To establish a passive income, you must work actively

There are two types of income: Active income & Passive income. One of them sucks and the other rocks.

Active income is when you put in work for a salary or wage, and the amount of money you earn is directly correlated with the amount of time you work. It’s an easy way to make instant money, but almost nobody gets extremely rich through active income.

Passive income is achieved by setting up systems that automatically generate revenue, without having to put in active work. With my eBay business, I had implemented a passive income, and got to the point that I was making $5/hour every single hour that I was awake, without me having to actually do any work at all. This was because of all the sleepless nights I spent putting the system in place.

I bet you can guess which one rocks – although they each have their advantages and disadvantages. The upside to an Active income is that all you need to do is find a job and you can easily start making $50/day within a week. However, the downside to this Active income is that you have to put in hours of work to make this money, and since there are only so many hours in a day, there is only so much money you can make. Nobody with a billion dollars received that money through an Active income.

A Passive income also has its ups and downs. Obviously, it is nice because you don’t have to actually do any “work”; all you have to do is put an income-generating system in place and get drunk and watch your money flow in. However, a major disadvantage to this Passive income is that you need to work really hard to establish these money-making systems. I know this from hundreds of hours of experience. You will do a LOT of work and only then be making a few dollars a day. After months and months of work and experience, I was able to get to the point of reaching over $70/day income while only putting in 30 minutes of maintenance work each day.

Another more personal reason for why having a Passive income is better is that it facilitates a much freer lifestyle. Without needing to put in an 8-5 job every day, I can literally go anywhere and do anything I want, wake up and go to bed at any hour, and not have my life restrained to the hours of my “work”. This was actually a large reason for why I decided to pursue the path of Internet Entrepreneurship.

I view time and money as the exact same thing. How can you use one to maximize the other? I’ve started paying people to do work for me; creating custom scripts that save me tons of hours of work.

HOWEVER, right now I am doing what the title of this post implies. I’m going back to some basics of eBay item creation, and this involves going item-by-item through absolutely massive data tables. I’ve taken as many shortcuts as I can, and right now I’m not in a financial place to be investing hundreds of dollars just to save some more time. So, I’m back at the grindstone, building up my Passive Empire :)