We’d all love to make more money, but we only have a limited amount of time and energy. However, there are a number of ways to supplement your paycheck by earning passive income. Passive income is income you earn from a source that requires little or no day-to-day involvement on your behalf. Here’s a look at five common ways to earn passive income.
5 Simple Ways To Earn Extra Cash
1. U.S. Treasuries
Here’s how treasury bonds work: You buy them at a discount to their face value, you hold them for as little as 28 days until they mature and then you sell them at face value upon maturity. When interest rates were higher, Treasuries were an extremely safe way to earn decent passive income. Today, the yield on one-year Treasury bonds is only about 0.5 percent.
2. Online Money Market Savings Accounts
The yield on typical savings accounts are extremely low these days, but certain money market accounts can be decent sources of passive income. A money market account is like a hybrid savings/checking account that allows only six transactions per month. According to Bankrate, the national average yield on money market accounts is only 0.11, but certain online banks have higher yielding accounts than others. For example, Dime, Synchrony Bank and Capital One Financial Corp. COF 0.71% all currently have accounts yielding at least 1.0 percent.
3. Peer-To-Peer Lending
If the bank won’t pay you enough interest on your money, why not act as your own bank? P2P lending sites like LendingClub Corp LC 1.11% and Prosper Marketplace allow customers to lend to individual borrowers and/or pools of borrowers based on different financial profiles. Lenders can use data like the credit scores of borrowers to determine the appropriate amount of risk and potential return on their loans. Lending Club’s current interest rates range from 5.3 percent all the way up to 30.9 percent depending on how much risk you are willing to carry.
4. Cash-Back Credit Cards
The idea of earning income by spending money may not sound like a good idea. In reality, we all eat, drive, wear clothes and pay bills no matter how frugal we are. If you aren’t using a cash-back credit card, you are missing out on a decent passive income source. There are number of cardsout there, but typical cash-back cards pay 1.0 percent for all purchases and up to 5.0 percent for purchases in specific categories like groceries or gas.
5. AdSense
If you can put together a popular YouTube channel or blog that will consistently engage an audience, you could be earning passive advertising income every day. By using Alphabet Inc GOOG 0.64% GOOGL 0.64%’s Google Adsense, you get paid…
Click here to continue reading
Want to learn more about how to profit off the stock market? Or maybe you just want to be able to look sophisticated in front of your coworkers when they ask you what you are reading on your Kindle, and you’d prefer to tell them “Oh, I’m just reading a book about stock market analysis,” rather than the usual “Oh, I’m just looking at pics of my ex-girlfriend on Facebook.” For these reasons and more, check out my book, Beating Wall Street with Common Sense. I don’t have a degree in finance; I have a degree in neuroscience. You don’t have to predict what stocks will do if you can predict what traders will do and be one step ahead of them. I made a 400% return in the stock market over five years using only basic principles of psychology and common sense. Beating Wall Street with Common Sense is now available on Amazon, and tradingcommonsense.com is always available on your local internet!
