Friends. Welcome back to the channel. In this video, we're gonna talk about 9 different ways that you can make passive income. And for each of those, I'm gonna talk about how hard it is to get started, how hard it is to make a $100 a month from it, and how hard it is to maintain once you've created the thing in the first place. For me and my business, these 9 different sources generate around $27, 000 per week these days with varying degrees of passiveness. And obviously, this has taken me like 8 years to build up. So don't expect to be hitting those sorts of numbers when you first get started. But this is the video that I wish I would have had when I started my financial independence journey many, many years ago.

Let's go for it. Alright, so when I say passive income, I always air quote it because there is really no such thing as passive income. There is no way to make money without doing anything at all. But when I say passive income, what I mean is that it's it's money that is not directly tied to our time. So let's say you were to write a book. If you write a book, you publish a book, that book is now on bookshelves. You've done the work kind of once to write and publish the book. But now, anytime the book sells, you make money from royalties.

That is passive income. You could literally be making money while you sleep because you've created this thing which is out in the world which is generating income for you. The other thing with passive income is that it always takes a very long time to get going. So if you see any ads before this video talking about how you can get rich quick by whatever scheme, or if you see people in the comments pretending to be me saying, oh my god, here's how you can get rich quick with crypto, WhatsApp this number. That is all a scam. It's not gonna work. There is no way to get rich quick. It is not a thing.

So if you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, those things just don't exist. So you might as well not even try. And the way I think of this is that ultimately money is just a medium for exchanging value. The only way to make money is to provide value. And the only way to make passive income, passive money, is to provide value in a way that is not directly tied to your time. So please, please, please do not try and join a get rich quick scheme. They don't exist. I've had lots of messages over the years from people who have tried signing up to a get rich quick crypto scheme or a gambling scheme or a, hey, here is how you kind of play poker online.

None of these things ever work, people always end up losing money. The only way to make money is by providing value. And so let's talk about the 9 different ways that you could provide value if you wanted to. Just before we dive in, I wanna tell you that I've just launched my brand new Skillshare class about productivity for creators, how to start a successful side hustle. That's linked in the video description. Skillshare is sponsoring this video. I'll tell you more about Skillshare later on. But I wanna plug my own class because I think it's genuinely really good, and people really like it, and it'll help you get tips on how you can start side hustles in your spare time.

Anyway, let's get into the video. Alright. So let's kick things off with investing in stocks and shares. And in this context, the way that we provide value is by offering up our money. Providing money and investing in a service is in a way giving a form of value. And so when we give our money to a company in the form of buying their stocks, it makes sense that we would get some kind of return for that investment. And we're starting with this because investing in stocks is the easiest way to make any kind of passive income. If you have any sort of savings and they're sitting in a savings account earning 0.01% interest, they're not really doing very much for you.

Whereas if you had those days savings and put them in stocks, you could potentially be earning passive income from the money that's otherwise just sitting there. Now I've got a whole video called the ultimate guide to investing in stocks and shares for beginners, which is gonna be linked over there somewhere. So that is a solid half an hour long introduction to stocks and exactly how they work. But the thing that I recommend for most beginners as a non financial adviser, and this is not financial advice purely for entertainment purposes only, or so people say, Or at least the thing that I do is that basically all my money that's in stocks and shares is invested in index funds. Now an index fund is something like the S and P 500. And when you invest, let's say, $1, 000 in the S and P 500, that basically means that your $1, 000 is distributed amongst the top 500 biggest companies in the US. So, you know, weighted by how big they are. So like, you know, 2% of it would be in Apple, 2% in Facebook, 2% in Google, 2% in Microsoft.

And then you probably won't have heard of the 500th company on the list, but basically all the big US companies you've heard of, you end up investing in all of them a little bit at a time. So if you wanna get started with that, all you need to do is sign up to a stockbroker. If you're in the US, you can use Webull, I think. I've got a link in the description. If you're in the UK, you can use Freetrade or Vanguard. Basically, whatever country you're in, just Google the phrase best stockbroker platform, your country name, and you'll find something that works for you. And then it's very easy to be able to invest in an index fund. So within our famous side hustle assessment matrix, we're gonna give the difficulty of starting a 1 star rating, 1 out of 5.

It's very, very easy to get started with stocks. How hard is it to make $100 a month by investing in stocks and shares? Well, this kinda depends, because it depends on the performance of the stock market overall. So in the last 12 months, from 2020 to 2021, the S and P 500 has actually increased by about 50%. That is that is a lot. It's like gone up by a solid 50% despite COVID and everything going on. So if in April 2020, you had invested $2, 400 in the S and P 500, the fact that it's gone up by 50% means you would have made a $100 a month. But obviously, this is not the way to look at it because, you know, things can go up and down, and the stock market has different level of performance depending on what time period you're looking at. But if we average out the last 30 to 50 years, the S and P 500 has had a roughly 10 point something percent return, which means every year, on average, over the long term, it goes up by around 10%.