Passive income is the key to financial freedom. We may or may not like our job but most of us have to get up every morning and trod off to work to earn some pay.
Most workers dream of the day they can retire (and trust me I'm no different). Retiring is great, but when the time comes, many find they will not have enough income in retirement so they end up spending their savings to make ends meet. It is often said the worst thing that can happen to you is to live longer than your savings. Imagine being 85 years old and having to return to the work force because your savings ran out.
To avoid out living your savings you need to ensure that the income you have coming in after retirement meets your needs with a significant margin of safety. Depending on where you live you may have government provided passive income in retirement (e.g., Social Security in the US) but not everyone is so lucky. Even if you do have a government provided retirement income, that likely won't be enough unless you live a very modest lifestyle, like a Ramen Noodles Everday kind of lifestyle. Ramen Noodles - Yummy!
Growing your passive income is the key to getting out of the rat race and ensure you can live the life style you are accustomed too in your old age.
What is Passive Income?
Passive income is money you earn without having to do anything at all (or very little anyways). Passive income is derived from an asset you own that pays you income over time. Classical examples of assets that pay passive income include dividend bearing stocks, bank savings, rental property, and royalties.
Growth of an asset (like the rise in value of your Bitcoin holdings) generally isn't considered passive income because while your wealth has grown, unless you sell some bitcoin you are not generating income and growth can not be relied on to provide continuing income.
Cryptocurrency provides new and exciting passive income oppotunities that everyone can benefit from. The rest of this post will focus on the top 5 ways (in my opinion) to earn passive income on HIVE and LeoFinance.
1. Delegating to a Curating Pool
When you delegate your Hive Power (HP) to a curation pool such as 
2. Auto-voting
Speaking of auto-voting, hive.vote is a great way to automate your voting to maximize your return from curation. You can join a "curation trail" where when the trail leader upvotes a post, those following the trail provide automated upvotes. I had been on the 
3. Mining Tokens
There are a number of mining tokens on Hive. The owners of these tokens earn rewards periodically in the parent token. For example owners of LEOM are rewarded in LEO.
Here is a list of the mining tokens currently available on HIVE. You can recreate this list in Hive-Engine or LeoDex by searching tokens for "miner" and sorting on market cap.
4. dApp Development
So you can't write a Great American Novel, but what about the next killer dapp? Hive provides amazing opportunities for developers. Build it once and let it earn income for you while you head off to the Islands.
5. dCity
Did someone say killer dapp? dCity is an interesting way to earn real income from virtual real estate. dCity is a virtual city building game which pays SIM token daily based on the income from your virtual city. You can also earn WEED and BEER tokens from your Weed Farms and Breweries. It isn't completely passive as you do need to tend to your city.
I am just getting started but am going to funnel much of my DEC earnings here to move my gaming earnings to a more passive mode.
Here is my city. It is so little but you have to start somewhere.
Partial Credit
I have another way to earn quazi-passive earnings and that is by playing Splinterlands. I say quazi because there is nothing passive about playing Splinterlands. If you don't play, you don't earn. That said, if you are going to be playing anyways you can purchase and play alpha and gold cards and earn extra DEC rewards. Each alpha or gold card you play per round will give you an extra 10 in DEC rewards when you win. Got an alpha gold card? That is worth an 20% return.
Do you know any other good ways to earn passive earnings on Hive? Drop them in the comments, I'd love to hear them.
Till next time!
Image sources: Unsplash and screen captures.