Over the last three or four years, I've devoted entirely too much time to passive earning activities. And while I can appreciate Warren Buffet telling us that if we don't learn how to earn in our sleep that we'll work until we die as much as the next guy, not all passive earning opportunities are nearly equal. I could likely run through a list of passive earning activities and apps with you and tell you what's good, what's bad, and what'll rip you off. Because, yes, I've been ripped off by passive earning opportunities. But, I've also experienced a great deal of success with passive earning. I sure stuck with it long enough!
I want to say that it started with Survey Junkie when I was hard up for an additional stream of revenue. I've completed enough surveys to tell you which surveys will waste your time based on how they design the first couple of pages. I'm sorry but there are some survey groups that will estimate their survey takes 15 minutes, engage you for 10 minutes, get you through three rounds of opinions and then disqualify you at the exact moment where the last set of classification questions is supposed to be presented. But you know you are about to get paid when they stop asking about products and start asking about race.
Those passive earning apps led me to crypto. Well, crypto advertises heavily on those apps, and for good reason. Networks like Polygon and Telos enable working class bums like me to get some skin in the game and leave with a little too. Besides, I wouldn't make a brokerage much money, I don't have enough to make any real money once I pay trading fees and if I'm not trading, I'm not creating order flow... no order flow, you know, no money for the whales. And the fewer who play, the harder the markets become.
Then came Robinhood, right? Democratizing finance for all! We all know what happened with that. And as we approach the Robinhood IPO, we are given still more lessons on neoliberalism. But never mind that because now there are a slew of apps out there designed to give everyman access to the stock markets and the crypto markets.
Can we just pause one moment here and reflect on history a bit? You know, right before the Great Depression, everyone and their brother, uncle, sister, father, and aunt got involved in the stock market. It all ended poorly: there was so much dumb money about that the markets just fell to stitches all over everyone's portfolios. I just think it's worth mentioning this little fact. Something to think about the next time your girlfriend's brother or your uncle's old war buddy or your friend from that last job you sometimes talked with calls you to ask about the day's best altcoins while you're pretty sure he's never even heard of block chain. So here we are.
These passive earning apps usually require you to do SOMETHING in order to earn something. It starts with the click of a button and a daily check-in. Then you are doing surveys or sharing your location to accelerate the easy earning. Now your phone is constantly on GPS and your battery is burning up. Worse yet, maybe you got involved with some geo-mining app that pays out in a cryptocurrency no one heard of and it trades in a market with no liquidity. If it's an ERC-20 token, good f'ing luck buying the ETH to trade that token for real money, pal, because those gas fees probably equal whatever small amount you got paid. Just sayin'
Wait for it. They got this whole group of passive earning apps that actually pay you in a currency that isn't traded on a market. Stop. Go back and re-read the sentence. You got that right, bud, they pay you in something that doesn't spend. Why doesn't the token trade? No one can say for sure and it doesn't make a lick of sense. Except, once a day, users have to click a button and watch a short ad. Where are the ad revenues going? Don't think too hard.
What I've found are that there are a few good apps out there that offer you the opportunity to trade some of your time and opinions for a small amount of money. If you invest your time, your earnings will increase. When I got good at the good apps, I was able to raise enough to make a reasonable buy into a crypto market. I was able to accumulate enough to be able to stake it and earn all night long while I sleep. I'm glad I did, I thought leaving the payments with the company was just a bad idea since fiat deflates and, besides, why not try to earn a little interest on it somewhere? Certainly not in an American bank account. With fiat? What a scam!
The truth is that these apps, in requiring your time and attention to click buttons and watch ads, they take a lot of your time. That time could be better spent on a real hustle, like, I don't know, learning a new job skill. In fact, learning a new skill will probably earn you far more before you retire than any amount of money you invest in crypto today. Yeah, so that last sentence was NOT for you big-timers, heavy-hitters, and swinging-dicks. You guys have your world and we think it's nice that we can dream about it. The other 99% are probably not best served by the ads they are being paid to watch anyway.
And never-mind the out-and-out scams. I think my favorite had to be when a certain survey app blocked my account after something like 500 days of answering a single question a day in return for a penny. After about a year and a half of this stupid thing on my phone, I decided I want to hurry up and get to $10 so I could cash it out and delete the app... I just hate to leave money on the table, it's a personal flaw, it is what it is, we are works in progress. So I had a balance of like $6.73 and I went on the survey part of their app and the next day the account was locked. Apparently a third-party had listed my email address as "suspicious" or something along those lines so I was cut off, those were the rules, and, by the way, I could not have the $6.73 that I had earned because they "simply don't have a mechanism for paying less than $10." That's funny because they sure had a mechanism to keep it!
If you don't feel like learning a new job skill, because, right, that's hard, I just think that, especially after a period of time during which you might raise just enough to get yourself started on an investment to earn a dividend, these activities probably are not worth your time and are not best serving you. I wasn't the only one sucked in by these apps and opportunities, many people are.
But then again, here I am, working on a skill, but I also happen to be doing it here, where we share micropayments in the form of tips. Let's be honest, now. Maybe you are a better reader than writer and that's okay, but I bet there is a skill that you already possess which you could develop further that would yield an equal or better benefit.
Just be clear-eyed about your goals when you get involved in the passive earning world, expect to be scammed out of something that should have been yours at some point, and have a plan to exit. It's not too dissimilar from investing in that way. Let's be honest, most people don't sell their first ten-bagger until it's at least a five-bagger; you've got to remember to pay yourselves.. but we don't. After a while, it's just a road to nowhere. Hell, check out the DOGE and Shibu price charts if you don't believe me.
There's no free lunch, and that ain't gonna change, sucker.
