- There’s a key difference between earning passive income and side hustle income.
- With passive income, you can put in upfront time or money and eventually earn while you sleep.
- One entrepreneur says to focus on building passive income streams so you can free up time and energy.
There’s a big difference between passive income and side hustle income, emphasized 29-year-old entrepreneur Vanessa Ideh Adekoya.
“With a side hustle, you’re actively earning. You’re getting money in exchange for the work you’re doing,” she told Insider. “With passive income, you do the work once and it continues to pay you money, so you don’t have to exchange your time for money.”
Ideh Adekoya, who runs her YouTube channel Launch To Wealth full-time and is using the platform to achieve financial independence, says that if you want to supplement your primary source of income, focus on building passive income streams rather than pursuing a side hustle.
That’s because side hustling requires a lot of time and effort.
“For example, if you work from 9-to-5 and then do a side hustle like driving Uber or delivering food through Instacart from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., that’s your time that you could otherwise spend bonding with your family, doing homework with your children, traveling, reading a book, or doing things that bring you joy.”
While passive income requires upfront time and, in some cases, money, the idea is that, eventually, you’ll be making money while you sleep.
“Passive income allows us to hit our financial goals without sacrificing our present joys,” said Ideh Adekoya. “It’s a life design tool. It lets you live a richer, healthier, more fulfilling life and allows you to show up to the other parts of your life 100%, rather than exhausted. For a lot of people, having a side hustle in addition to a demanding job can leave them burnt out.”
The 2 main ways to earn passive income
“There are two ways to generate passive income: by putting up your time or by putting up your money,” explained Ideh Adekoya.
If you don’t have money, you can use your time to build an asset that generates passive income, which is where she started.
“An example of building an asset would be building a personal brand on social media,” said Ideh Adekoya, who prefers using YouTube to build an audience over other platforms, like Instagram and TikTok.
“Some social media platforms value recency, while YouTube is evergreen,” she explained. “I wouldn’t say that building a platform on Instagram is passive, for example, because your Instagram posts from two years ago probably aren’t going to pop up on anyone’s feed. You have to keep creating content every day. But YouTube values SEO and the value of your content …….
