There is a certain allure to the idea of “passive income.” After all, who wouldn’t want a continuous stream of income without having to trade your time or effort for it? But true passive income is quite elusive. True passive income can be defined, and is defined by the Internal Revenue Service, as “cash flow generated by activities in which the tax payer does not materially participate.” But outside of portfolio income, cash flow generated solely by appreciation of an asset like a stock (and liquidation of the earnings), there are few examples of true passive income.
Even Wikipedia gets it wrong.
Real estate: the classic example is false. Rent on a habitable property is generally called “passive income,” but it’s not. If you want to have tenants and consistently earn income from the property, it must be maintained. At the simplest level, as a landlord, you must interview prospective tenants, arrange background checks, respond to maintenance issues, keep the property attractive and in working condition, process rent payments, draw lease agreements, and maintain connections with plumbers, electricians, painters, and real estate agents (or do that work yourself). Even if you outsource management to an outside firm, you must develop the contract and oversee the management.
The more work you’re doing, and being a landlord is a lot of work, the less passive your income is. Outsourcing more of the work results in less income overall.
You won’t hear about this in the motivational books and seminars, but the only way to ensure high cash flow from real estate is by owning and renting out a lot of properties, and outsourcing the management of all of them. Incredibly high volume would hopefully make up for the thin margins due to outsourcing the management. But building this real estate empire takes the kind of time and effort that those with “passive income” written on their forehead with indelible ink may not understand or accept.
The allure of AdSense. Time and time again I hear from people who are excited and motivated to start a blog with the intent of throwing up some advertising to earn passive income, expecting almost immediate returns. Unless you plan on scraping other websites and stealing their content — and if you do, I hope those who provide the income will discover this tactic and stop providing the income to you — this concept is miles away from the idea of “passive income.” While there are always exceptions, for the most part you can’t just throw up a website, add advertising, and expect passive income to roll in.
If you want to really earn money online, you have to work. You must create lots of content, relevant content, and you must continue doing so. This is highly active income, not passive.
Like the real estate empire, you could simply register hundreds of domain names — there are programs that will do this for you, for a fee — and throw up one page on each full of advertisements. With incredible volume, you’ll make more from your thin profit margins. But what benefit does an empire of hundreds of websites devoid of content provide to the internet at large? It just creates more junk websites that are nuisances to anyone who is attempting to properly perform research on the internet.
This seems like a strange message coming from me. I’m earning a multiple of my day job’s salary by working with the web in my “spare time.” But this work is so far from what anyone could consider “passive income” that I’m almost insulted when I hear that. My strongest efforts wax and wane with the moon, and so does the resulting income. Consumerism Commentary won’t “run itself” and continue generating income for long.
In general, I have an option: either be a positive force, adding to the wealth of information online, even if the information is more interesting to me than to anyone else, or don’t do it at all.
When I read about the truth about earning money from real estate, like in The Complete Real-Estate Investing Guidebook by David Crook, rather than ambiguous, motivational bull (I won’t mention any specific authors, but you know who you are), I see that real estate management is not truly passive income, and success won’t come for most people who try, particularly those after a quick buck. I know from experience that the same holds true for earning money online.
Simply: If you want to earn income, you have to work for it; that is, income is active. The IRS may call certain things “passive income,” but the term itself is a lie.
Things are a little different from an investor’s point of view, and I’ll tackle that approach soon.
Published or updated June 3, 2008.
{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
Your post today actually made me laugh at the concept of making “passive” income from real estate or…even further from the truth….blogging.
I’ve had a blog for a few months now and never intended it to be passive income, yet I’m amazed at the people who actually believe that they can make a substantial amount of money this way. Case in point…my Ad Sense revenue for last month was a whopping 63 cents.
At last, I can retire from this life of crime…
Love the blog. Keep up the great work.
I’m not a landlord yet, but from what I know, you’re dead on about the real estate. As a blogger, I’d say you’re half-on with that side. Blogging is very, very hard work – much more so than many jobs. And it’s certainly not an easy path to riches. But I think when *most* people refer to blogging as “passive” income, they mean that you earn round the clock, whether you’re at the computer or not. If I take a day or 3 off from blogging, my content is still on the internet, racking up advertising dollars and adsense clicks.
Granted, it would be making more ( probably ) if I was actively working on it. But I don’t have to pound on the keyboard every minute of every day to keep that money coming in. It’s “passive”, in a sense.
AWESOME post, Flexo. I used to believe that blogging would bring passive income, too. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. There’s nothing passive about it. I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. People e-mail me all the time asking how they can make money blogging. “Work 12 hours a day for two years,” I want to tell them.
I agree that blogging must be the worst form of passive income. I put in a lot of work to get where I am at. However, I think it’s an excellent form of alternative income.
Blogging most certainly isn’t passive income, but other forms of websites can be. I have a few that earn me $40-50 each per month. It’s not much money, but there’s no work involved either. For one of them, I haven’t so much as logged into the FTP server or done any promotion in over 2 years now. Of course, it did take me quite a bit of work to get it set up in the beginning.
Kyle: Do you mean the Learn Spanish on Your Own site, a “key-word” dense, small maze of static web pages with affiliate links to Amazon? The more stuff like that published on the internet means there’s more “un-content” people who really want to learn Spansih have to wade through before finding what they really want.
On a Learn Spanish on Your Own website, I would expect to see Spanish lessons.
These little affiliate sites are probably light on maintenance, so you’re approaching passive income, but I don’t think the outlook is good in the long term. Eventually search engines will get smarter and discount content-less websites.
I don’t intend to criticize, I just want to delineate the difference between what I was writing about in the post and other forms of earning income online.
Which is why I will never be in real estate. I want my investment income to be passive—therefore the market suits me best.
Blogging is by far the least passive thing I’ve ever done. It requires even more work than most normal jobs because you have to be constantly creative and reaching out. There are no guarantees about salary or simple job requirements. I like it, though.
I think the reason that people get thrown off into thinking they can easily make money is all of the ads about get rich quick schemes and I am making $500 a month with a site that I don’t update. Those throws people off so they decide to build a site. Eventually, they realize how hard it really is to make money with it.
I had someone email me a proposal from a SEO company (It cost $1,500) and it said that they could put adsense on their site to earn big advertising dollars. It really made me laugh when I read it.
Great post by the way. Very enjoyable! What would you say are “true” passive income sources?
Flexo, that is one of them although it’s not the largest earner. I disagree that it is content-less. At the time I wrote it, there was literally nothing else on the web like it and I get emails occassionally from people thanking me for publishing the information and others asking me to clarify certain points, so at least some of my readers are finding value in it., which is good enough for me. I personally find the content to be invaluable and wish a site like it had existed when I was trying to learn the language. I do actually have spanish lessons on the site, and they have received most of the external links and search traffic, but they are not linked from the main page. You have to go a few pages deep to find them. I originally intended to add much more of that part, but life got busy and I wasn’t earning enough money to justify putting any more work in, so I dropped it.
However, the information there is exactly the process I used to learn the language to near-fluency in a matter of a few months. I pieced together bits and pieces of the process from a few other sites, but I’d never seen it all packaged together. Of course, that has changed over the years but Google traffic has been increasing steadily since the beginning, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t be sustainable. It’s almost 4 years old now.
I also disagree with affiliate pages crowding the internet and making information harder to sift through for beginners. The potential size of the internet is infinite and sorting it out is largely a solved problem i.e. tripling the size of the internet by adding a bunch of worthless affiliate sites will be exactly as difficult to filter as it is now. The idea that an increase in crap content makes it more difficult to find the good content is a fallacy.
Kyle: I looked around some more after posting my comment and you’re right, there is a lot more on your site that I didn’t see at first glance. You definitely have some helpful content.
There are many more websites out there that are simply one-page, key-word heavy landing pages designed to attract search engine visitors and force them through an affiliate link or an advertising link if they don’t use their browser’s back button to return to the search engine results.
An increase in crap is a decrease to the overall signal-to-noise ratio in search results, and it makes performing research much more frustrating. First, you can’t always tell the quality or depth of a website simply by its listing in search engine results. Second, many such sites blatantly use tactics to manipulate search engine results and they can be listed highly for unrelated topics. This most definitely makes it harder to find good content because I expect that every top search result presented by Google (for example) to contain what I’m looking for if I structure my search query properly.
The proliferation of sites designed *solely* for SEO and affiliate sales add to the noise, lower the signal-to-noise ratio, and make it more difficult to find good quality, in-depth information.
Again, your site is better than I initially thought. :-)
Thanks! Although I still disagree on the SE-related parts. While some sites do slip through the SE crackers, they are outliers and generally don’t stay ranked for more than a few months at a time. I say this having designed several search engines myself. In fact, my senior design project in college was a search engine and I currently work for a search company (not any of the big web SE’s, though). Adding noise sites does add irrelevant results, it’s true, but that is largely irrelevant. Any given search query may have 6 million results. Having 6 million and one isn’t going to hurt anybody since it will appear on page 400+ 99.9% of the time. What you care about with search results is recall (retrieving most truely relevant pages), even at the expense of precision (retrieving ONLY relevant pages). In practice, you don’t care if 99% of your search results are irrelevant so long as the sites that appear on the first two pages of the results mostly are. For NEW topics or those without much search volume (very long-tail searches), you can sometimes have a problem making this happen and that is where these SEO one-page affiliate site wizards operate. There isn’t enough data to determine which pages are truely most relevant and so you get it wrong sometimes. But in terms of actual real-life experience, very few people end up being affected by this and if it does happen, they can just hit back on their browser. For established topics with large search volume, this practically never happens because competition for all those keywords is very intense.
In theory, the addition of crap sites has no influence whatsoever on search results. In practice, it does but the influence is very small and getting smaller all the time as google tweaks things. That said, there is no fundamental reason why one-page SEO sites can’t provide real value to their readers. After all, a visitor presumably wouldn’t have clicked on an advertisement or made a purchase in the first place if they didn’t think it in their best interests.
Great article. The greatest passive income I have found in the last few years has been in the foreign exchange markets. Betting against the dollar for example. Gold and oil have tripled in the last few years as the government continues to print money like crazy.
Blogging is very hard work, I’m give you that. But, it puts you in control and gives you the opportunity to as I like to say, “Get your own customers”. Real estate is also a very exciting business – IF you put in your time and find the right deals. But, I like blogging better because the startup costs and the risks are much, much lower.
I also hate searching for something and finding a one page website with nothing but links to somewhere else. They only frusturate users and decrease the value of the internet. I wish google could find a better way to filter them out.
Real estate: I don’t believe you’re saying it’s not passive. Yes, if you’re the maintenance guy and rent collector then the maintenance and rent collection are work. But if you’re not those things then it’s totally passive, you just own an asset and let it return money. Property management firms exist to handle those things for the smaller investor, and larger investors would simply hire staff outright to manage that.
Glad you write this post, Flexo. It’s nice for you to point out the work involved for these “passive income”, that they are not so passive in reality. In a blogging perspective, the amount of work, initiative, and thinking involved to put up a quality post on a blog is not small.
It’s really hard to truly find passive income even if you count stocks’ capital gain and dividends because that’ll require a lot of initial learning and continuous studies and attention to both the individual investments and the market.
As for real estate and rentals, being a landlord is no where near passive. The amount of stress and maintenance and sudden issues that come up with tenants… I have seen too much of the people I know and I will never be landlord. Not because it’s a bad thing. It’s still a great way for income for many people. It’s just not suitable for me. Therefore, it’s important for each person to know what he or she wants.
I believe anything only can become passive after lots of ACTIVE work.
Take blogging for example.
Obviously you have to put in tons of time to build it and get to a sustaining traffic and income level, eventually you could be able to just coast by with writing a post. That takes what? All of two seconds.
In real estate if you are able to become successful, eventually you can outsource the upkeep and whatever else might be required.
But I do see what you are talking about. Many people feel they can just come in and make a quick buck. Then again it might seem like that because they enjoy it that much, and most people don’t equate “enjoy” and “job”.
Great comments, everyone.
Luke: Advertising sure makes it sound easy.
Curt: Betting in foreign exchange seems to me to be fairly active rather than passive, and only income if you manage to earn money rather than lose. But unless I misunderstand the concept of foreign exchange trading, you need to perform research and make moves at the right time. That doesn’t sound passive to me. You’re not lifting heavy boxes, but you are trading your time and effort.
I purposely didn’t discuss investments in this article because it is a different world and active vs. passive is a different relationship. I’ll explain in a future article.
Customer’s Revenge: If you are completely uninvolved with management of your real estate properties, then two things happen. First, you’re lucky if you are earning income on top of what you have to pay to the management firms… and as I mentioned in the article, this works best with large scale operations, to make those thin profit margins actually worthwhile. Then you’re dealing with the time and effort it takes to build that empire. Hardly passive. Second, once you’re totally hands-off, you’re an investor, which is really where passive income sits, but you’re still not in the clear.
theWild1: “That takes what? All of two seconds?” Believe me, if your posts take two seconds to write, you better have an amazing gimmick, or else you won’t have much of an audience for long. I wish I could take two seconds to write a well-informed and in-depth article. Then I could increase my productivity 1,800 to 7,200 times. For a typical post, unless I’m posting a quick update, it takes at least an hour to write. Usually more. Then there’s time taken to respond to emails, comments, work with advertisers on deals, network with other bloggers. I could write an entire post (and it will take at least an hour) to discuss all the time that goes into blogging. Two-second posts do not exist, not here anyway. I’ve tried the short update form of blogging… and it doesn’t work so much in this type of blog. But even those take longer than two seconds.
theWild1: Also, you have a great point in your final sentence. When you *enjoy* what you’re doing, it doesn’t have to feel like work. That’s not the case for everyone, though. I’ve seen cases where once people start getting paid for what they love doing, and once they have defined responsibilities and deadlines whether self-imposed or not, some of the joy and fun may be replaced by stress. Self-awareness is important.
I agree that the phrase “passive income” is way over-used. As far as investment income goes I don’t even believe that is passive. If I invest $1000 into a dividend paying stock then yes, I don’t have to do much work to rake in the $40 per year (or whatever) of income but I need to put in a heck of a lot of work to come up with the $1000 in the first place! Yes, you can keep that money invested for a long time but I think if you average out the amount of work to earn that $1000 over the number of years you own that investment – it’s not as passive as most people make it out to be.
Mike
Blogging definitely isn’t passive income. And although I have a few website ideas that may be more passive than blogging (ie. once the useful content is created the site should generate traffic without regular updates) there will still be a fair amount of work up front.
Real estate CAN be reasonably passive – we currently own a residential rental property and although we collect the rent and manage it ourselves that takes less than an hour per month on average. The rent gets paid directly into our bank account by the tenants, and the most I have to do is send an email reminder if the rent hasn’t been paid when expected. Although the property is 50 years old and in “original” condition, because the rent is relatively low for the area the tenants don’t expect too much upkeep. Only when something actually breaks do I have to call in a plumber or electrician. Anyhow, a large potion of the total return is long term capital growth (around 80% price increase in ten years) which is definitely passive.
However, I’ve previously had a rental property that was tons of work – with lots of tenants who fell behind in rent and had to be chased up, lots of damage to repair between tenants, and so on. So rental properties are a bit of a lucky dip in terms of the amount of work required.
I think that blogging is a nice way to create an alternative income stream. You could write an article which takes you an hour for example. But once it is published you can earn income on this article forever. Of course in order to blog successfully, the minimum is that you post at least 3-4 times a week. And your posts add something valuable to your readers’ lives.
As far as truly passive income, I would say that dividends from stocks and interest from bonds/cd’s are the closest to passive income. Sure, it might take you a while to research and find that nice dividend stock, but if you set up a portfolio of 50+ stocks ( or just buy several etfs) you are as close to passive income as possible.
As for interest, you simply buy a CD, a nd then jsut collect the interest. Who cares about inflation anyways :-)
As was mentioned earlier, you have to work to save money for you to get into opportunities for passive (or semi-passive) income. I blog because it’s fun and a creative outlet for me to write Andy Rooney type commentary. It’s not often useful to people, but it’s sometimes entertaining, makes you think, and comes up amazingly high in search results for certain topics. So I always have in the back of my mind ways to make some money off of the site. With a “real job”, I just don’t have time to develop the advertising.
I’ve inadvertently become a landlord with a job change and a move. Luckily, the tenant is a friend and the property is relatively new, so it hasn’t been that much work. It’s the tax advantages that may make me continue to rent out the house, especially since I’ve lost money (on paper) on the value of the house.
As for stocks and other investments, it can be passive if you trust those target retirement mutual funds. I do my own financial planning and although it takes work, I find it interesting and almost fun.
So, just because income isn’t passive, if it’s active but fun, or at least stress free, then it’s almost as good as passive and can often be better than working at a “real job”.
+ Atul
I agree to a point; nothing is passive in that it will eventually die if you don’t keep tending it.
An example that many like to give is MLM (BTW: I’m NOT involved in any MLM’s) – after building up your downline you sit back and reap the benefits; or so the story goes.
This is certainly true for one of my friends … he makes $1 Mill. or so a year and doesn’t even attend meetings anymore. But, what if your downline starts to deplete? The MLM’s products become outmoded? The company changes their business model of goes under?
But, if I can earn $250k ++ a year doing virtually nothing – move to another country for 4 years, leaving my businesses and real-estate to others to manage and run … kick back and write a blog about my experiences … that’s passive enough for me!
You’re very right on both accounts Flexo. Real estate and blogging are not passive income. Actively managing your own properties can be a lot of work. Real estate can be a less active investment if you hire a property manager and generally that isn’t much work, but it is certainly still some work. Property managers charge usually about 10% of the net rent and fees and expenses on top of that. Plus theres no guarantee the manager will do a good job and not waste all your money by failing to fill vacancies or finding good tenants.
Jim
I had a recent post on my passive income goals – $300 was my target. Some of that was blogging income. I agree that blogging is active work, but once established it does generate passive income in that even if you don’t work on it for a while it will still generate income (though declining). Similarly if you don’t monitor your investments they may over time go south and similarly become poor investments. Your points are right though so I still think you need to have a passive income goal, just make sure that it is not all made up of blogging income.
On a slight aside but related to blog income, I also had a post on ” RSS readership correlation with blog revenue “, which looked at if a blogs revenue (from all sources) is proportional to the number of readers. The articile and some comments look at high profile pf bloggers (I would classify you as one) figures but could not reach a conclusion. It would be great to get your thoughts on this.
Andy
I agree with you regarding the lure of adsense. I think there is a pyramid style myth going around regarding how much you can expect to earn from a blog. I explored this in a recent post.
Hi – firstly, this is the first time I’ve posted on your site and just let me say how much I’ve enjoyed it thus far. Keep up the good work.
Secondly, I have a pfblog, though I don’t ever expect to make any money out of it. Its more for my own personal enjoyment than anything else. I’ve been keeping a financial diary for years, so its simply the electronic verson thereof. And, yes, it is ‘hard work’, in the sense that golf is hard work for Tiger Woods. Should anyone really expect to make much money off their blog? No, I wouldn’t think so – not any more, there are too many out there. (BTW check it out – its still new, but having visitors gives my ego a boost).
But, I’ve gotten off topic. I wanted to add to the discussion about passive income and in particular trading (refer comment #12 from Curt). I’ve worked in investment banks and hedge funds. Those guys who make BIG money work very very very hard (20 hour days are not uncommon). Also, the stress kills most of them by the time they are 40. Now that seems like real hard work to me.
There are thousands of websites out there promoting trading in all sorts of instruments (http://www.forexautomoney.com/ from a simple google search – one of millions). Is this easy, passive income? Again, in my experience people who try to trade these sorts of markets for a couple of minutes a day eventually get screwed by the guy doing 20+ hours a day.
Remember, there is no such things as passive income. If someone tells you there is, they are probably trying to screw you out of a few bucks.
Interesting take on things, pretty much agree with what is being said. I work in finance, as a mortgage broker, and my investment clients don’t really think of owning investment property as a “passive income”, they have to work at it, to maintain the property, keep the property tennanted and also, in the current financial climate, they have to work at keeping the finance in place at the right cost (actually I do a lot of that for them), but you get the picture. There are too many people who have been taken in by advertisements for “passive income” or become an “armchair investor”, believing that you pay other people to look after everything else, but invariably get screwed because they had been sold on the idea of eaning money for nothing.
I have been involved in websites that made a lot of money through affiliate marketing, and I have to say that most of the time, we weren’t doing any work. The mechanism for earning the money was passive. However, just like with property, you have to do maintenance to continue earning the passive income. With websites, the real-estate is the search engine positions/adwords campaign you have, which needs to be maintained. You never really achieve true passive income because you are constantly having to maintain SE positions, much like with real estate, you cannot let it fall into disrepair otherwise the income will fall.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. As a landlord, a blogger, a freelancer, and wage-earner, I can attest to the veracity of what you say here, sir. (Jesus, did I just say that?) No, seriously, I work my ass off; I am always freaking working every minute all the time, constantly. I don’t recall every working this much this hard in my life, and I know so many other people are living the same way, just to get by. Passive income my ass! If I read one more stupid ‘Make-$5000-While-You-Sleep-With-Affiliate-Marketing’ (substitute ‘real estate’ if you want) I will puke, no kidding. P.T. Barnum was right.
Thanks for just telling the truth. Very refreshing.
Quick comments about real estate vs. other sources of “passive” income.
Real estate will work long term, but you have to work it hard in the first years to get to a point where you get ahead of the numbers (value goes up, rents go up) and get to a point where you can afford to have someone else manage it. And “Professional Property Management” is a huge oxymoron — no such thing exists. NO ONE will manage it better than the owner, but you just get to a point where it’s worth more to you personally to NOT manage it, even though you could make a little more money doing it yourself. Time vs. Money. I value my time more now than I used to when I managed them myself. But with multiple properties, over time, the passive income is there.
Key advantage of real estate: None of the other sources of passive income have the TAX SHELTERING advantages of real estate. Real estate is the only investment that can provide long term appreciation, income, AND tax advantages. A substantial portion of my real estate properties will provide true, passive net income, while showing a tax loss. It’s a delicate balance, but the goal is to have an overall portfolio where there is a tidy amount of monthly net income, while showing a net wash on my taxes. Uncle Sam thinks I’m poor, but only because I’m beating him at his own game, by his own IRS rules. I’ve got to tell you, I get huge satisfaction from that.
To each his own. But real estate is working very nicely for me. It took about 10 years of hard work, but the framework is in place for a comfortable future.
Party on. . . . .
Under the definition you could consider farming as passive income, because you only have to plant the seeds once and you can reap the benefits for years without any additional work. Everyone knows that farming is passive income, they just sleep all day and hang out in their barns.
J.D.’s right about the 12 hours a day for 2 years part. That’s about exactly where I’m at now. However, the hope is that some day, I get better, the pay improves, and it gets to a point where I spend less time…
As for the real estate part, you can outsource the drawing up of a contract. And if you have to oversee the management, you really didn’t do a good job picking a management company. This overseeing should be limited to, “That’s what I pay you for.” and then hanging up. Overall that’s less work than rebalancing a portfolio.
Hey Flexo,
You’ve got a new reader. This post is nearly a year old – it is good to see your quality articles still bringing them in.
It is hard. I am 26 and love learning about investing. I am experimenting with Options strategies, own an investment property, and run a blog about retiring with passive income generating assets. There is a long way to go.
Residential Investment Property – It’s fun. Why is this hard? Buy a property with a sizeable deposit, do it up, rent it out. Check it every 3 years and consider giving it a splash. The acquisition process is by no means passive, but after the hard yards are done it is a lot easier.
Stocks – I do not like the sound of shares. Huge capital outlay, little leverage and buy, hold and pray approach has given me the willies. Little money down, lower risk higher reward, massive leverage – I believe in options all the way! There are a lot of other share market strategies I do not yet understand but hey – I’m still at my 9 to 5 so give me time.
Blogging – My AdSense revenue is trickling into my bank account at a snails pace. There are a few affiliates dribbling funds here and there and slowly but surely my traffic is growing. I decided to write about my passions and hence not fall over in 6 months time when I found Ad revenue a joke. It is an arduous journey to the top of a blogging empire but I’m having fun.
Business – The entity behind the blog empire is something I continue to think about behind the scenes. There is definitely the potential to generate massive wealth with business principles. Like, provide your readers with a solution to their problem and charge for it. The blogging business model only seems to generate cash from affiliates and memberships. Fill me in here please!
It is all a bit of a mess but I am wading through, cutting the fat, tweaking the systems and looking to the future. Financial independence is a hard road but I am thoroughly enjoying the trek.
All the best – Johnny
Flexo is 100% right! If you disagree, try and go on an extended vacation and NOT: (a) answer your cell phone, or (b) check your e-mails, or (c) worry about [insert “passive income” source of choice] ;)