ChatGPT’s 10-Year Guide to Passive Income — From $0 to $4,000 a Month (2024)

In 2023, 45% of Americans have a side hustle. Yet, the average monthly income from such activity is only $483, and entrepreneurs spend an average of 13 hours per week on it. This comes down to an hourly rate of $9.20, which is less than you can make working a regular 9–5 job. Yet by the end of this year, the global side hustle economy is expected to be worth $455 billion, so the opportunity to get a bigger slice of the cake has never been more ripe.

With the recent surge in popularity around using AI to do and answer just about anything, I thought of asking ChatGPT to come up with a plan for a 30-year-old person, with the goal of generating $4,000 in passive income by age 40. I went with 30 years old because I’m almost this “old”, and it’s also an age I think a lot of my readers will relate to. I decided to give the AI a 10-year timeline because I was curious to see if it would come up with anything novel, something I hadn’t thought about myself. Here is the exact prompt I used:

Passive income is a dream envisioned by many, but the truth is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Most people who claim to be making passive income work their butt off to keep their business going. They may have a team and be able to delegate more, but the engine always has to keep going in the background.

Those who make truly passive income and were able to stop working got to where they are today by working their butt off in the first place, often for years, if not decades. In both cases, money is earned as long as hard work is put in, so if you’re looking to make money without work, you need to reframe the way you think about wealth and money in general.

Note: The “financial plan” part is based on 4 different parts generated by ChatGPT. Each part starts with the AI tips (as a quote), and I then add my own insights based on my experience as…