The Cult of "Passive Income" | Internet Analysis

Apologies for the passive income related ads and tons of spam comments, watch out!! the bots always target money-related videos 😤😤

I feel like not that long ago 'flipping houses' meant 'buying a wreck and putting in the work/money to make it comfortably livable so somebody can buy or rent a safe home where there was once an unusable space, and earning a profit for this work' and now it seems like it means 'buying a wreck and covering up all the safety issues with cheap cosmetic changes, then tricking someone into overpaying for it'

but tiffany, girlbossing is my kink

I find it really disturbing that the ultimate goal, according to these "coaches", seems to just be to go from being exploited to be being the exploiter. I get the surface level appeal, everyone wants to be comfortable financially and being exploited sucks, but how are you supposed to live with yourself knowing that now you're just as bad as the people who were screwing you over a couple years ago? Edit: what the fuck are these replies lol

im shocked at the amount of people using "passive income" when they mean "second job"

My biggest gripe with this kind of thing is that you're not even allowed to have a hobby anymore without being expected to monetize it. I'm low income because of disability and dabbling in various hobbies (on a budget, obviously) is my joy in life. Making it a "side hustle" would suck all the joy out of it and it wouldn't even gain me much.

Totally agree with not only this, but also the side hustle thing. Personally, I currently only work a standard 9-5 job after squeezing a side job at night and on weekends into that for 2 years. I never had a day off and worked 60+ hours a week. I eventually quit the side job bc I couldn't handle it and now all i hear is "get a side hustle, don't only have one source of income, diversify your income" and I'm just like 😒😒. For those of us who can't do online work or start our own business, service jobs are the only "side hustle" we'll get. The side hustle rhetoric just makes it seem like you're not doing enough by having a standard full time job when that's literally all some ppl can handle. Work your job, enjoy your down time, and please be kind to yourself!!

The property "hacks" just sound super hurtful to me right now. I'm struggling to buy a house to live in because the bank will probably refuse due to my somewhat low salary. But at the same time, I know acquaintances and distant family members who do wholesaling and flipping. They're literally just buying a dozen houses each month and reselling it at 120-150% of the original price without adding any value to the property, driving up the price bubble and causing people like me to not be able to buy even a single house just to live in

The amount of anger that fills my body when I hear about real estate investing. It has every thing to do with my hometown being totally gentrified right now and my rent going from $400 to $875 in just a few years. The rage!

Outsourcing your life is the new ‘have servants’. You get time to do fun stuff or get richer and they should be grateful to be employed. Having maids or nannys, cooks etc is fine, just pay them properly! If you’ll only give them a pittance because ‘They live in a developing country’ or ‘they’re lower class so why pay more’ or ‘it’s a low skill job why should I pay more’, then you’re part of the problem. Domestic workers deserve a living wage just like everybody else.

This was on point. People aren't dumb. People are desperate and are doing what they can to survive and maybe have a bit extra. These scams are really predatory in the current economic context

Finally some one is talking about this. Every time I get an ad with some dude walking around some luxurious place filming with his phone camera with airpods on talking about passive income I can't help but roll my eyes. What factory is churning out these pyramid scheming grindset bros?? They're literally all the same person.

Another thing that infuriates me with these coaches and passive-income enthusiasts is that 99% of them started as rich anyway. It was easy for them to just quit a job and get that passive income, with their savings already giving them enough time to become self-employed.

Okay but can we actually get a video on the ethics of monetizing meme pages, though? Or like the Buzzfeed articles that are literally just a collection of a bunch of tweets about whatever the Internet is “outraged” about on any given day?

Can we talk about how so many of the "I don't dream of work" YouTubers have been promoting these passive income schemes? There has to be a video about the New Age Spirituality to boss babe pipeline.

the idea of having to work for the rest of my life is existentially horrifying

so much of "entrueaper" "self-employed" "passive income" advice boils down to: quit your 40+ hr work week to work 24/7 for the possiblty to maybe earn hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. it's more work for less of the benefit. at least with my crap cashering job I get 2 days off and get free lunch. at least I can go home and not think about work for a couple of hours.

this is the real talk no one WANTS to hear but actually HAS to hear, including me. Thanks for keeping it real, Tiffany!

Passive income is actually the opposite of passive when you're just starting. A Youtube channel, making and marketing courses/ebooks, selling art prints, etc. All of these require so much time. And as someone with a channel, when we don't upload weekly, the activity on our channel decreases as well, so it's not like you can just have videos and those keep earning. You still need to be producing content regularly, unless you're already huge and have a big fanbase, or you suffer on the algorithm game anyway.

This is one of your best videos ever. I'm a personal finance writer, and some of the content I see on YouTube is very disturbing. My favorite point of yours was that if these investing/real estate guys were doing so well with passive income, why are they spending so much time creating YouTube content? Of course, it's to sell you something. And there are plenty of people falling for it.