Yahoo Finance These 7 Passive Income Streams Aren’t Easy To Get Started, but They Pay Off Big-Time
Passive income is the dream. You go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning richer than you were before.
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However, while making passive income sounds like the perfect way to quit your job and enjoy the rest of your life taking naps on the beach, the reality is a lot more hard-work and less time sitting on the sand — at least at first.
Most forms of passive income require that you invest money or time (or both), and the best forms of passive income typically require a larger upfront investment. This means spending nights and weekends building a business, or investing a larger sum over time to get the passive income train moving.
But once you’ve built the passive income machine, it can pay off in a huge way, giving you the lifestyle freedom, you’ve always wanted. Here are seven passive income streams that take some work, but are totally worth it.
Build a Car Rental Empire
You can rent your car out on the internet with sites like Turo, allowing you to make money while you’re not using it. Turo costs include insurance (in case someone trashes your vehicle), so the risk is low, and they handle everything through their online platform.
But instead of just renting out your personal car, why not create a car rental empire by purchasing desirable cars and renting them for a premium? Electric vehicles (EVs) are highly-desirable rental cars, and also cost less in maintenance and fuel than other cars. Many let you lock/unlock vehicles remotely as well, making it even more passive than handing over your keys.
If you can build up a fleet of cars that are rented regularly, not only could they pay for themselves, you could make thousands of dollars per month in profit. If the business becomes too time intensive, you might need to hire an operating manager to handle the day-to-day logistics to keep it passive for you, so keep that in mind.
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Invest in Multi-Family Real Estate
Real estate is one of the best investments of the last century, and it’s one of the better long-term investments that can qualify as passive income. But instead of buying a single-family home, you can make even more by investing in multi-family real estate.
A multi-family home includes properties like duplexes, triplexes or apartment buildings that house multiple people in a single unit. If you are a first-time homebuyer, you can put a small down payment on a property up to four units using an FHA loan.
The best way to grow wealth with multi-family real estate is house hacking. This means purchasing something like a quad-plex, living in one unit, and renting out the other three. The rental income then covers all of your costs, including your mortgage, letting you live for free while making a small profit.
While the income from real estate investing takes time to grow, the home appreciation, tax benefits and increase in rents can pay off huge in the future.
Publish eBooks Using AI
If you enjoy the process of writing but don’t have the time to write a bestselling novel, why don’t you let AI do it for you?
With the advent of ChatGPT and other tools that utilize language learning models (LLMs), you can put together a completed novel in no time. Or a self-help book. Or anything you feel like writing about.
Many AI tools can help you with formatting and ideation, character development, and you can even ask questions about the characters in the book as it is being written. The possibilities are endless.
While your first book might not take off, you can write a few more in no time by leveraging AI tools, and if one of them takes off, you can collect royalties for a long time to come.
Create an Affiliate Website
Long gone are the days of creating a personal blog to share about your feelings and what you ate yesterday. All of those posts have moved to social media platforms.
But if you’ve ever wanted to create a website to grow an audience, now is a great time to start. Many companies are looking to partner with site owners to get in front of their audience, and the more traffic you can drive, the more money you can earn.
The most passive type of website is one that collects most of its income from affiliate and display ad sales. This means that you write helpful articles that get picked up by search engines (i.e. Google) and more and more people find your website.
You can then partner with brands that offer a product or service that will fit with your topic and audience, and collect a commission for each click or sale that comes through your website.
The best part about this process is that you can build a website that earns money while you sleep, and you can even outsource most of the process (writing, editing, SEO, etc.) Just know it might take a year or two to gain enough traction to earn thousands per month.
Sell an Online Course
If you know a lot about a specific topic, you might be able to sell that knowledge. Creating an online course is a great way to teach what you know while not having to show up every day to do it.
Online courses typically consist of a single topic that helps customers reach a specific outcome (healthier, wealthier, save time, etc.). Once you have your topic, you can break it down into teaching modules and lessons.
Online courses also usually come with downloadable worksheets or PDFs to help students “do the work” so they can get the promised result of the course. Once you’ve created the course you just need to tell people about it. This might include social media posts, online advertising or phone sales.
Once you’ve built a marketing system that brings in leads automatically, you can sleep well while making sales 24/7.
Build a Vending Machine Business
Snacks are the best. And you can build an entire business around them.
Vending machines are everywhere, and if you own one, you could be raking in money, even while you sleep. The key is to find the right products in the right location at the right price — easier said than done.
But if you can build the business slowly, buying a machine or two and testing them in the right locations, you can start to build passive income. And once you figure out your market, you can scale up, buying more machines, and eventually hiring someone to restock products, making it a fully-passive venture.
Vending machines can be a lucrative business, but it might be a while before you see any big profits passively.
Create a YouTube Channel
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. So why not create a channel that attracts enough eyeballs to earn you some sweet passive income?
YouTube has grown into a massive online platform that offers anyone the chance to upload videos. But if you want to earn money on YouTube, you have to be strategic about it. You want to pick a niche that you are an expert in, or that you can create a ton of video content around.
You’ll then need to publish videos consistently, with high-quality editing and engaging content. Once you pick up 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch-hours (within a 12 month period), you can join the Adsense program and earn a portion of the ad revenue from your video views. The more views you get, the more you earn.
While this requites work up front, if you create videos that continue to get views, you can continue earning income from videos you made years earlier. And if you don’t use your face on your YouTube channel (Faceless YouTube channels are huge right now), you may be able to completely outsource video creation to make it 100% passive.
Bottom Line
Passive income isn’t so passive after all, but the rewards are worth it. If you have the patience to grow one of these passive income sources, it can change your entire life.
Many of these income sources could grow to become your full-time income, or allow you to retire earlier due to bringing in so much side money outside of your day job. You just have to be willing to do the non-passive work up front first.
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: These 7 Passive Income Streams Aren’t Easy To Get Started, but They Pay Off Big-Time
