‘MY SIDE HUSTLE BRINGS IN £12K PER YEAR – WITHOUT ME EVEN REALISING IT’
The dream for many is to earn as much money as possible for the least amount of effort – spending their time with family or on the beach.
Instead of trading your time for a wage, as with typical jobs, people who earn a so-called “passive income” do so with minimal input.
More people have taken on “side hustles” – secondary jobs, often linked to hobbies or experience – since the pandemic. Some 43pc of adults in the UK have at least one side-hustle, according to data from comparison site Finder.
But unlike a passion project done on top of your job, earning a passive income should theoretically take as little work as possible. It’s a broad term and includes a variety of different activities. For example, renting out a room, driveway or entire property could be considered as earning passive income, as could investing in index funds.
Those with a more entrepreneurial spirit could consider creating and selling digital assets, such as templates, courses, eBooks or even knitting templates, which can be bought over and over again.
Another source of passive income is selling photo editing settings, known as Lightroom presets. Some take stock photos, selling them on sites such as Getty; others have uploaded sounds such as white noise to Spotify, taking a (very small) payment every time they are streamed – which eventually adds up.
But experts say the concept of passive income is misleading, as it often requires lots of work to get started.
Financial planner and coach Catherine Morgan says: “The allure of making money in your pyjamas, with nothing but the soft click of a mouse or the gentle tap of a smartphone screen, is like a modern-day fairytale.
“But before we can all throw in the towel on the day jobs, behind every seemingly effortless, passive income stream is a backstory filled with hard work, late nights, and probably a fair share of caffeine.
“Whether it’s writing a book, building a course, or investing in stocks, there’s a significant amount of effort and learning involved upfront. It’s less ‘set it and forget it’ and more ‘set it, nurture it, tweak it, and then maybe forget it for a bit.’”
Morgan says she has generated over £1m in revenue from creating digital assets that teach women how to have a better relationship with money.
However, she warns people to tread carefully.
“Venturing into the realm of passive income, with the idea of quitting your day job is unlikely to be financially sustainable in the beginning. So before you send your job packing, start your passive income journey as a side hustle. It’s a safer way to dip your toes in the water while still having the security of a steady income.”
‘My eBooks will create a retirement pot’
Bakery owner and author Reshmi Bennett makes around £1,000 a month passively selling children’s baking eBooks and recipe downloads.
She tests out the recipes as part of her day job and works on the books in her spare time. This month she’s spent about a day-and-a-half doing new sketches and writing copy for Facebook adverts.
While it takes about two months to finalise each book, including collaborating with an illustrator, once it’s uploaded onto Amazon, Bennett, 40, says it “sells itself”.
Bennett’s venture into self-publishing was by chance. During the pandemic, she wrote and designed a baking book for her son Xavier’s fourth birthday about them making blueberry muffins together. She posted it to her Instagram, which at the time had 55,000 loyal followers, and the inquiries flooded in.
Bennett, who lives in Farnham, Surrey, made it available to order on her website – the following morning she had over 750 orders for the £10.50 book.
She says: “The book was already designed so it was just a case of printing more. But I still had to package them all and send them out – which was not passive enough for me. I want to do the least amount of work with the highest payout.”
So in May last year, she uploaded Xavier and his Magical Blueberry Muffins onto Amazon as part of her StoryBakes series. She now has five books listed on Amazon. The eBook version is sold for £4.50 of which she earns £2.92, and for every £7.99 paperback which Amazon prints and sends, Bennett gets £1.54.
She says: “Amazon takes a big chunk of sales but what’s left goes straight in my pocket, often without us realising.”
Sales doubled last Christmas and she expects a peak in demand over Easter.
Bennett also stocks the books on a dedicated StoryBakes website, which she gets printed and then ships out. She sells downloadable recipes for sponge cake and cookies on her bakery’s website for £6.50 each.
But while managing the sales of the books is eventually minimal, Bennett recognises the work involved in the first instance. She initially releases them as a physical book sold on her website, which she promotes through her bakery’s social media, school visits and other press activity, before uploading them on Amazon for more passive earnings.
Bennett says: “My social media followers were already invested in my bakery’s journey and I used the platform to create a community, rather than just selling. I think this could be key to the interest in the books.”
However, she says she would be scared if it were her only income.
She says: “I’m glad I don’t have to rely on it. We had to make £10,000 of refunds during lockdown after all the weddings were cancelled and ploughed a lot of our savings into the business as a result. We don’t have pension savings so this extra monthly income can hopefully build us a retirement pot over the next 10 or 20 years.”
‘The extra income means I can contribute more to my family’
Mother-of-two Daisy Ferns created a passive income stream at the end of last year when she reached “a ceiling” in her earnings as a baby sleep consultant.
Ferns, 37, did not have the capacity to take on any more clients nor did she feel she could raise her prices. So instead she spent four months designing a self-paced online course to train others to become baby sleep consultants too, in addition to her current job. It costs £2,995 for a place on the course and so far she has 21 students.
However, Ferns, who lives in Derby, East Midlands, says the term “passive income” is somewhat misleading.
She says: “There’s lots of work to do at the start and I spend about four-and-a-half hours during the week supporting students with live Q&As, assessing their work and responding to queries in the Facebook group. The marketing of the course also takes up a significant amount of my time – you can’t just build a product and sell it on your website.”
Ferns’ goal is to turn over £100,000 with her business Lavender Blue Sleep Consulting, which would equate to four or five students signing up a month.
She adds: “I’m still working as a baby sleep consultant, but the extra income means I can contribute more to my family, such as paying for a trip for us all to Lapland.”
Ferns says the key to earning passive income is doing something you’re experienced in and you love.
“It feels a bit unethical to set something up just to make money – and it’ll probably be unenjoyable too. I think anyone can make a passive income but I’m not sure how you’d be able to do it unless you were passionate about it.”
‘I am aiming to work just 10 hours a week’
Natalie Stanton is using her 11 years’ experience as a local government environmental health officer to create a video course in food hygiene. As The Safety Expert, she currently makes between £200 and £500 a month selling it to businesses, but says it takes up a lot of her time and she still works part-time as a food safety consultant.
While the course generates a passive income, most of her week is taken up creating content for LinkedIn and Instagram, keeping her website updated and marketing herself.
Stanton, 36, who lives in east London with her husband Stefan, 36, says her aim is to create enough content that can be repurposed to enable her to reduce her working hours to 10 a week.
She says: “It’s important to have experience in the area you’re wanting to pursue for credibility, but if you know how to sell or have marketing skills, you could probably make something work faster. It’s 100 per cent worth pursuing but I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it without working as a consultant alongside or having savings.”
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2024-04-08T16:00:46Z dg43tfdfdgfd