A Silicon Valley software engineer lists six income streams outside his salary; three pay him without work, and the other three are still him selling his time.
The author is a Silicon Valley software engineer who has invested in US stocks for over twenty years and writes a personal finance blog. This post is a list of what his household earns outside his salary.
Three of them really do pay while he sleeps
The biggest is fund dividends, six figures a year in dollars, and he calls it the least demanding of the lot.
Two more come from books. The same title, The Wealth Shortcut, exists in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English, sold through Amazon and Google Play Books, with a paper edition in English. The platforms take roughly thirty percent of each sale.
The other three still involve answering DMs
Three more come from X and Substack: monthly membership fees for subscriber-only posts, plus a payout on original content based on how many people read it.
The author admits these take time — posting, replying to readers' private messages — so they are less passive than the first three.
The catch: six streams, and three of them burn the same fuel, which is his own hours.
Why it matters
'Passive income' bundles two very different things into one drawer: an asset that pays out on its own, and a side job wearing a costume. People who cannot tell them apart treat opening more accounts as the road to financial freedom, and end up splitting their hours six ways.
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