17 Uncommon Passive Income Ideas for Financial Freedom in 2024

Introduction

In a world where the traditional 9-to-5 grind is being redefined, many people are now looking for passive income to achieve financial independence. However, numerous other possibilities have not been exploited beyond the usual rental properties and stock dividends. As we enter 2024, we will reveal our new book, 17 Uncommon Passive Income Ideas.

These ideas will reward you financially and take you on a journey to financial liberation. They are far from being your ordinary side hustles. They are hidden treasures among numerous business opportunities waiting for daring individuals to pursue them.

Every idea is a potential ticket to making money via innovative methods ranging from leveraging emerging technologies to reinventing ancient crafts in digital marketplaces. So let us embark on this voyage together and discover how to earn money while you sleep, travel, or even enjoy your hobbies like never before. Say hello to the world where your earning isn’t just passive but creatively active!

1- Participate in Sleep Studies

The first passive income idea on the list is participating in sleep studies. Yes, you can get paid to sleep, which might be the ultimate form of passive income. Participating in research projects and clinical trials involves understanding natural sleep patterns and disorders. Research institutions, universities, hospitals, or clinics typically conduct these.

You can often do these in the comfort of your home. You have to hook up some equipment so they can monitor you. Sometimes, you might have to go in and sleep in a clinic or a hospital setting. But this is legitimate; you can apply for it in clinicaltrials.gov. Some websites, such as sleepstandards.com, cost you $2,000 to do this.

Even NASA pays people $19,000 to stay in bed for two months. Now, in that case, you have to stay in bed the whole time; you can’t leave your bed anymore and sleep beautifully. I kind of just included that one as a joke. However, there are many legitimate sleep studies, and even ZipRecruiter says you make about $35.27 an hour participating in sleep studies.

It’s not a way to make a full-time income or anything like that, but it’s interesting to look into. I’ll give it a 5.5 out of 10 opportunity score.

2- Rent Out Useful Household Items

The following passive income idea will be renting out helpful household items, including tools, appliances, and equipment. Because let’s be honest, how often do you use your lawnmower or weed whacker? You can do this quickly on Neighbor, Fat Llama, or Rent My Items.

So you list different items around the house they could rent on the platform, and the platform pretty much takes care of all the rest for you. Then, if you ever need to use the item, you temporarily close down the listing. It’s that simple.

I saw this funny article where this guy talks about who is paying these prices because he’s sharing all the dumb stuff that he rents out. For instance, he rents out a cornhole game which I think everyone’s probably played before. You throw a little bean bag at a board with a hole in the center of it. If you can get it in the hole, you score a point.

He also rents out beer pong supplies and a beer pong table. He says he makes up to two thousand dollars every weekend just renting these things out, but he’s only doing it as a side hustle. I’ll give this one a 9 out of 10 opportunity score.

3- Rent Out a Driveway

The following passive income idea is renting out a driveway. Yes, this is one that not everybody can do. You do have to have a driveway, and you probably have a driveway in an area that people would want to park in. This is especially good if you live right next to maybe a big stadium or event that happens every year. You probably already know about this if you live in that place.

You can charge people a ton of money to park. If you live right next to the Kansas City Chiefs football stadium, for instance, but even if you don’t live in a super convenient location, some apps will still help you do this—for example, Just Park, Parkable, and Spot Hero.

It allows individuals to list their driveways for rent and connect with drivers needing parking spaces. So, as an example, let’s say somebody works two blocks away from you in an office building, and they don’t have any suitable parking spaces or have to pay for parking. They could make a deal with you and park there every day, and then all they have to do is walk two blocks away.

Here’s a story about a caregiver who makes $10,000 a year renting out his driveway. It’s probably the most passive thing you could do. It’s just a piece of concrete sitting there doing nothing, and you can make $200 a month from it. If you have a big driveway, whoa, wow. You can make a lot more.

So, this is another excellent way of actually making money. It’s kind of like real passive income. You must set it up once, and it’s good to go. I’ll give this one a 9 out of 10 opportunity score.

4- Domains Trading

The following passive income idea is not entirely passive and requires some expertise, but it is still good: domain trading. In this method, you buy different website domains that you think will increase in value over time. Then, you hold them for a few years and do nothing with them. Then, a few years later, you can sell them for, sometimes, ten times the price.

This is, honestly, one of the most common ways that I’ve seen people make a little bit of passive income on the side, and it’s pretty predictable. For instance, when crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, or whatever started to become popular, many people just bought up every crypto-related platform.

So crypto.com, cryptocoins.com, coinbase.com, and cointelegraph.com are based on anything loosely related to cryptocurrency. Many of those domains are worth thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars now, but many people bought them up for 10 or 50 bucks back in the day.

So if you can foresee something getting big in the next few years, like, you know, AI or maybe virtual reality, artificial intelligence augmented reality, something along those lines, you can go ahead and buy these domains, and then a few years from now after absolutely nothing with them. For that entire time, you can go ahead and sell them.

A guy has made millions of dollars selling domain names to big brands like CNN, including some of his sales *****.com for 8.9 million. I might have to bleed that out, but you know what I mean. He also sold ireport.com to CNN for $750,000. Now, of course, he got into this game very early.

He got into buying domain names probably in the 1990s and early 2000s. You won’t be getting those huge domain names these days. That said, there are still a lot of trends happening. Pay attention to the trends that are popping up and then buy domain names related to those trends. So, this one does require some expertise.

It would be best to practice and research, but once you’ve bought the domains, it’s incredibly passive. So, I’ll give this one a 9 out of 10 opportunity score.

5- Creating a Boring YouTube Channel

The following passive income idea is creating a boring YouTube channel. Now, you might be asking me, Arslan. Why would you ever make a boring YouTube channel? YouTube’s supposed to be lots of fun, right? Well, YouTube is a lot of fun. I like watching YouTube videos, but let’s be honest, you probably watch YouTube videos about half the time.

It’s not for fun but for education because you’re looking something up. Somebody is making educational videos that people look up all the time and then watch. Is it the funniest thing in the world to create educational videos? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. But with that being said, if you find the right topic and start making videos about it, that is a great way to make a ton of money.

Most people who want to start on YouTube want to become vloggers, video game streamers, or make a Mukbang channel or something like that—something fun. So, there’s more opportunity to make these boring channels available in the educational niches. Focus on helping other people. Try to solve real problems for real people out there.

I am not necessarily trying to make entertaining content, but many people see, you know, the Mr. Beast of the world making $54 million a year and the Jake Pauls of the world making, like, $40 million a year. They think that entertainment is the way to make money. That’s got to be the best way to do it.

The truth is that it is kind of like a winner-take-all market. Most people who start entertainment channels don’t make any money, and many lose money. With educational channels, there’s less competition. There are a lot fewer people doing it, so it’s much easier to make money.

The coolest thing is, when you make this searchable content every single time you make a video, it’s like you’re putting a soldier out there who’s going to live an entire lifetime for you in every single moment of his her life and is dedicated to bringing you more views subscribers and making you more money.

So you have to do the work upfront, but once you put those videos out there, they will be searchable for years. So, if you’re willing to put in the work, if you’re willing to focus on solving other people’s problems and, you know, putting off the fun a little bit longer. You know, for a few years.

Then, you could have fun for the rest of your life because you started a YouTube channel that’s making you passive income forever. So yeah, I love this business model. But this is, in my opinion, without a doubt, the best way of making money. So, this one gets a 10 out of 10 opportunity score. I love this one.

6- Buying IPs

The following passive income idea is buying IPs. Now, what exactly is IP? It’s intellectual property. Just kidding, that is IP, but you will purchase internet protocol or IP addresses. Every single time you log on to the internet, you have what’s known as an IP address. Unless you have good VPNs, or you’re using some private server or something along those lines.

All these companies can track exactly who you are and what you’re looking up. A lot of people don’t like that. So, they’ll rent out other people’s IP addresses. That’s where you come in as the person running it out to them. Now, this is very passive once you create your IP addresses.

A lot of the time, you can make more money than what you’re paying for your internet service provider every month just by doing this. Now, there are several different companies you can do this. One of them is Ipv4 Global, and the other one is Loris.net. It’s pretty simple and easy to do.

The incompetence is relatively capped. You could have an IP address or empire, but that would defeat the purpose of doing this because it would be a lot of extra work. So, I’ll give this one a 7.5 out of 10 opportunity score.

7- Storing People’s Stuff

The following passive income idea involves storing people’s stuff. So, there have been so many different billionaires. Yes, billionaires with a B have been created in the United States and other countries that started storage businesses. Storage is a massive business in the United States and many other countries.

Did you know that if you have a house and some free space, you can rent it out? You can do this on several platforms, such as Neighbor, SpareFoot, and Store At My House. There’s a story about this lady who made an extra $26,000 just renting out her extra yard space on an app.

So you don’t even have to have necessarily house space, just space in your yard. There are countless different stories of people doing this, and even if you live in a small and medium-sized apartment, you can still make money doing this because the average rental price for a storage space, even a small storage space, is $60 to $180 per month.

The average rental price for a climate-controlled storage space is $75 to $225 a month. So, if you already have your air conditioner on in your house, guess what? That’s a climate-controlled space, and you can make even more money. So, this is Uber in the storage and rental market.

I like this one, which is super passive, honestly, actually passive; once you get it set up, I will give this one a 9 out of 10 opportunity score.

8- Investing in Bond

The following passive income idea is investing in bonds. Now, if you’ve ever hung out at a Country Club or just hung out with older people, they like investing in bonds; you know, there are so many different things that they could invest in, but for some reason, they choose bonds. Why is that? It’s a super, low-risk way of investing your money and ensuring you get a return from it.

Also, keep it highly liquid so you can pull it out immediately. The average return on corporate bonds is about four to five percent per year, and historic rates have been even higher, sometimes up to 15%. There’s a 30-year average of about 6.1 right now, but that doesn’t mean it will be that high in the future.

Treasury bonds are a little lower, about three to four percent, and municipal bonds are about two percent, but these are some of the safest investments you can make. Now, of course, I’m not a financial advisor. So make sure you do your research here. But with that being said, this is truly a passive way of making money.

If you have a bunch of money sitting there, you might as well put it in bonds or invest it in something else. So, I’ll give this one a 7.5 out of 10 opportunity score.

9- Invest in Index Funds

Another passive income idea could be to invest in index funds. For instance, if you were to invest in the S&P 500, it’s returned about %10 every year since we can remember, and the S&P 500 is the 500 most prominent company. This is another one that is considered to be an extremely safe investment.

You can make a ton of money with it. I think a lot of people know about index funds. I’m a big fan of them. I’ll give this one a 9 out of 10 opportunity score.

10- Investing in Art

Now, it is a slightly riskier type of investing. What’s been getting extremely popular lately is investing in art. You can do this on many platforms, such as Artsy, Saatchi Arts, and Christie’s. Art is a fantastic asset class that has been doing exceptionally well over the last 20 years.

In many cases, it’s outperformed many of the other standard asset classes now. Does that mean it’s going to continue in the next 20 years? Not. But it is a way of diversifying your portfolio. So therefore, I thought I would go ahead and put in the article that the most expensive painting in the world, the Salvatore Mundy by Leonardo da Vinci, was sold for a whopping 450 million dollars, and billionaires, for instance, invested in art all the time.

They think it’s a worthwhile investment, so this is a decent one to look into, especially if you want to diversify your portfolio. I’ll give this one a 6 out of 10 opportunity score.

11- P2P Lending

The following passive income idea is also much more risky, but it does have the potential for a higher return. It is P2P Lending, also known as person-to-person lending. This is basically where you lend money to other people on the internet who are also using the same website or app as you, and then you get to earn back interest on that money.

This is basically what banks and financial institutions do to us, so there are different platforms like Prosper, Lending Club, or Funding Circle. These allow you to do it to other people without having a bank or financial institution as the intermediary, and they charge a small fee.

Here’s the guy earning $300 to $400 monthly in interest. The average return for something like Prosper is about 5.7 percent. But people who are very good at choosing who to lend to can make much more money than this. So this one is decent. I’ll give it a 6.5 out of 10 opportunity score.

12- Advertising on Your Car

The following passive income idea is advertising on your car. This is where you wrap your vehicle in some advertisement from a company. There are many different companies. You can do this with Carvertise, Wrapify, and Stickeride, to name a few. As long as you don’t mind being kind of like walking or, in this case, driving advertisement, you can make some good passive income from this.

People report making an extra $70 to $180 monthly, which is entirely passive. They even say you can make anywhere from $100 to $500 monthly on the platforms. So, this one is super passive. It’s hard to argue here as long as you’re okay. With being a driving advertisement, this one’s excellent. I’ll give it an 8 out of 10 opportunity score.

13- Selling Your Notes Online

The following passive income idea is selling your notes online. So if you’re somebody who has maybe taken classes at a university or even a high school in some cases and you’ve taken notes on the different courses, or if you’re just somebody who’s good at certain subjects and you’re good at taking notes on those subjects, this could be an excellent opportunity for you.

So here are some examples of StudySoup and Stevia. Those are two perfect ones, and believe it or not, there are people out there who made two million dollars in revenue, literally just selling their study notes.

This lady, for instance, was a full-time emergency room nurse who took it well. In college and during her nursing days, she built a community on TikTok of 687,000 people. Then, she drove people to her Etsy store, where she sold her old notes. So that’s a perfect example—a good one. This is less passive than many others on the list. So, for that reason, I’ll give it an 8 out of 10 opportunity score.

14- Purchasing ATMs

The following passive income idea is purchasing ATMs. You’ve probably used an ATM before you put your card in, put your password in, and withdraw money from it. Well, what you didn’t know is that many of those ATMs are owned by individuals, not necessarily companies, and every single time you withdraw from the ATM, it usually charges you anywhere from fifty cents to three dollars and fifty cents.

A man, Paul Alex, actually does this for a living. So he started his first ATM, and you started making $500 a month from it, and about a year and a half in, he already had 30 ATMs. He was making $15,000 a month, and the average surcharge income for an ATM is about $450 a month. It also takes time to find a suitable location and set it up.

It is relatively passive after you’ve had that initial investment. If you are going to make this into an ATM empire, you will have to hire somebody to go and replace the cash for you. But this is a good one. I’ll give it a 9 out of 10 opportunity score.

15- Selling 3D Designs

The following passive income idea is selling 3D designs. This one is one that I’m very bullish about shortly because I think that with augmented reality, virtual reality, and 3D printing, selling 3D designs is going to be huge. Maybe you should buy some domains related to it.

So there are a bunch of different websites. For instance, you can do this on Shapeways Turbo Squid, CGTrader, and Sketchfab. You can make this on many things, such as gaming architecture, animation, and product design. Just as one example of the use cases for this type of thing, when 3D printing gets just a little bit better, you can design your own Halloween and cosplay costumes.

So, to be somebody for Halloween, you have to measure your dimensions. You design the costume you want online, and then it will automatically print it using a 3D printer. They will ship it to you, so I can almost guarantee you. This will be a massive business here in the next few years.

So, if you want to get into this and start designing and posting things on these websites, it could be a perfect opportunity. For instance, this design is sold for $2,400, but typically, 3D character models cost between $50 and $500. Those are the basic ones for the mid-range.

The 3D character models usually charge between $500 and $5,000, and for high-end 3D character models, they charge $5,000 more. So this is a huge business, and there’s real money in this, so it’s perfect. I think this one will be great in the next few years. I will give this one a 9 out of 10 opportunity score.

Uncommon Passive Income Ideas: Seventeen Inexpensive Ventures to Look into in 2024

Closing this search for passive income, it is evident that the path to financial freedom is diverse and gratifying. These seventeen uncommon passive income ideas are not just ways of earning but a ladder toward economic independence and stability.

Some unusual routes to earning money exist, starting with 3D design printing and ending with Investing in Art. Artistic production, crypto art, or investment in dividend-paying equities suggest new possibilities that defy established thinking.

To unlock financial liberty, we must be ready to draw up new ideas and become open-minded enough to learn and try them out, making it complicated. As such, anyone willing to break free from conventionality and seize their economic future will find 2024 full of opportunities.

So, as you stand at the threshold of this new year, consider these uncommon passive income ideas as options and invitations to a life where your time is your own and your earnings reflect your ingenuity. Here’s to unlocking financial freedom and crafting a future that’s uniquely yours.

By the way, I wrote an article about Passive Income Ideas that went viral. It’s “15 Passive Income Ideas to Boost Your Earnings Online”. You can check that article, too.