I've been on a Passive income kick lately and my family has been making money "passively" for years. Here's what I got.
ATM Machines. My family has owned a lot of these over the years. If you get the right locations its a huge money maker. Recently we've moved into "mobile ATMs" where we trailer ATMs to events and use 3G Wireless to authorize. Good money here, fairly passive.
Startup costs: About $50k + $200-300k or so to stock your machines. You either have to run your route refilling the machines or pay someone. You better trust this someone because you're going to hand them a bag with $50k in cash to re-stock machines. If you do it yourself carry a gun, your back is turned while you refill.
Work required: You gotta get those prime spots so its going to take a few phone calls/business development to get off the ground.
Real Estate. More "passive" if done right but you need a large investment because its impossible to make any good money when the house is mortgaged. You'll need several houses to make it worth while. Real estate has a 2 fold benefit. Passive income now, cash out later when the market is up.
Startup costs: $250-500k depending on how many houses you want to buy.
Work required: If you do it right you hire a property manager and you don't do much of shit except write checks when shit breaks.
Storage Units. Don't bother putting these in the city. Its saturated. Think rural. Rural folks have shit to store as well as boats, RVs, ATVs, etc... You can typically charge more too for convenience. I've been looking heavily into these this year. Takes a sizable investment though because you want to own the land and the building.
Startup costs: $300k-$1m depending on where you put it and how many units you build.
Work required: Not a lot once its built and running. You only need 1 employee. Getting it bought, built, and running could be time consuming. I havent looked into that part of it yet.
Donut Shops. Super high profit. Not exactly "passive" unless you can find some good employees that are willing to show up at 3am, rain or shine, to cook donuts. Donut costs you about $0.06 to make and you sell them for a $1.00.
Startup Costs: $30-$50k. Basically just rent a shopping strip unit put your donut sign up and buy your cooking materials. Lease your ovens/equipment.
Work required: Could be quite a bit at first. You'll have to find an employee or two that are willing to get up and go to work at 3am for $8/hr. If not your ass is getting at 3am to cook donuts.
Vending. This is a TOUGH racket. Most of the guys in this business have been doing it a LONG time so they have the connections and know how to land the contracts. You have to be in office buildings or anywhere else people have to leave to get food. The upside is the profits are good. Just remember you have to visit all your machines once a week to refill with snacks and empty the cash. Outside vending gets vandalized a lot.
Startup cost: $100-$300k + location rental/rev-share with the business owner.
Work required: Its significant if you don't have an employee running your routes and collecting the money and re-stocking. Since this is a cash business you'll have to come up with a creative way of keeping your employees from stealing from you as well.
Redbox style DVD kiosks. Since Blockbuster, Hastings and all the other movie rental places have gone bankrupt people have to use these things if they want to rent a DVD. Things are starting to go digital, but DVDs will still have a place for a long time. Think rural areas again. Not exactly passive as you have to order the latest releases and keep them stocked in the machines. Really high profit though. Medium investment (you can get started for about $20k/4 machines).
Startup Costs: The machines are the biggest expense. I've seen them run from $5k to $50k depending on how badass of a machine you want. The cheap ones just rent DVDs the expensive ones allow you to sell advertising and more. If you're serving rural customers then the $5k machines will probably work. You need about 10 machines to get a nice profit stream coming in ($10k/mo+) as some locations will just be shit.
Work required: Just like vending machines you're gonna have to restock these things with the latest movies. At least your money will be deposited electronically.
Websites/AM. As you know, high profit when done right. Low investment, high risk. Regardless I still do it because the profit and low investment costs.
Startup costs: $20. All you need is hosting and a domain if you can use Wordpress. Super high ROI if you do it right.
Work required: We all know it takes a shit-ton of work to get a website to produce passively, reliably.
Laundromats. I plan to buy 2 next year. Good profit, fairly low maintenance and expandable. You can offer laundry service, folding, etc. as well. Requires some (probably expensive) permits to start one from scratch. You're better off buying one that someone else is selling (my plan), than starting from scratch.
Startup costs: If you start from scratch the washers can easily run $10k, dryers about the same. You need a good location and some money socked away for the water and electric bill until you got a nice cash flow going.
Work required: Pretty simple. An employee can sit on their ass in the A/C for $8/hr and fold clothes and give change. You can also do an "employee-less" biz with cameras if you're in a decent neighborhood and don't want to offer wash/dry/fold service, but then you'd be leaving money on the table.
Dry cleaning. The sky is the limit here. You can open satellite stores to collect dry cleaning and then outsource the actual cleaning to a plant. Or you can open your own dry cleaning plant and take other satellite stores cleaning work (bulk laundry essentially). I love this business because its grow-able and its also how Fring from Breaking bad hid his illegal meth operations. =)
Startup costs: If you do the satellite stores its relatively low. You need a good location, a big ass "Dry cleaning!" sign out front. Customers drop off, you ship it out and call them when their shit is clean. Costs for your own dry cleaning plant can be high. $250-$1m depending on whether you own or rent the land. Also the EPA will be riding your ass and I'm sure the permits alone from the EPA are outrageous.
Work required: If you do the satellite store you really just need 1 or 2 employees to interact with the customers. If you go the route of the plant then you'll need a significant amount of employees to wash and press clothes.
I've got a few more I've been researching that I'll post up here if I have more time. Starting a business is a LOT of work. Try buying an existing business instead.
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