Everyone including me hopes to earn money without working. Imagine you really get to choose what you want to do with your time instead of being stuck in a job or boss you hated.
Here are 9 ways to earn money without working:
- Rental Properties
- Dividend stocks
- Digital Properties
- Acquire brick & mortar business
- Other people’s money(OPM)
- Other people’s time(OPT)
- Start a business
- Spend less than what you earn
- Compounding interest with time
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Rental Properties
investing in properties is one of the most common ways to earn money without working. Whether is it renting out the extra room in your house or investing in a 2nd residential or commercial property, do make sure you educate yourself sufficiently before making the move.
A good rental yield for Singapore residential property will range between 3.5% – 3.9% per annum but is not easy to find. Take your time to build your network with property agents and also lots of due diligence will allow you to avoid costly mistakes
Dividend Stocks
This is one of the easiest ways to earn money without working. You basically look to invest in stable blue-chip stocks that generate decent dividends for you to cover part or all of your expenses. It is easy to find 5% – 6% yield from reputable real estate investment trusts(REITs) in Singapore.
There are also blue-chip stocks that have increased their dividends for more than 25years. We coined them as dividend aristocrats and most of them can be found in the S&P 500 and you can check out the list here.
You can sign up here and if you refer a friend they will also give you a free Twitter share.
Digital Properties
When referring to digital properties, I am mainly referring to online businesses. However, as we are looking to earn money without working, content sites will be the easiest to manage. Depending on your budget, a starter site can cost a few hundred dollars all the way to millions of dollars.
They are normally being sold based on a multiple of their earnings. So for example, if you are looking to earn an extra $1k USD/month passively, you will need approximately USD$37K – USD$45k of capital. You are technically breakeven after 3 to 4 years. You can check out my case study for a small site I sold here.
Some reputable sites include flippa, motioninvest, investors club, or empire flippers if you are keen to explore this avenue. However, if you are very new to this, it is best to get your feet wet first by starting a site from scratch. I highly recommend income school course started by Jim and rick which is very suitable for beginners and which has an easy-to-follow step-by-step guide.
Acquire Brick & Mortar Business
If you prefer to acquire profitable brick & mortar business, you can start by working your own network. You can try to reach out to friends in the marketing/consulting field who may know of something available.
Other valuable resources are accountants, bookkeepers, or lawyers. They may know of clients who are keen on selling their business. If you know of an existing business that is interesting and you are the customer, no harm in having a chat with the owner to see if they are open to selling their business.
As you are looking to earn money without work, it is best to acquire a business that already have someone managing the day to day operations so you are not buying yourself into another job.
Other people’s money(OPM)
This is actually a way to arbitrage on the difference of what you borrow and invest in. For example, if you take out a loan from your insurance policy at 6% per annum and you manage to find an investment opportunity like website investing. It generates 25% per annum returns and allows you to earn the difference as income.
However, only consider this option if you are a really savvy investor and have a huge appetite for risk.
Other people’s time(OPT)
Everyone only has 24 hours a day. If you want to earn money without working, you have to learn to start buying other people’s time. Let’s say you are starting a content website and can only write 1 article a day, if you hire 10 writers, technically you can churn out 11 articles a day.
As you free out more time, you can have the space to look at other opportunities that can give you above-average ROI. Set up the system and hire someone to take over once the profits can cover the overheads. Rinse and repeat.
Start A Business
Yes, definitely a business is something you cannot grow and scale without work. However, in the long run, it is still better than relying on a day job and building other people’s business. Once you reach a certain size and scale, it is always possible to outsource and earn money with little or no work.
Spend less than what you earn
In order to reach the stage to earn money without work, you definitely have to spend less than what you earn. Every time you spend on consumption, you will have less money to build assets that can be your indefinite ATM till you drop dead.
This is a very simple theory but most people do not have the discipline for delayed gratification. I will rather spend money to build a secure future than spend money on things to try to impress others.
Compounding Interest With Time
Not everyone is cut out for business and you may prefer to stay in your day job. Nothing wrong with that. If that is the case for you, the best time to invest is NOW and let your investment compound and snowball over time. The safest way will be investing in index funds with low management fees.
I personally use Syfe for recurring monthly investments into global index funds. They will auto-adjust my portfolio using AI and also reinvest the dividends to maximize my returns. You will receive a free 6 months fee waiver on the first $30k investment if you use my referral code SRPSGC598