Passive Income. IT's a dream of many people, including myself. I mean, who wouldn't want to kick back and rake in a paycheck while they live their lives how they want. However, building a Passive Income has two main hurdles, time and money.
Like me, these two hurdles can be seemingly impossible to overcome causing many people to despair and give up on the idea of achieving their goal. Why are these two hurdles seemingly so difficult to overcome some of you may ask? Let's start with the first hurdle, time.
In order to build a Passive Income properly you need to invest a lot of time. Time to research your investments, time to keep an eye on the markets, time to let your investments grow, and time to keep current on events and knowledge of the markets you are in. For your average joe this can seem overwhelming for a beginner, or they don't invest the proper time and end up losing money. Either one of these can cause people to give up on the idea of a passive income, especially people who don't have a lot of capital to get the ball rolling. With that said let's move on to the second hurdle, money.
As the saying goes, it takes money to make money. With a passive income that is especially true. With apps like Robinhood making the stock market increasingly accessible to regular people there are more and more people joining in the stock market. Being able to start investing with a very small amount of money is very attractive to some people, however I have witnessed a lot of people with little capital to start getting burnt out. Why? With the average APR being 10% for the stock market if you start with $100 dollars that's only $10 dollars of profit for a years worth of work, and that's if you are able to match the average on your own. I don't know about you but seeing only $10 dollars of profit after putting in a years worth of work can be highly discouraging. For people with a lot of start up capital this may not be much of a hurdle at all.
For me I fall into the category of both of these being a large hurdle. As a father of a two year old, who recently became a single father, I find myself severely lacking in the time department. I don't know what you all do for a living, but the Army doesn't pay enough to have a large amount of start up capital (at least not at my pay grade.) My journey towards a passive income started a couple years ago. I started investing in stocks on Robinhood ensuring I only invested in solid companies with decent dividend returns. This freed up my time as I didn't have to try to sell and buy stocks to turn a profit. Instead, I took advantage of their automatic dividend reinvestment program. This was my sole way of working towards my goal. Recently I discovered NFTs and stumbled upon Hive. Since then I have devoted my free time to researching more into Crypto, blockchains, NFTs, and Hive itself.
For those of you facing these hurdles like me I would encourage you to not be discouraged. Think of it this way. Your passive income is like a snowball on a very long hill. At first it's very small and you have to put a lot of effort into rolling it so it picks up more snow. After a while, it gets larger and larger and requires less and less effort until you are merely helping it roll down the hill. A short while later your snowball will have gotten so large it rolls down the hill itself, increasing its size on its own, and all you have to do is keep an eye on it to keep it on course and keep it from crashing, giving it the occasional nudge if it loses momentum and stalls.