My day job is running a remodel group for a commercial general contractor. I plan on sticking with my day career for as long as possible. However, I always find myself trying to find passive income above and beyond what I am bringing in from my primary job. I am not sure why, but some things that I feel like are motivation to me are the fact that I am a sole bread winner in our family since my wife is a stay-at-home mom so definitely feeling the pressure to bring in as much money as possible. In addition, I like the idea that it’s possible to eventually get to the point where I can live off of passive income. I am not sure how I can get to that point, or how long it is going to take, but as I said I don’t think I will ever give it up. I think that at some point I had hobbies including maintaining a saltwater aquarium and collecting RC airplanes and I got to the point where I thought “why should I choose hobbies that cost money, what about finding hobbies that make me money?” That was in 2011 and that was when I began my first “hobby” that started making me money.
Before I go any further I just wanted to lay out the three things that I am either in the middle of doing or looking to begin doing in the near future, in order of most “advanced” to least:
- Website Development
- Primary Home Capital Improvements
- Real Estate Investing
This blog is call “capital improvement” and I really think that I landed on that name because everything that I try to do to at home or at the construction company that I work for – W.E. O’Neil, is to build value in whatever I am a part of. I know that website development or website investing seems like it is in a different category than “real estate” or “commercial construction” but at the end of the day I just like to build things, whether it is real or digital.
Back to my story: in 2011 I still had my aquarium and it was starting to look pretty good as I had just upsized to a 60 gallon, just upgraded my lights to a metal halide fixture, and was about to start up a new refugium. However, we had gone on a nice vacation, but upon returning we found that all of my livestock including fish and corals had died. At that time my wife, who is usually pretty good at bringing me back down to earth, strongly suggested that I tear down the aquarium since we were about to get married in 2012 and we figured the last thing we need to worry about on our 2 week honeymoon is whether the fish were still alive when we got back! At that time I decided to shut it down, sell it off, and find a new hobby. So what was the new hobby? Website development!
- Website Development
When I quit maintaining a saltwater aquarium and decided to learn how to code and build a website, the first website I chose was called aquariumdimensions.com – I am guessing to kind of stay involved with aquariums. It is actually still running strongly at this time. So I have been involved in website development as least “off and on” since 2011 or about 8 years ago. Aquariumdimensions.com is great because it is truly a custom html website that I created myself, you can totally tell that it is old school but I definitely think that there is merit in A) being able to build a website from scratch in html and B) some of these old websites get nice organic traffic because they are truly static and mine website personally has built a TON of backlinks over the years that help keep the traffic coming!
Out of the three “passive income” methods that I am pursuing I am farthest along in developing website. Mainly because I haven’t had time or money over the last, oh, 7 or so years to get into real estate, or truly work on my house to the point where we are making drastic improvements. I am OK with this though and I really truly think that there is way more opportunity in developing websites than in real estate. Why? Everyone is already doing real estate. Every neighbor in my neighborhood owns a vacation home or a second home or a condo and is trying to rent it out for money. Now there is nothing wrong with that, and a lot of people are making a ton of money. However, I know that some people are losing money as well.
Developing websites and making money off of them is a “relatively” new concept – let’s say it started in the past 10 years when Google started conquering the world. So that method feels like it’s got a little more opportunity in it to make some real money.
- Primary Home Capital Improvements
My wife and I like to remodel our home. We are always looking to upgrade different parts of our house at the right opportunity with the hope that every upgrade will increase the value of the house. Now, I do fully understand that doing this will never gain “passive income” for us but the desire is that every little project that we tackle will help us eventually so that if or when we need to sell our house we can realize the gains at that point.
We are going to keep doing our projects (see the past and current list of “to do’s” here) regardless so we hope that it will help us come out better off in the end.
- Real Estate Investing
I have just started to research real estate investing. It’s a crowded market and especially in the Denver market so I believe that I am going to have to wait for a downturn in the real estate market before I find a great opportunity but it’s definitely something I think I would be good at and something I am going to watch closely for opportunities.
As I mentioned I believe now the best opportunity lies in website development. Stay tuned for future blog posts and I will plan on giving real, detailed updates on where my “properties” came in last year and where they are trending this year. I will be the first to tell you that websites are certainly not boosting me in the next tax bracket, but I believe if I can fully establish a scalable system then the sky is the limit!
