool things you saw and did there. You can make money in a few different ways. You can apply for ad programs like Google Adsense and set them up on the sidebar of your site.
If any of them click through, you will get a small fee from your advertising partner like Google. You can also sign up for some of the affiliate programs. As mentioned above affiliate marketing is one of the various ways to make money online by promoting products or websites to earn a certain percentage as a commission.
16. Passive Income Through Money Making Websites
Many blogs earn revenue from Google ads. Some may have affiliate income as we described above. What most don’t know is that you can buy blogs from the owners and take them over. The ideal cases have evergreen content that generates passive income for years. Add some fresh content, and you’ll increase traffic and monthly revenue. This also raises the possibility of earning money with site flipping.
Alternatively, you can build a niche blog that targets a small subset of the blog’s audience, increasing its value to the audience and advertisers. You can even increase traffic to all of your blogs by cross-linking to each of them. This is one of the better passive income ideas for those who want to do more than a blog on the same subject every day.
17. Passive Income Through Selling Online Courses
One of the best passive income ideas is selling access to courses or guides to an audience that needs such content. This isn’t one of the hottest passive income ideas. Variations of it date back to the “Four Hour Workweek”. However, this method of building passive income has evolved over the years. The money from the online course comes straight to you, and you can use it to promote your blog on the online learning platform.
You could also promote your current business with the online courses, whether you’re a home decorator, real estate agent, attorney, or building contractor. Furthermore, you could use the course to promote other content you’ve created, be it a blog or book. Or encourage them to sign up for your subscription-only newsletter.
Content creation can be one of the better passive income ideas if you connect with services that can write quality content on-demand that you simply add to the newsletter. Note that there are plenty of tools for handling the marketing and distribution side. For example, you could set up newsletters to automatically send content to your email list.
Once you identify a need and can create a decent online course that fulfills it, you’ll have people paying you for the content. If it is good, they’ll refer it to their friends, generating more revenue. You only have to create the content once and post it on a site where they pay to access it.
If you create an online course, you can sell a companion “guide” or e-book to the students. If your online guide is selling well, then you can create audiobooks or courses for them as long as it provides additional value. You can also use online courses to promote your expertise and promote books you’ve already written. This is one of the better passive income ideas for writers since it allows you to monetize content you already have in a new way that can even raise your profile.
18. Buying Notes
This is one of the best passive income ideas for those who want to secure steady and substantial income, though you have to hunt for it. It is possible to buy loans or “notes” from others. Then you are the one that receives the payments. Every person who offered lender financing to the person who bought his or her home has such a note.
Besides, some of them may be willing to take a discount on the note to get most of their cash back. Know that this requires doing your due diligence and drafting the right legal documents to protect your investment.
If you’re looking for passive income ideas, know that you should stay away from tax liens unless you know what you’re doing.
19. Passive Income Through Turnkey Rental Properties
The standard approach for would-be landlords is to buy a property, make the necessary renovations, find tenants, and rent it out. Buying turnkey properties skips the middle two steps. You are buying a property that already has to pay tenants. We won’t say this is among the brand new passive income ideas for 2020, but the real estate investment approach is coming back into style. And several factors are making it more attractive for those seeking passive income.
Banks and other institutions will loan you money at affordable rates to buy properties like this. You can generate passive income almost immediately. You inherit the tenant, and you might be able to inherit the property management firm that does all the work. You don’t have to fix up the property. Yet the seller is obligated to inform you of major problems and upcoming repairs.
You can choose not to buy the house that needs a new roof, new air conditioner, or foundation repairs. There is less risk of buying a property and being blindsided with major unplanned expenses. You can also find a growing number of properties up for sale as retiring Baby Boomer wants to sell their assets and just retire, while others hit the market as part of an estate. This does demonstrate that owning and holding rental real estate is among the most successful passive income ideas.
These are some of the best passive income opportunities we have listed for your knowledge. They could help you to get started in making more money and maximizing your wealth, especially in the time of economic crisis like the current one emanating from coronavirus pandemic. Do you have any better passive income ideas that you would like to share? Let us know in the comments below.
References:
Active and Passive Income
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/passiveincome.asp
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timedeposit.asp
Benefits of Passive Income
http://www.wealthylovelife.com/benefits-of-passive-income.html
https://wellkeptwallet.com/24-great-passive-income-ideas
Crowdfunding
https://www.moneyunder30.com/should-you-invest-in-real-estate-crowdfunding
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/072514/real-estate-and-crowdfunding-new-path-investors.asp
Peer to Peer lending
Real estate / Landlord
https://www.quickenloans.com/blog/5-ways-earn-truly-passive-income
Stocks and bonds
https://investorjunkie.com/16179/cashflow-quadrant
Affiliated blogging
https://www.affilorama.com/introduction/how-does-affiliate-marketing-work
Online Courses
https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/299914#4
http://www.mymoneydesign.com/passive-income-ideas
Income Through Various Forms of Real Estate Investing
https://www.quickenloans.com/blog/5-ways-earn-truly-passive-income
https://smartasset.com/mortgage/pros-and-cons-of-buying-turn-key-homes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jrose/2019/02/22/real-estate-investing-without-buying-property
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