DIY Passive Income

I spent the first week of 2021 reacquainting myself with Dividend Reinvesting and I’ve concluded that it makes a ton of sense for someone like me. Retirement isn’t here yet but I can see it coming on the horizon. I’d need to think about stabilizing my investments against volatility and start thinking of long-term income.

When I first started investing I put a small amount of money in Dividend Reinvestment Plans (still long INTC, thank you very much) and focused on growth inside my retirement accounts. The growth strategy coupled with a passive investing approach has paid off handsomely. For the both of us! So much so that early retirement might be possible for my wife.

I still have 20 years before I have to start withdrawing my IRA and 401k so I can still focus on lots of growth and prepare for income investing. Of course, this assumes that I’ll be working till 70, and I sure as hell don’t want to do that! I’m shooting for 59 or 60.

If I want to achieve that, I have to start thinking of passive income vehicles at a low tax rate. Granted, I’m not a tax professional but if I were able to generate a passive income of $100,000 a year and figure out how to have a low tax rate, then I’d be golden.

Every process has a genesis and ends with a revelation.

So how would I go about doing that? On the surface, I’d have to start a business and generate this passive income through there first and then pay myself a salary. From there I can ‘write off’ expenses like my laptop, hosting fees, etc. The good part is that I already have an LLC and I would need to spend the time to reorganize my properties.

The second step is to figure out how to build the actual passive income. A portion of it will come from my investments but more immediate sources of income will have to come from affiliate links or products that I’ll have to sell. Affiliate links can be a great source of income ONLY if you have enough traffic. The same goes for selling a product, but both are completely doable.

Another source of income is writing, surprisingly I’m generating a few dollars a month from Medium. I have a standing love/hate relationship over there but if you get into a decent publication (like Data Driven Investor), you can get a lot of eyeballs on your posts and that, in theory, could turn into passive income.

I grew up (debatable), chased my dreams, changed careers, and started living my best life.

Why am I interested in Passive Income? The simple answer is I have more important things to do than work for the man! Granted, I like what I do career-wise but if I had the choice to go bird watching or hiking or work, then the choice is a simple one. Why, because we only have a limited time on this Earth and I want to make the most of it. If COVID-19 taught me anything in 2020 is that life is fragile and it's A MUST to have a Passive Income hustle going.

But…

Before I do anything I have an important step to take. I call this step zero and it’s to take a scary step. I have to rebrand this blog and focus on Passive Income strategies. That’s a BIG and scary step for me because I’d be moving away from what this blog has been for the past 14 years! Since this blog’s beginning, I’ve written about investing and using machine learning to make money. Then it gradually morphed into a RapidMiner tutorial blog with a YouTube channel. That opened doors for me and the rest is history!

For first-time readers, this might be a ‘Duh! You’re a Dumbass’ moment...

When I went to H2O.ai, it remained a tutorial site with more Data Science topics but I started to feel stifled. Starting in 2018 I began posting more investing articles again and found that I like doing that but something was different. Something was off and it took me a while to figure it out.

It hit me a few years ago but I never internalized it. There’s a lyric that’s rapped in one of the Luv Sic songs (Part 1) written by Shing and Nujabes that goes, “Every process has a genesis and ends with a revelation.”

This blog has always been my ‘process’ and it had a genesis back in 2007. Now I’m coming to a revelation, much like I had when I joined RapidMiner in 2014 and H2O.ai in 2018.

Neural Market Trends was a name I chose back in 2007 because I was applying neural net algorithms to stock and forex market trends to make money. It then took on a life of its own when I discovered YALE (baby RapidMiner).

Today that name takes on a different meaning for me. Neural represents taking the time to think about my life and Market Trends is about how the markets and the trends they have. It means something different because I’m something different.

I’m a different person. I changed.

I grew up (debatable), chased my dreams, changed careers, and started living my best life. I’ve learned a helluva lot in the Investing and Machine Learning / Startup space. I love my career as a Sales Engineer and I love making Passive Income. Yet I always struggled to reconcile the both until now. Why do I have to choose one or the other? Can’t I do both? Can’t I love my career and build up Passive Income? Yes! Yes, I can!

It’s a sharing and caring approach to blogging again.

For first-time readers, this might be a ‘Duh! You’re a Dumbass’ moment but I’ve always made it a point to keep my professional and investing lives separate. It was when this blog and my passion landed me my first Sales Engineering gig at RapidMiner did the blog realigned to be more of my professional. That was cool and everything but now I’m taking it back, after all, I have LinkedIn, and reinventing yourself is good from time to time.

The big question you’re going to ask me is, will anything change? The answer is YES! I plan to ‘gamify’ building Passive Income for myself AND brain dumping on you all the things I’ve learned along the way. It’s a sharing and caring approach to blogging again.

My tutorials will remain intact but I’m going to reorganize my blog by eliminating the blog and tutorials section. You can still find my RapidMiner, Data Science, Python, and SEO tutorials via my tutorials tag, but they’ll index faster and I’ll have a more streamlined site.

My goal is to write at least ONE big post a month that focuses on Passive Income building, how it’s going for me, and my thoughts on it. I hope to have you along for the ride!