The TRUTH Behind Passive Income

Hey guys, welcome back to the channel! In this video, we're going to be talking about the truth behind passive income. Because when I make a video about passive income, I love talking about passive income—it's one of my absolute most favorite topics to talk about. I could talk about passive income all day.

However, when I make a video and I'm always upbeat because I'm so, you know, so pumped up about passive income, there's always people that comment on those videos saying, "Oh, what are you talking about? In this video, passive income is such a buzzword. It doesn't exist, it's unachievable, it's unrealistic. You know, the average person can't hope or dream to end up living off of passive income. You know, what's going—what are you talking about?" So, I thought that in this video, I'm going to clear all that up. Let's talk about the real truth behind passive income.

So, to start off, is passive income easy? No, it's not easy. It's fantastic, but it's not easy. In fact, people that achieve high levels of passive income work incredibly hard. They put in more hours than people going out and working normal nine to five jobs. Whoa, whoa, hang on, hang on, hang on. Brandon, you're saying they work more? If you're creating passive income, you're working more than someone that's working a job? That doesn't make sense!

The idea of passive income is that I kick my feet up and I earn a heap of money. Well, that's not necessarily the case. And this is where I get really frustrated because this is why passive income is one of the most misunderstood terms in the whole finance space. Because passive income doesn't mean no work and you get paid—that's totally not passive income. Passive income is a model of income. There's active income and there's passive income. Active income means you are trading your hours for money. If you don't trade your hours for money, you don't get money.

Passive income is the model of income where you work sometimes incredibly hard at the start, perhaps for absolutely no pay whatsoever, but then once you've completed that body of work, then you start getting paid after you've finished it, and it has the potential to continue to pay you money out into the future. That's passive income. It doesn't mean you're kicking up your feet, you're doing no work, and you're earning millions of dollars—which is what a lot of people on the internet try and make it seem like, because of course that's what sells.

But at the end of the day, passive income does require a lot of work. If you take two examples, right? First example: writing a book. Okay, writing a book doesn't happen overnight. That takes an incredibly long time; it takes an incredibly large amount of work. A lot of times, if you just wrote a book, you wouldn't be getting paid anything while you wrote it. The only chance you have at creating income is once you've finished the book and you're selling it. But it has the potential to generate you money for a long time into the future—that's passive income.

Or maybe dividend investing. Oh sure, I just buy some stocks, kick up my feet, and I just get paid for it. No, absolutely not! You have to put in the time. You have to put in the hours to research, to study the companies, to study the ETFs. You have to put in a hell of a lot of research first up to set yourself up to make an investment that is then going to give you consistent passive income for a long period of time.

And even once you've done the work in that case, while it's still passive in nature—you don't have to go and give your investment; you don't have to go work for the company you invested in just to receive the dividend. So it is still passive in nature. Even after you've made the investment, you still have to chip away; you still have to put in the work in order to achieve that passive income.

So, to clear the air, passive income a lot of times is not easy. Okay, remember it is a model of income. However, there’s no doubt it is a very powerful model of income. And then I want to move on to the next kind of argument that I get against passive income is that it's unrealistic. "Brandon, you know these ways that you're making money, it's just so unrealistic for the average Joe." Do I think that passive income is unrealistic for the average person? No, absolutely not!

Even if you have no passive income sources right now, I do not believe it is unachievable or unrealistic that eventually you will create passive income streams that can rival your active income or even surpass it. For example, you take the clock back four years. I wasn't making any passive income four years ago. I was working nine to five as a physiotherapist. Then when I got home, I would go and do even more active income. I would go out to the gym and I would teach a class or two.

And at that stage, I didn't have any dividend income on my investments. YouTube wasn't even a thing for me four years ago. So that's where I started. There's nothing special about me; I'm just an average kind of 25-year-old dude. Over the last three, four years, I've slowly started to build up passive income side projects.

So I remember the first four I had into passive income was knitting grids—one dollar knitting grids. Now of course that failed; there was no way I was creating good income off of that selling knitting grids for a dollar. But then I tried selling t-shirts. I would design t-shirts and sell them. That, yeah, it seemed like it was awesome at the time, but really, it didn't really work out, didn't make me a heap of money.

So the first two I tried didn't really go anywhere. But then I tried YouTube, and YouTube did start to create money over time. I started my own business, which is structured passively. I've made a couple of online courses. Once I've made the courses, then they're finished and they can be repeatedly sold. And then that started working as well, and it's worked to a point where I'm very fortunate in that I now generate 99% of my income passively because I've decided to focus on these other parts—the YouTube channel, my business, etc.—and I have easily, so I'm very fortunate that my income has easily surpassed what I was doing actively beforehand.

So just from my own experience, that's why I say I do not think it's unrealistic for anyone, anyone out there to start generating passive income, scaling it up. Yes, it takes time, but scaling it up eventually to a point where you could definitely live off of your passive income. You just got to put in the work. Like I don't—you know, I'm not taking an early retirement. I'm not kicking my feet up. I'm not, you know, playing video games all day every day.

Of course, I've still got to work to keep earning that passive income. Even though with YouTube, once I've made a video, uploaded it, released it, then that's all I have to do. I still have to keep my channel going; I still have to make more and more YouTube videos, make more projects. Same with Profitful—like yes, once I've made the courses, then I don't have to make them again, but there's still support requests and questions that need to be answered and yada yada. So there's still—it takes that maintenance; it still takes that work. So it's not easy, but it's still realistic.

So overall, if you're one of those people that watches these passive income videos and you kind of just left feeling demoralized, or you leave a comment saying, "Oh, too hard, unrealistic," you know, "You're just, you know, scamming us on this buzzword passive income." Well, that's great; like whatever you do, you. But at the end of the day, the way I see it is that, you know, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

If you've got a little bit of time on the weekend, there's no harm in at least trying to start a passive income stream. I showed you before, like my first two income streams—my first two passive income streams failed. You know, t-shirt designs, knitting grids—both of those failed. That could have been demoralizing, but I stuck with it and I tried some other things, and now my last two or three have been successful.

Okay, so I definitely don't think that you should just pooh-pooh the idea of passive income just because it seems like, "Oh, people say that it takes no work and you can make millions of dollars." You shouldn't poo-poo the idea just because it actually does take effort, because at the end of the day, it is still very, very powerful if you can get it to a point where you're actually earning good money.

Okay, because some of these passive income streams—I'm not saying all of them, some of them—can eventually be put into kind of autopilot mode where they can keep earning you money out into the future, even though once you've done a lot of work on them already, you eventually get it to a point where you don't actually have to do too much to just keep those income streams going.

And I think that's a really important point. If you are someone that just works for someone else, trades your hours for money, then if you stop doing that, you earn no money. Okay, that's reality. You're not going to work; they're not going to pay you for skipping work. Whereas even if your passive income streams—they don't even have to be the most successful; let's say they're only moderately successful.

The point here is that even if they're just moderately successful, they still have the potential to earn you money even when you're sleeping. Okay, so even if, like say a YouTube video performs poorly or maybe one of my courses doesn't sell very well or whatever, that's fine! Because at the end of the day, I've still got the chance of earning money when I'm fast asleep because of that passive income model.

So overall, this is a topic that I'm really passionate about, because I think that it's so powerful. Yes, I get it; online passive income becomes definitely a buzzword. It becomes kind of clickbait trying to get you to click onto videos and saying, "Oh, it's easy, just follow these three steps, buy my course," whatever. But at the end of the day, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If you've got the opportunity to try and build a passive income source, you should do it because when you consider all things, passive income is the ticket to retirement. Okay, retirement happens so when retirement is when you can stop work. Okay? If you want to stop work, you have to make sure that all of your living expenses are covered by income that is derived from you doing something other than work. So that’s passive income, right? If you’ve got enough passive income to cover your expenses, then you can retire.

All right? But if you're in a position where if you stopped working, your expenses would remain high enough and you would be out of pocket, you would be losing money, then you can't retire. That's just the simple financial equation, so it is so powerful. Get on the bandwagon, get excited about it. No, it's not easy. Okay, yes, it takes time, but the potential is there. It is realistic that anyone can start building up a passive income stream—at least one! So give it a shot.

Anyway, that's it from me for today, guys! I hope you enjoyed the video. Leave a like on it if you did. Thanks very much for watching, for listening to my little rant. [Music] Uh, subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already; of course, I super appreciate it. It helps me out heaps. Good time to get on board as I've been saying the last couple of videos—fresh rebranding; it kind of feels like a fresh start. We just hit 100,000, so why not jump on board, and let's keep going to a million? I would be very surprised if this channel ever got to a million, but you never know; stranger things have happened!

Anyway, guys, that's it from me for today. Thanks very much for watching. If you're interested in checking out those profitable courses I've been making reference to during the video, check out the links down in the description below. But that'll do me, guys! I'll see you all in the next video. [Music] Um. [Music]