Image credit: Sharon McCutcheon.

Imagine yourself sitting somewhere in Havana, sipping margaritas, looking all fly and relaxed. When suddenly, your relaxation is disturbed by an e-mail alert on your newest iPhone. Suprised, you take a look at your phone, only to find that you have just been informed about the payout from one your passive income sources. 

After a few seconds of joy, you go to the bartender to order a shot of tequila, because, after all, today is a good day. As you move full of satisfaction with your drink, you can’t help but notice all eyes on you. At moments like this, you keep reminding yourself, that life is great.

Living life like this would be great. No, it would be amazing. While anyone could live this kind of life, in reality, it requires an immense amount of time, dedication, stubbornness, and mental strength. There are thousands of guides, tutorials, courses on making passive income. They all talk truth, they all share a lot of great information, but in the end, you’re still you — not someone who is chilling in Havana and sipping margaritas. 

So, here are some facts about passive income, so you could prepare yourself better if you’ll ever start considering your success rates with passive income.

1. You Don’t Need to Monitor Your Income Streams.

This is one of the most dangerous passive income myths. We would like to believe that once everything is set up, no additional work is needed. Life is never that easy. Whatever your passive income is, there must be other people doing the same thing. This what makes the market competitive. You can never stop progressing and optimizing your business because you’ll lose.

2. You Only Need a Short Amount of Time to Get Started

Whichever method of passive income you choose, you’ll need time to understand the business, set everything up, and find an effective way to run it. Not knowing how everything works is the biggest problem in a false belief that everything is so easy. Currently, if you’d want to build a blog, it would take you around a year, to start making a living out of it. 

3. One Source of Income is Enough

There’s one golden rule in investment, that is relevant in this case as well. The rule goes by, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” This is also true for passive income. You can’t expect to be able to do the same thing forever and still make passive income. There are tendencies and many other factors; therefore, one source is never enough.

4. You Don’t Need Money to Start

There are many ways to make passive income. Some methods require you to have some money up front, and some don’t. There are also instances where having money allows you to accelerate your start, but it’s not a necessary thing to do. In most online cases, you can start without having any money, but in exchange, you’ll need to give a lot of your time.

5. You Need a Unique Idea to Start

All you need is to start doing something, not an idea itself. Of course, you need something to start with, but you shouldn’t get caught up in the belief that everything must be unique. You’re not a special snowflake. At least not for now. It’s okay, to do the same thing everyone else does. Everything else will come with time.