My Passive Income Story ($0 - $3000/month by age 24)

So today, guys, we're gonna be talking about passive income, a topic that's very near and dear to my heart. Essentially, passive income is the model of income where you can earn money around the clock, wherever you are in the world and regardless of whether you're actually physically working or not.

Now, unfortunately, these characteristics have given passive income kind of a bad rap of late. It's now one of the most frequently misused buzzwords going around. A lot of people now promote passive income as the easy way to do no work and earn millions of dollars.

Now, as you guys would have come to know on the channel, I follow a no BS rule, okay? And so I'll tell you the truth. Right, passive income is not easy. It is hard to generate, but it's also the truth that it is the ticket to financial freedom. Really, the way that I like to think about passive income is that it is one of the two income models or structures, okay? There's active income and then there's passive income.

Now active income is pretty straightforward; it's what most of us know when it comes to income. That is the model of income where you go somewhere and you trade your hours for a certain amount of money. You work for a certain amount of time, and your employer will pay you per hour for the amount of time that you worked. For most people, this income model is absolutely fine.

But there is one particular issue with this model: it's not scalable. You don't have an infinite number of hours in the day, therefore, the amount of money you can earn in a day is limited. Right, it's capped. Whereas passive income, we don't run into that issue at all, okay? The amount of money you can make is not capped.

So passive income, on the other hand, is not where you just trade your hours for money; it's actually where you put in a lot of hard work and a lot of hours upfront, usually for nothing. You don't get paid for those hours, but then once you've finished the work, it starts to generate you money after you've finished it. It can continue to generate you money into the future.

Now, obviously, there are different kinds of ways of generating passive income, so the longevity of that passive income is different depending on what you've done. But for some kind of forms of passive income, you can finish that body of work, work really hard, and finish that body of work, and then it can literally keep making you money, in some instances, for the rest of your life.

A common example of passive income is, say, writing a book. You don't get paid for writing the book; it takes you a very long time to write it. But once it's done, it's done, and then it just keeps selling from that point on. So you can think about something like the Harry Potter franchise, right? How much do you reckon JK Rowling still gets from that franchise she created ages ago? Heck, think about how much directing JK Rowling gets from just Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Just that book by itself, and she wrote that or released it. It was published back in 1997.

Now, it was when I was about 19 or 20 where the idea of passive income really cemented itself in my brain, I suppose, as well. It's that time where I really understood the two different types of income: active or passive. From then on, I've just been so incredibly focused on making sure that at least some of my time and energy is going to some form of passive income source.

Back when I was 19 or 20, when I first got switched on to this, you won't believe this, but my first foray into the idea of passive income was actually selling one-dollar knitting grids on a website called Kraft. See, how weird is that? But basically, what happened was my mum told me about some of her friends that liked to knit, and they made these knitting grids, you know, like instructional grids that people can follow along to make the different designs.

She was telling me how they sell them for like a dollar each, and then every now and again, they just get an email saying, "You've made a sale," and they get one dollar. And that was just like, "Oh my gosh." I knew that I had the Photoshop skills to be able to make something like a grid with, you know, a couple of different colors and make the patterns and that sort of thing.

So I knew that I could do it. Plus, with my mum there to give me a hand on what would actually work as a knitting grid, I just thought I was onto a winner. And so my first ever kind of business idea kind of started to flourish, but it didn't really; it was actually a total failure. There were weeks and weeks or months that went by, and I didn't make a single sale.

I had maybe, I don't know, ten or so different knitting grids, but after a couple of months, then I did start getting a couple of sales. Now, a couple of sales back then literally meant like two dollars, but that was enough for my brain to realize that this is something that could actually work on a much larger scale.

And from there, okay, maybe the knitting business wasn't so flash, but then I moved on to something a little bit bigger again, where I still took those Photoshop skills that I had. But this time, I decided that I would make t-shirt designs. So I found a website called RedBubble, where you can make a design that's in a certain, you know, rectangular pattern, and they can print them on t-shirts, and they handle all of the printing; they handle all of the delivery. I think their t-shirts sell for something like twenty or twenty-five dollars each, and if you sell one of the t-shirts with your design on it, then RedBubble are going to cut you into that. They'll give you maybe four, I think it was about $4 per t-shirt.

And overall, the designs that I made were really quite simple; they weren't complex Photoshop designs, that's for sure. But what was interesting now is that I kind of found a couple of niches. Usually, I just did, like, portrait prints, so light stylized portraits that were printed on the front of t-shirts. And for every fanboy, I even made a t-shirt design of Elon Musk, so there you go.

But what was interesting is that I kind of found these certain niches that I was working in, and because I found those niches, I did start getting more and more sales. When I started trickling in, like maybe a couple of sales a day, then I was like, "Oh, this really does have some potential." So I put a lot of time and effort into trying to maximize the amount of t-shirt designs I could have so that I could start to rake in the money when they started to sell after I'd finished the designs.

So of course, that's a very passive income model as well. You put in the work, you make the design first, you upload it, you get it ready to go, and you get nothing during that time. But after you've finished, when people come along and they buy those t-shirt designs, that is the passive income model.

From here, I got super inspired, right? And I started making all these different t-shirt designs. In fact, I ended up churning out more than a hundred t-shirt designs, and at one stage, like as a 19 or 20-year-old, this was snowballing up, and I was earning more than $300 a month doing this RedBubble stuff. So for a 19 or 20-year-old, not too bad, and it was very passive.

Obviously, I didn't get paid while I was making the t-shirt designs, but once they were finished and they were getting ready to be printed on the t-shirts, when the sales started coming in, that is very much the passive income model. It was kind of at this time where I realized that I'm still quite young; I really have to go for this passive income stuff. I have to try as hard as I can as early as I can to try and snowball some passive income streams.

So that's when I decided to take the next leap up, and I'll tell you a bit more about that in a second. But interestingly now, I actually stopped designing all the t-shirts and that sort of thing. I haven't done, like for me right now, I haven't done t-shirt design in over a year. I haven't even touched the RedBubble site in over a year, and it still gives me about fifty to a hundred dollars a month.

So, and I've literally done nothing for that money for at least a year, so it's still handy, like a handy little amount of pocket money each month that I don't have to do anything to get. But of course, I wanted to take that next leap up; I wanted to try and do something even bigger and better in the world of passive income.

So I started up the YouTube channel, and again I found my niche. This niche is obviously personal finance and investing, and I was a little bit more, you know, undecided about this one because I knew that in the early days, YouTube was going to be a big struggle because I was starting at zero. I had no followers, nothing, no views, no nothing. But I also knew that if I stuck to it and if I did find some even moderate success, then the potential of that YouTube channel was just enormous, especially because I was starting so young.

So anyway, I decided to start doing it anyway, and as I kind of expected at the start, basically, it went nowhere. In fact, my first 90 days on YouTube earned me $16.25. It's not a lot, right, considering that during those 90 days, I was making two videos a week, you know, heaps of hours put into each video, scripting it up, you know, recording it, editing, uploading, doing all that stuff. And overall, that whole 90 days owned $16.25.

But I knew that I should keep going with it because once I had kind of a collection of videos, a body of work under my belt, then the views would start to trickle in, and that's where the passive income would start to generate. Now, obviously, things have grown a lot more since then, thank goodness. We've actually just ticked over 30,000 subscribers, and obviously, the revenue has grown quite substantially from then as well.

But what's interesting about this thing and this whole idea of this passive income model is that the videos that I made really early on still make me money to this day. They still get views. So one of the first videos that I ever made, one of the first, I think it was maybe in the first ten, was called "P/E Ratio Explained for Beginners." Just a really simple video explaining a very common investing term called the P/E ratio.

And in the first 90 days of the release of that video, from just that video, I earned two dollars and ninety-two cents. Basically, nothing in the first 90 days. But what's interesting is that in the last 90 days, so in the previous 90 days from now, it's earned me a hundred and twenty-five dollars and ninety-two cents. So that's really interesting, right? It's a really great form of passive income because I did that work for that video ages ago, literally two or three years ago, and at the start, it didn't do much.

But over time, it started to earn me more and more as it gathers more and more views. So in the last 90 days, it's literally earned me over a hundred dollars, and I haven't done anything to do with that video for three years. So overall, that's kind of my journey into creating passive income, and now it's snowballed up to a point as you saw in the thumbnail, where overall, my passive income sources now earn me over three thousand dollars a month or thereabouts.

So obviously, with this whole YouTube thing, it's very lumpy from month to month. But if you kind of smooth it out and take an average, it averages out to about three thousand dollars a month. Overall, if we break it down further, the YouTube channel itself earns me anywhere between two thousand, two thousand five hundred dollars a month, and that is obviously the bulk of that three thousand dollar figure.

Then I sell just a course that people sometimes buy, and that earns me anywhere from like a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month. RedBubble, so the t-shirt designs, that nets me anywhere between kind of fifty and a hundred dollars a month. And the last passive income source is the sponsorships of the channel, and that can really get lumpy, but that earns me anyway kind of between a hundred and four hundred dollars a month.

So again, if you kind of take an average of all that, we even out to about three thousand dollars a month. What's interesting is because that is all passive income, that just keeps growing over time, right? As I work more and more active work on the YouTube channel, that number only grows because I get more and more videos completed, more videos that can then gather views, and that number slowly gets bigger and bigger over time.

So I find that really interesting. Now, I guess this overall—this probably does sound quite impressive, and I don't want to make it sound like it's really easy to do. Remember that this has taken me now almost has taken me about two and a half, three years to do, and obviously, I've been working on those other passive income sources for longer.

So I'm not gonna tell you that passive income is your secret formula to making millions of dollars, but what it really does give you is it does give you flexibility. It is nice to know that with YouTube, even if I don't upload a video on a particular day, then I will still get paid from all the other videos still gathering views.

This is particularly helpful because, as I was saying, it gives you that flexibility. Alright, so for instance, the other day I was up at 10:30 at night finishing off this edit for a video, and I was just reviewing it a couple of times, and I just wasn't happy with it. I just wasn't happy; I just missed a couple of points that really should have been in that video.

So there was no pressure on me needing to release that video that was actually not as good as what it could have been. So I decided not to; I went to bed, I slept on it, I came back the next day, I rerecorded it, re-edited it, and then uploaded the new version of that. It's nice to know that even though I did that—so I kept the quality high—but I took longer to do that, but even though I did that, I still wasn't financially penalized by doing that.

Like even though I didn't upload on the Monday, I uploaded on the Tuesday instead, okay? I still got paid on the Monday. So overall, that's what passive income really gives you; it gives you flexibility. Now, with that said, it can also become a bit of a trap. A lot of people get particularly burnt out with their passive income sources.

The reason for that is. Obviously, the more work that you do towards your passive income sources, usually the faster and the bigger they grow, right? So a lot of people can just get completely burnt out with the idea of passive income because they want to go so hard on it, so hard on it to try and build it up as high as they possibly can, that overall they just lose their interest and they get completely burnt out, except working themselves too hard.

So it's kind of a blessing and a curse, I suppose. But overall, I definitely think that what it is, the way to get to financial freedom because you want to get in that position where you don't necessarily have to work, but you will still get money coming in.

So overall, that is my story with passive income, and I hope that you guys can get something out of it. I think one of the main things I want you guys to take away is just to avoid the hype that gets thrown around the words passive income. Remember, it is definitely the ticket to financial freedom, but it does take a lot of work upfront to try and snowball these passive income streams up to a point where they're relatively self-sustaining.

But overall, if you ask someone that has that kind of business-focused mind, then it's definitely worth pursuing some form of passive income to try and grow it up as big as you can. Because overall, the quicker you can grow it, the larger you can grow it, the faster you can get to things like early retirement and that sort of thing.

So I hope you guys enjoyed this video; that's what I got to say. Leave a like on the video if you did enjoy it or if you found it useful. But that's it for today. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already. But for now, guys, I'll see you in the next video. [Music] [Music]