One of the Facebook groups I follow is Wealth Building 2.0.
It kinda figures. Marc King is president of Keller Williams Realty Inc, and guess who’s a Keller Williams real estate agent? Yep, little ol’ moi, but the Facebook group is not just for Realtors. Although private, anyone can join.
Every Friday they go video live and discuss wealth building strategies. One of the topics they cover a lot is passive income.
And really, I still don’t know what passive income is.
Marc King, by the way, is this very tragically beautiful man. I mean, look at that quaff. He’s the exact epitome of a money bro. Except, when you listen to him, you quickly realize he’s not that dude. In fact, as a teenager he lived in a car.
Passive income has evolved into one of these cool buzz words and suggests you don’t have to do anything to earn the money. But there is nothing passive about passive income. You will always pay an upfront cost of time, energy, work, and/or initial dollar investment. Passive income is never passive to begin with, which is why I don’t really understand the term
In my quest to earn $12,738.75 during the month of September, I’m not counting my teaching income or Mary’s full-time w-2 position; I’m starting from an absolute zero. And to be honest, I’m super nervous about this new-to-us car we’ve just purchased. The monthly payment plus the insurance premiums is a bit over $300. I need to knock that bill out.
So I’m scrolling through the Wealth Building 2.0 group and I see a couple posts about how to generate passive income. This is the list of ten passive income generators found on the group:
- Start a blog or YouTube channel.
- Write an e-book or digital guide.
- Create an online course.
- Sell stock photos or music.
- Design custom products.
- Buy real estate.
- Rent out your house.
- Store people’s stuff.
- Rent out useful items.
- Rent out your vehicles.
There’s stuff here I’m already doing, or have done, like for example this blog, e-books, and online courses. But I’ve never made money off any of this. None of it is passive either.
I don’t care what the ChatGPT gurus say, you can’t have an AI write your book. You must butt in chair and do the work. Then you have to give the time, energy, and sometimes the money to promote. That’s why I don’t understand the term passive. A better descriptor would be Harvested Income.
Harvested Income implies a whole process. Where most of the time you wait for your crops to grow, you still have intervals of work: planting seed, rotating crops, prepping the field with cover crops, finding someone to purchase your product.
I can’t rent my vehicle—we have one car shared among three people, and I don’t own any items that are useful enough to rent. Nor am I financially ready to purchase real estate. The storing people’s stuff thing though, that got me thinking. My current lease, subletting to people, that’s a problem. No terms or conditions regarding renting space for storage though.
So, a couple days ago, a fellow Keller Williams agent needed coverage for a private home tour in Wolfboro. She asked if she could Venmo seventy-five bucks for the favor. Except, I am old and don’t have Venmo. My daughter has Venmo. I asked my fellow agent if she could Venmo my daughter. Then, asked my daughter if she’d clean the attic for seventy-five bucks.
Guess who has a clean attic?
I used Neighbor.com to list the space.
Look, I’m making a hundred bucks a month on this, and only if the space rents. But that lowers my car and insurance payments to $300. Plus, because I only have the one car, I have half a driveway I can rent. That’s another fifty bucks.
If you click the link and sign-up, by the way, you’ll earn a $50 Amazon gift card. I’ll also earn $50 bucks every time someone uses that link. Listen, I don’t do affiliate marketing on this website because if I did that kind of sales, the site would lose focus, becoming nothing more than a product review repository.
I don’t want to just tell you what I’m doing to earn the $12,738.75 in September; I want to give you the resources I’m using doing it!
I want you to come alongside me with your own one–month challenge! Leave a comment below and tell me how much money you want to make in September! And give me some ideas on how you’re going to begin!
And besides Neighbor.com of course, you can also check out storeatmyhouse.com, stache.com, and prked.com. Or, you could put an ad on Craigslist. Or advertise on social media and do this on your own. However, these third-party AirBnBs of storage often include insurance, limiting your personal liability.
Anyway, what else can I rent? I’m literally out of physical space. I do, however, have unlimited virtual space. My hosting plan allows me to have as may websites as I want, and sure this is not dedicated hosting. I don’t have to be a big dog here.
I really want to hone in on what Glenn Stearns said in one of the Undercover Billionaire episodes. “I got to find my buyer.”
And I think I know who my buyer is. I’ve been in the real estate biz for almost two years and the thing I keep hearing over and over from agents is that my website is amazing. Well okay. I just think it’s average, but it’s not my perception that matters here, and most individual real estate agent sites are cookie cutter templates provided by their big brother brokers, and they all kinda look the same. They all have that real estate feel. They all have the same IDX feed of homes for sale, and as an industry we must be honest with ourselves and realize that unless you are a celebrity Realtor no one’s visiting your site to find homes. Consumers are don’t pass go don’t collect two hundred dollars straight to Zillow.
I believe I can offer a useful service to a niche clientele in need, and the cooler bit is I already have a built-in audience, I already talk to these people on a daily basis. Further, I believe I can off-load the heavy-lifting, the design and coding, and collect the rent—the passive harvested income.
