Hello Forevercashers, and welcome to Passive Income 101 – Session #10: The Ethics of Passive Income.
In this post I wanted to address some negative comments you might hear from folks when you bring up the subject of passive income.
1) “Are you against putting in an honest day’s work?” This one comes up from time to time, often when a person is feeling defensive about their own career choices. They imagine that people who set up passive income sources are lazy individuals who don’t want to work.
Apparently, those folks don’t realize how much work goes into setting up a source of passive income.
People who want passive income aren’t lazy – most love to work. They love the challenge of taking an idea and developing it into something that works. And most of the time, a person who has one or more sources of passive income has set them up thinking of their retirement – the time of life when conventional wisdom says it’s okay to slow down a little bit.
Negative comments like this one are meant to hold you back and to keep others from feeling bad about their own life choices.
2) “Aren’t you just taking advantage of others?” I hear this one when I advertise a new educational system (like my Land Profit Generator of Flip it Fast Formula). I have been accused of taking advantage of people who don’t know any better.
Well, while there certainly are some sharks out there, I definitely am not one of them – and you shouldn’t be either. Any passive income assets you own should offer a real value to the end buyer – whether you are talking food, education, training, a product – or anything else that you might offer in a business. Passive income is about giving something good to your customer – without being physically there yourself to do it. Whether you have a crew working in a kitchen flipping burgers or you have a website offering a downloadable product, passive income should not be about taking advantage of anybody – it should be about conducting a business transaction where both parties walk away happy.
3) “There’s no such thing as passive income!” I have heard this one, and I guess that there’s some truth to it. But I never said that passive income means no work – I want you to work hard now so you can work less later.
So no, you can’t go out and buy a cash machine. But you can build one over months and years.
Passive income is perfectly ethical and is a fine way to spend your golden years. As Warren Buffet once said about his wealth – “I don’t have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It is like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing.”
And that can be the same for you. Don’t feel guilty about taking a different (and more successful) path than those around you. Recognize that you have contributed something to the community and filled real needs for your customers.
And at the end of the day, what more could you ask for from a business?