Money For Nothing. That’s the dream, right? After all, as the legendary Warren Buffet said,
“If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”

That cuts pretty deeply, and we here at Ideal want to make sure that you don’t have to work until you die. One of the best ways, in our humble opinion, to make money while you sleep is through this thing called passive income. 

What Is Passive Income? 

As the name implies, passive income is money you make without doing anything. That means you can build multiple income streams without having to work multiple jobs, which makes it much easier to diversify and build wealth. 

The “Not Passive” Disclaimer

Well, almost completely passive. There are things you must do to set up your passive income streams. We’ll go over those things in a second. 

It’s simply that once you are set up, you are good to go. That’s unlike these side hustles that you can do to make a little cash quickly but will require constant attention. 

What You Need to Start

Like we said above, passive income is not completely passive. You will need to invest something to start. What to invest in is going to depend on what you have.

Generally, there are three different initial investments you will have to make. You’ll either need to build some knowledge, invest a bunch of time, or have a bunch of money. 

Knowledge

 Knowledge-based investments have the lowest barrier to investing.  You may not realize it, but you have some great information to share already. If you work a job, you have developed skills related to the job. If you have friends that go hiking, well, that means you probably know what hikers like. Even if all you do is play video games all day, that’s a very marketable niche.

What that means is you can take something you know about, and turn it into something that makes some money. Usually, this comes in the form of knowing your market and knowing what the people in that market buy. Or just knowing what the funniest meme is right now. Believe it or not, memes are a pretty lucrative business.

Time

The second thing you’ll need is time. All investments take some time, but some take way more than others. It takes minutes to buy a stock, for instance. That’s not a lot of time, and most people can afford to spend a few minutes. 

On the other side, setting up an entire website and maintaining it takes a lot of time. 

Generally, you can trade one of the other categories for time. For instance, if you don’t have the knowledge, you can do a ton of research. It takes a lot of time, but you can overcome any knowledge gap.

Money

Cash. Moolah. Stacks. Whatever you call it, it’s easier to make money if you have money. One of the best ways to make passive income is to just receive interest on the money you already have. You just need a lot of it. 

The passive income ideas we are about to go over cover the whole spectrum. As an important note, there is no “best.” There is just the best for YOU at your stage in life. Don’t feel like you are missing out on everything just because you don’t have ten grand to invest right now. 

T-Shirts on Demand

Everybody loves merch. We even have our own here at Ideal, which you can find here, and in our modern era, it’s easier than ever to make your own merch. All you need is a great idea for a t-shirt, and you can start making money. 

Websites like Teespring and RedBubble even have built-in features that allow other people to find your designs and buy them. The best part is? It’s free to start since they take a percentage of each sale rather than charging you to start a line. 

What You Need to Start

The only thing you really need to start is a handful of good ideas. I guess you do need access to a computer connected to the internet, and an email address, but since you’re reading this on the internet, it’s safe to assume you have that covered. 

How Passive Is It?

Once you have a line of merchandise set up, it’s as passive as you want it to be. You will make more money if you put time into advertising your wares on social media, but it’s by no means an absolute necessity. 

To make this a true, long-term passive income stream, though, you will need to update your designs from time to time. That may require you to stay current with modern jokes, or have enough knowledge in a niche to know what your audience wants to buy, which does take some work. 

Income Potential

The downside to the incredibly low barrier to entry is that everyone has a t-shirt business. That translates to a fairly low monthly income. Since there is a LOT of competition, you need to give someone a reason to buy your t-shirt over one of the thousands of others, and that’s hard. 

That being said, with some work, you should be able to add a few hundred dollars to your bank account per month. If you become a marketing genius or attach the designs to a brand you’re developing, the income potential raises exponentially. 

Pros

• No cost to start
• Low maintenance
• Some sites advertise for you
• Everyone needs clothing

Cons

• Income potential isn’t very high unless you get big
• Lots of competition
• You need to know your audience

YouTube

YouTube is one of the largest entertainment platforms on the planet, and it doesn’t seem to be getting smaller. That’s great for you since it means there’s money to be made. 

Here’s how it works. You create videos, people watch the videos, and you get paid per view. What’s great is that if you want to create YouTube videos, there are thousands of YouTube videos that can help you out. It’s truly a never-ending cycle. 

What You Need To Start

A lot of people won’t begin making videos, even if they really want to, because they don’t have a nice camera or microphone. The reality is that you can absolutely grow a fantastic channel with nothing but a cell phone. 

You may also want a computer to edit on. There are free video editors like Davinci Resolve that are fantastic, and it’s much, much easier to edit on a computer vs. editing on a tiny cell phone screen. 

How Passive Is It?

Out of the three ideas outlined on this page, YouTube is the least passive. Yes, you can upload a ton of videos and hope that people are still watching the same videos years later, but your best bet is to produce regular content. The more content you produce, the more views you’ll receive, and the more money you’ll get. 

That doesn’t mean it has to be a full-time job or even a part-time job. You could make one simple video every so often, and as long as you learn the game, you’d have a few hundred extra a month to invest. 

Income Potential

The way YouTube works is that you have to have a certain number of hours watched in order to get monetized. How long that takes depends on the content you produce, but for most people, it’s about a year. 

Once you hit that milestone, the sky’s the limit. A small YouTube channel with the occasional brand deal could make 300 a month. A medium channel is probably pulling in a grand a month, and some large channels are hitting 10k a month. 

Pros

• Low cost of entry
• Income potential is nearly unlimited
• There are a lot of places to find help getting started
• The audience is only growing

Cons

• Lots of competition
• Can be difficult to reach monetization
• Can require a lot of work

Dividend Investing

At the end of the day, both YouTube and shirt printing requires at least some work to set up and keep running. Dividends, however, require nothing but money. 

Some companies are so big that their stock won’t really grow. Companies like Disney and Ford, for instance, are so gigantic that their stocks are not ever going to explode in value. Instead, in order to make sure people buy the stock, they pay dividends. 

In short, they pay you to buy their stock using the profits they make. Ford pays ten cents per share, and some ETFs pay as much as 2 dollars a share. That can add up very quickly. 

What You Need To Start

To start dividend investing, you need money. You also need a way to trade and manage your portfolio. We recommend Webull, but there are plenty of others that vary in fees and ease of use. 

You should also do a ton of research into what companies pay the best dividends, and then do a ton of research into picking safe investments. Remember, do not risk any money you can’t afford to lose. 

How Passive Is It?

Once you buy the stock, they pay you a dividend at a fixed interval. Most companies pay quarterly, some pay yearly, and some pay monthly. You don’t have to do anything; you just get money deposited into your portfolio when they shell out the dividends. 

Income Potential

It all comes down to math. 

First, you start with your initial investment. Let’s say it’s $1000. QYLD, an ETF, pays roughly a 10% dividend per year at the time of writing this, so that’s $100 a year for doing nothing. 

If you reinvest that $100, now you have $1100, which would be $110.00 in dividends. Then it’s $1210.00 for 121.00, so on and so forth. 

In 10 years you’d have $2593 dollars. That’s $1593 for doing nothing.

After 20 years, you’d have $67127.50. That’s going from a grand to nearly 7 grand, and the only work you ever did was to click “buy” on some stocks.  

Pros

• Truly passive
• If you play it safe, the money is nearly guaranteed
• It sets you up for the rest of your life

Cons

• You need money to start
• It can take a long time to really pay out
• There is always the risk of picking bad investments

Other Ideas

The three ideas above are only some ways to make passive income. Other popular ways include: 

• Writing books
• Selling a course
• Drop-shipping
• Affiliate marketing
• Selling ad space
• Owning rental properties
• Owning or Subletting an Air BnB
• Credit card hacking

And more. 

Make Money in Your Sleep

Don’t wait. The sooner you start making money in your sleep, the more money you’ll have, and that my friends, is an IDEAL way to live.