Ever since I first read 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, I began an adventure of attempting to make an extra bit of cash outside of my full time job. My intentions were to make this secondary income stream as passive as possible – do a bit of up front work and then watch as the cheques get mailed and my PayPal account fills up while I relax and sip margaritas. The goal was to eventually retire young(ish) and enjoy life while the cash keeps rolling in. Dan Miller calls this kind of passive cash, “SWISS” (or “Sales While I Sleep Soundly”) income in his book, No More Mondays.
It turns out to not be all that easy and to this day, a couple years after first reading 4HWW, I’m still nowhere near my goal. But the project is still going strong and some passive, SWISS cash is actually getting into my hands (albeit not nearly enough to live off of).
I’ve decided to incorporate some monthly summaries of this snail pace project into my blog. I present the first of hopefully many more articles that summarize my monthly “passive” earnings.
The “passive” earnings breakdown for July 2011:
July 2011 was actually a record “passive” earnings month, believe it or not. For some strange reason I pulled in more than usual AdSense revenue (though just $23) and also managed a couple of affiliate payments (truthfully my first affiliate payments, and they were also exceptionally small). The bulk of the earnings, however, were from my apps.
I’ve had an iOS app, WOD Timer, in the wild for a couple of years now and despite not touching it in just as long, it still manages to pull in between $100 to $200 per month. But this month also included earnings from two newer BlackBerry PlayBook apps that managed to snag me over $250 in July.
Although I call this income “passive”, over the last couple of previous months, I spent quite a bit of my free time working on the PlayBook apps, so it’s hardly passive. Fortunately both of these apps are in a good position now and, like WOD Timer for iOS, I don’t expect to be working on them much in the foreseeable future while they continue to work for me and “passively” deposit some dollars in my bank account. Though I do expect to finish yet another app in the next month and I’m feverishly trying to find time to do so.
I don’t have the numbers off hand, but I believe that last year at this time I was making less than half of July’s earnings. If my doubling rate is anual, I’m hoping for at least $1000 per month in “passive” cash in July 2012. Of course, that’s assuming we make it there and that cash is actually worth anything when we do.
