Isn't passive income a cornerstone of of the Rich Dad Poor Dad Books? This long predates 2020. I would say selling masks and only being $800 in the hole is a lot better than starting a "regular business" and down $80k-800k.

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Glyptodon 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My memory of RDPD was that it preaches getting assets which generate income, not that your management of those assets would be passive. Though obviously it also did have a subtext of "scale some kind of assets that generate income to a certain point and you can pay someone else to do more of the grunt work while you look into a new opportunity."

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wj 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You’re right. Books like the Four Hour Workweek and Escape From Cubicle Nation were guides to passive income twenty years ago.

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ghaff 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s not totally risk-free income (but what is) but a decent pile invested sensibly makes for pretty good passive income depending on your goals.

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bluGill 5 hours ago | parent [-]

now where do you get that pile to invest? I have a pile invested - but I'm close to retirement and it took me many years to save it up.

	▲	ghaff 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		By working and investing. More successfully at some points than others. But you’re totally right that different people are better set up and more or less inclined to move on from a job than others.

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ryandrake 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, it was the exact same scheme. Rich Dad Poor Dad was basically "Buy lots of cheap, crappy houses and become a slum lord" expanded into thousands of pages of books, seminars, and self help guides.

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datadrivenangel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

and Kiyosaki has declared bankruptcy at least once!

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qzw an hour ago | parent [-]

There really should be a special category for business books written by people who’ve gone bankrupt. I know at least two well known examples, but there’s got to be a whole lot more.

	▲	jimbokun 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Dave Ramsey went bankrupt but to be fair he incorporates it into his teaching. “Hear are the things that led me to bankruptcy, and here are the things I did to climb out of it and become financially stable again.”

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b00ty4breakfast 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been hearing about "passive income" for at least the last 10 years, and I reckon it goes back further than that.