It occurs to me that a rough way to measure a person's financial privilege is to ask them if they know what "passive income" is.
Those without financial privilege tend to lose something for every monetary gain (time, effort, property, etc).
Whereas those with financial privilege are more likely to gain additional money for essentially just having money.
@freemo I guess that depends on what you describe as "passive". I assume, in your software example, you're referring to maintenance and support contracts? Those tend to be hit or miss for me whether they're active or passive (mostly depending on the client's disposition). And even then, they're based on a mountain of actual past work.
The passive income I was referring to is like renting property. The only requirement for that income is to have enough money to buy the property in the first place. Then, you may have to spend a percentage of what you collect while renting it on maintenance, but you're still profiting from virtually no effort just because you started with money.
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I assume, in your software example, you’re referring to maintenance and support contracts?
No I am talking about writing simple software tools you put in some marketplace somewhere and make money off of as people buy your app for a few dollars.. you release a version and aside from a few fixes its passive.
@freemo I wish it was as easy as you make it sound.
Most of the software I make on my own loses money.
@LouisIngenthron I mean, it has to be software that fills a need yea… but how can it loose money. You mean with time invested?
@freemo Doesn’t matter if it fills a need if nobody can find it. The marketplace is so over-saturated that you pretty much have to spend money on marketing just to rise above the tide of garbage so your potential customers can find you.
@LouisIngenthron Part of the challenge is of course coming up with something unique enough and useful enough that it wont be drown out by noise, and superior enough to get the top reviews.
Not claiming it is easy, only that passive income is more accessible to those without money than ever before.. maybe more so than the rich (who often dont have the skills to exploit it)
@freemo I’d argue it’s way easier with money. How else do you explain those shitty phone games that get advertised during the super bowl?
At least in my industry, the indie game startups that break even, much less profit, are few and far between… they’re exceptions to the rule. The big studios get all the breaks.
@LouisIngenthron I went from poor and on welfare to what some people might call rich (I wouldnt, but i guess it depends on where you draw the line)... regardless I did it on passive income. Its actually the one ofrm of income most accessible to the poor...
Anyone can learn to program as its all virtual, and programming is a gret way to write software and make passive income.