In a perfect dream, money isn’t an object and you’re allowed to travel the world at your own pace and leisure. But, alas, money makes the world go round. So if you want to spend your days traveling - not cooped up in a sterile cubicle for 40 or 50 hours per week - you better find a way to generate passive income.

What is Passive Income?

Passive income is any money that you earn in a way that doesn’t require ongoing time, effort, or involvement. Most take either time or money to get started but eventually become hands-off. 

“Passive income generally won’t make you wealthy overnight, so forget about any get-rich-quick schemes you’ve heard of. But steady, profitable passive income options can build some serious money over the long haul,” number one best-selling author and financial expert Chris Hogan writes. “We’re talking anywhere from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars—depending on the income stream.”

Passive income ultimately paves the way for freedom. Some people use this freedom to retire early and focus on a hobby. Others use it so that they can travel the world on an ongoing basis. Whatever the case, passive income has the potential to produce powerful results that enable you to live the lifestyle of your dreams.

Practical Ways to Generating Passive Income

If it was easy to generate passive income, everyone would do it. So while the ideas mentioned below require some work, they are legitimate. Here are a few ideas:

1. Buy Rental Properties

The number one option (by far) is to invest in real estate in the form of rental properties. This method obviously requires some upfront money, but you’d be surprised how little cash you actually need to get started.

If you’ve never heard of the concept of OPM or Other People’s Money, then you’ll want to look into it. As the name insinuates, it’s a method of investing in real estate by leveraging other people’s financial resources in the form of seller financing, hard money lending, and/or forming partnerships.

Then once you buy the properties, you streamline the day-to-day management by hiring professionals to handle things like property inspections and tenant management. The result is passive income. 

2. Sell Information Products

Not keen on investing in a bunch of real estate? If you have an entrepreneurial bent, you can always try your hand at selling information products online. 

Information products, which include things like courses and ebooks, are great because they have low overhead, fixed costs, and high margins. Once you create a course, for example, you can sell it for the same price hundreds and thousands of times over without having to put in any extra work (outside of marketing and advertising).

If you are going to sell information products at scale, you’ll need a funnel strategy. There are numerous products and processes you can use to develop your funnel, but they all ultimately come down to the same basic process: (a) create a landing page where you promote your product, (b) drive traffic to that page, (c) get visitors to buy the product. 

3. Run a Blog or Podcast

Since you’re already traveling, why not start a blog or podcast where you share your experiences? You’d be shocked to learn how much revenue individual travelers can generate simply by producing content. (If you build a large enough audience, you could eventually make six or seven figures per year.)

4. Invest Your Money

The final option is to put your money into proven investment vehicles that are known to generate steady and positive cash flow. Options include:

• Dividend stocks and mutual funds that provide payouts for each stock you own.
• Annuity products that yield predictable and recurring monthly income.
• Peer-to-peer lending platforms where you fund someone else’s project in exchange for interest on the money you lend.

You aren’t going to build tremendous wealth off any of these methods, but you’re also not going to lose the shirt off your back. They’re considered fairly low risk. 

You Need a Plan

You aren’t going to wake up one morning and magically find $5,000 in passive income hitting your bank account on the first of each month. Developing a sustainable stream of mailbox money takes work. And now is the time to begin working on a plan.