Why is a human being so driven by addictions?

Why is a human being so driven by addictions? I have been trying to implement the resolutions for AD 2017 for the past few days.

One of them was to give up on little addictions, like coffee, coke and wine. But, I helplessly observe how giving up on one addiction immediately results in hatching another one.

This time I tried to give up coffee and coke. As a result, the consumption of wine immediately grew by miles.

This Christmas, I also spent some time procrastinating and googling around. There is a saying that you should probably choose a profession closely related to the things you use to procrastinate. If this is true, I should be a professional money maker.

Looking up my googling history, I can find a lot of queries. For instance: ‘how to make money without effort’, ‘how to be rich, ‘how to make money on watching youtube videos’ et cetera.

The peak of my interest in those is usually around Christmas because I have more free time then. I can go through all my financial operations from the past year. Then I revise whether they were close to optimal and whether it is worth trying again.

What Is Passive Income?

This time, I would like to give a summary of what I found out these past few days about the idea of “passive income.” Passive income has become a popular key term over the past few years. It comprises all the possible ways of making money which you initiate and then can let go, of so that the money, in a word, keeps on producing itself. 

Most of the time, passive income relates to online activities. Examples include writing e-books and selling them on the Amazon Kindle website, or releasing an online course which people can download at a price. Others release popular youtube videos so that they can capitalize on advertisements, or do affiliate marketing.

Fiverr freelancing is another option (which means that you can offer any service at a fixed price of five bucks). Finally, some launch an online business that you can automate to a high extent, such as an online store with one or two employees, etc. 

Can You Really Get Rich From Online Passive Income?

There are multiple YouTube channels fully dedicated to the idea of a passive income. Most of these videos are appraising and very enthusiastic.

However, it is a small-world dynamic. It can never happen that everyone is making a fortune online at the same time.

Those who make up a living from their online activities are rare. For them, passive income is no longer as passive, since they do it full-time.

I think out of all the videos I watched, this one was the most sincere about what passive income means. And what are the pros and cons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXGBEJCEJ6k

This video woke me up from the childish dreams of having a self-sustained business at no cost. The ugly truth is that an online business never rolls on its own. And it is very hard to find a niche where you can create money easily and without any competition.

According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, roughly half of new businesses do not survive five years.

How Can a Full-Time Researcher Build Passive Income?

After watching a bunch of materials, I was more and more certain that to a researcher on full employment, there is one possible way of getting wealthy:

1. Buy a real estate, possibly a property that needs a little makeover,

3. Improve the property, rent it out and start saving money,

3. Play with this money on the stock exchange, or do other forms of trading.

4. As soon as you have enough money for buying another property, pull out the money from the stock exchange.

Then come back to point [1]. Iterate.

This strategy does not require you to act daily. This is why you can pursue it next to the daily job. Buying real estate is not something that you just do daily.

Of course, sometimes, there is an action to take on my to-do list. If one tenant leaves the house, I need to search for another one. If something breaks, I need to call a makeover guy and pay for the maintenance.

Also, if the company I invested in is in trouble or the market starts changing, I need to give it a thought. Then I reinvest it into another company or another market.

However, I do not spend more than one or two hours per week on all of this. So I guess, given that my assets are steadily growing, it is a low cost to pay.

This is a much lower time cost than in the case of herds of home-grown YouTubers. They spend hours every day recording new movies. Or home-grown writers who spend hours every day writing their e-books.

Why Are Real Estate and Stocks Safer Bets Than E-books?

One out of a million e-books then becomes a unicorn and starts making millions. But most of them will never pay back the time it needs to create.

What is good about my strategy is that it does not depend on fashion or popularity. According to Markowitz (1952), diversification across assets lowers risk without necessarily lowering returns.

Investing in real estate will always make money. And the amount of money on the stock exchange – despite every crisis on the way – is always growing in a long run.

Just look back at how many per cent every stock exchange grew in the last twenty years. You would never match this income by any interests from a bank deposit or governmental bonds.

According to Jordà, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick and Taylor (2019), housing and equities have historically delivered the highest long-run real returns of any major asset class across 16 advanced economies since 1870. Both, though, carry real volatility along the way.

Which Video Explains Buying Assets Best?

One last thing I would like to show you is another wise Youtube movie I recently found. This movie is brilliant, yet it got little attention since its publication. It is very straight to the point and perfectly pictures why some people are getting rich while others are getting poor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZdR4QvETzQ

I think it is so self-explanatory that I do not need to comment on this. According to Piketty and Zucman (2014), wealth-income ratios in rich countries have climbed sharply since the 1970s, meaning capital ownership (assets) has increasingly outpaced labor income as a source of wealth growth. I wish you all to have a great experience in 2017, and remember: buy assets, not liabilities!