How I built 4 passive income streams at age 22

Since the beginning of time, most of our mentors (parents, teachers, friends), advise us to study, to work hard in order to have a good salary and a well-deserved retirement. But what if going to school doesn’t guarantee anything anymore? What if your retirement was no longer guaranteed? I don’t want to sound alarmist, far from it. But there’s nothing to stop us from preparing for this eventuality.

Before we start, a little disclaimer. All of these investments and decisions belong to me alone and are in no way investment advice.

I have always been attracted by ways to make money. To automate processes to develop additional income. So I may not be a reference, but I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned in the last few years about investing and investing.

All “passive” sources of income require an investment, in capital or in time.

Dividends

I may not be telling you anything here, but dividends can be a great way to generate income passively. I won’t hide it from you, you will have to invest some capital, but not necessarily a lot. If you invest on a regular and recurring basis, you will start to build a solid capital over the long term. However, many will disagree with me, but this is not just about capital. This is primarily about strategy. Opening a CTO or a PEA (for the French people like me)? How to diversify your portfolio? In which countries to invest? Many questions where there are no wrong answers. Some of them will be more adapted to your situation, it’s up to you to define your strategy.

For my part, being young, I did not want to limit myself to the European markets, I decided to open a stock account with an online broker.

I invest mainly in North America, Europe and Asia.

However, here is a small lead, look for the “Dividend Kings”. This is a list of companies that have been maintaining and increasing their dividends for over 50 years.

I’ve been building this portfolio for a little less than 2 years with an invested capital of just over €11,000 and a yield (currently) of about 5%. The dividends that I have chosen are solid and now generate a little less than €600 each year. Wishing to benefit from compound interest, they are without exception fully reinvested.

Real Estate

Investing in real estate is the best known investment. However, not wanting to cut my borrowing capacity too quickly and to keep some liquidity on my investments, I chose to move towards paper investments.

They are certainly profitable investments, but their main purpose is to diversify my assets and better protect me during crises. It is still a small proportion of my portfolio that I intend to increase over the next few years.

SCPI — Corum

I have in my possession some shares of the SCPI Corum. It is the one which, in my opinion, has the best compromise. A lower share of fees than its competitors, a better liquidity, an often higher return and a simple and efficient dashboard.

For nearly €3,000 invested, I generate a return slightly above 6%, thus granting me nearly €200 each year.

I plan to buy a few more shares this year to consolidate my investment in this sector. In the same way as for my stock market investments, I decided not to touch these “gains” and to reinvest them to benefit once again from the compound interest.

Bricks.co

This is my latest real estate investment. The principle is quite innovative. The company Bricks is looking for property (often investment property) and launches a crowdfunding. The property is divided into bricks of 10 € each, allowing smaller purses to launch. The returns depend of course on the projects.

The company has just launched a marketplace to buy and resell bricks, ensuring a very good liquidity. The rents are paid each month as soon as the property is acquired. Count between 3 and 4 months after your investment.

My investment is for the moment very anecdotal with only 200 € invested. The service is relatively young, hence my low involvement. A small drawback, even if many projects are listed, they leave in only a few minutes. You’d better be quick if you want to be part of it.

Cryptos

I do have some cryptocurrency investments, and it’s hard to call that passive income. I would only count my stablecoins “lendings” here.

As a reminder, a stablecoins lending means lending cryptocurrencies indexed to a specific value (often $). It is now my most liquid and best performing investment.

I invested an amount of almost 6000 € on Just-Mining at a rate of 10% annual return. They are reinvested every day to benefit once again from the compound interests. This allows to generate a little bit more every year, because the interests are paid every minute.

In the same way I invested a little more than 1.500 € on Anchor, a platform allowing to lend UST (stable coin $) at the (mind-blowing) rate of almost 20%.

Thanks to these cryptocurrency loans, I currently generate an additional €900 each year. The whole is reinvested.

I intend to invest more massively in the sector.

Entrepreneurship

You’re probably thinking, “But Anatole, entrepreneurship is far from passive”. You are totally right, except if…

Being a web developer, I allow my clients to host their websites on my own server. This allows them to stay serene, their sites and backups are in good hands, all this at a controlled cost.

All this is linked with a meticulous automation of the entire process (backups, updates, reports…).

This allows me to generate nearly €200 extra each month, for a very limited investment in time.

Conclusion

To make a small assessment, it allows me to collect each year about 2,000 € additional each year. As I have strongly emphasized throughout this post, this income is entirely reinvested. We are still far from the financial independence sought by so many people, but at 22 years old, it seems to be going well. Of course, I intend to continue these investments and share them with you if you are interested.

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