This is just a quick progress report update on my passive income efforts.
Looking at my Vanguard account shows that I earned $59.75 in interest and dividends over the last month. I currently have about half of my money in the Vanguard 500 index fund.
While 60 bucks is not a ton of money, that income is purely passive, and represents at least one positive stream of income that I have built up. Certainly this will build in the future, and also see higher returns as the stock market rebounds (I hope). The idea is to make extra money from multiple streams of income.
My online ventures are showing great promise, as my flagship website recently went from a Google pagerank of 2 up to a pagerank of 4. (Pagerank is but one measure of the earning potential of a website) I am still tweaking my pay-per-click campaigns in an attempt to make them consistently profitable.
Action item – what you can do:
Earning interest might be boring at first, because it is just a small trickle of income compared to more “active” methods of generating income. But as a financial growth strategy, aiming for this type of income is extremely valuable:
1) Earning interest means you are investing your money
2) Earning interest means you are not spending frivolously
3) “A penny saved is a penny earned” is not quite accurate–investing a penny instead of spending it reaps a number of additional benefits other than simply keeping the penny: interest earned, less clutter in your life, and so on. Additionally, many of the things we spend our money on end up costing us even more in the future, or have some sort of recurring cost associated with them.
Therefore, aiming for passive income through investments and interest earned is a very sound strategy indeed, and can greatly simplify your life as well.