Forget Work. Passive Income Is the New American Dream. [View all]

Driven by a growing feeling that 9-to-5 jobs are a dead end, people are turning to social media to test out eccentric moneymaking schemes—along with a fair share of scams

Greg Keogh couldn’t stand commuting, office attire and feeling depleted at the end of a workday. To find a way out of his corporate 9-to-5, he decided to break into the world of so-called passive income.

Like most 30-somethings, he didn’t have a trust fund or enough savings to live off dividends. So he sought out a light-touch way of making money that would free up his time.

His escape hatch came from a chance conversation with a dog owner who was excited to have found a bigger-than-normal lint roller. A mechanical engineer by training, he designed one nearly as wide as a paper-towel roll and put it on Amazon, where sales took off.

Keough could have tried to build a lint-roller empire. Instead, he decided to coast. Seven years later, he works on it two hours or less in a typical month and personally nets about $50,000 to $115,000 a year.

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