7 Frugal Passive Income Ideas For 2026

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I've become a little disillusioned with this concept of passive income thinking. It's... Okay, yeah. I just do like one little thing and then I just get money and it just hasn't been my experience. It's... Passive income is so misunderstood because it does come with... Essentially, you can do a certain amount of work over years and get paid incrementally, right? And what passive income is, is you do a lot of work upfront and then you make money passively off of that work. And nobody wants to hear that or say that. And yes, the cumulative of the work you do upfront is less than what you would do throughout the same time period, given if we're thinking about side hustles or whatever. But they are missing that really key piece that passive income requires a lot of work upfront. And so we wanted to do an episode that is about passive income, but realistic passive income, our experiences with passive income because we have done all of these things. What you can realistically expect to earn or to work or to expect from. And then you can figure out if this is something that you want to do because it isn't for everyone. It doesn't have to be for everyone. So with that in mind, we've got seven ideas to share with you. These are not scams. This isn't buy property and rent it out. These are real ideas for normal people, but it is work. Let's remember like it is going to take work. And there is only one of these that is truly passive and does not require a lot of work upfront, but will pay you passively forever. And that's number seven. So it's a little different from one through six, but stick with us because it's one that that I think everyone can do. Beginners, savants, whatever, everyone can do number seven. But we'll start with the first one, which I believe is platform building. And I'm going to say what I think the best place to build a platform on right now for beginners is and it's YouTube. It's why we're here because we have been. I have been a blogger. I've been a freelance writer for finance blogs. I have been a podcaster, a social media influencer. I say that with quotations. Social media will never be passive because you can make a lot of money, but you will never stop churning out content. You will not get paid passively on the work you have done just because of the algorithm of the nature of it. But something that does really support well to passive income is YouTube. People who made videos seven years ago are still getting paid per view for that video. If it's showing up on search or suggest, that's the nature of YouTube's algorithm. So it's just heads and tails differently. So both can be profitable. But when we're talking about passive income, YouTube, I think, is the best place to be building something that can be passive. Yeah, this can be really great for teachers, people who are good at explaining things or you've got a certain skill set in a niche. Wherever you're at, you probably have something to be able to teach another person. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you've got to start a whole business around it. It could mean that you put a video out a week or every other week on something that you know people are asking that people are asking you maybe in real life or you're seeing people are asking online and you've got a good way to explain it. It could be worth your time and energy to create that video and see what happens and keep building from there. But every one of these does require a bit of entrepreneurialism. So if you're thinking that that wasn't going to be the case. I'm so sorry. So sorry. Yeah. But the really great thing to also tack on to some of the things you listed about YouTube is its searchability function. And one of the reasons that we are placing such emphasis on this while still doing our podcast is because it's far easier to search for the type of content that you want to look for on YouTube than it is in like a Spotify or Apple podcast player. You go to a specific podcast because it's been recommended. They're not coming up in a recommended for you. You're not searching for topics within Spotify. We are on YouTube. And we are watching YouTube far more than any other entertainment platform. Apparently it is outpacing Netflix, Hulu. It is the number one streaming app on TV. Like it has beat Netflix and every other. Yeah. So it's number one. And it is the number one place for people to listen to watch podcasts. So it just makes sense that that we be here. And I think starting out I would have started out a lot earlier here. And if you're starting out, I think YouTube is the best place. If you want to create a passive income stream, that is your ultimate goal. OK, the next category is affiliate marketing. And this kind of tax on to anything that you might do, whether it is YouTube or a blog or you have an email or you choose to try and grow an Instagram channel. Affiliate marketing is something that could help to make you money passively without needing to have your own product that you're selling. So that's where you are talking about a brand that you believe in. And for every conversion that happens to that brand because of you, you get a kickback. So for instance, for us, CIT is an affiliate brand for us, where whenever somebody signs up for a high yield savings account at CIT, we do get some money only if you use frugalfriendsandpodcast.com slash CIT, which we hope you do. And we you hope that the creator only promotes things that they truly believe in and usually, you know, that is the case, especially with affiliates. I think you can trust that more with affiliates than you can with brand deals. But yeah, so that's something that you can promote and make small kickbacks on forever. That link works in perpetuity. And a lot of people do this on a smaller scale, right? If you have Rakuten, they've given you an affiliate link, right? It's it's that refer referal. Yeah. Yeah, people will call it a referral link. And so there are times that we in our regular everyday life will refer someone to the credit card we're using, refer someone to the cleaning product we like. And we might get a kickback for that. So it's it's that concept only trying to get it out to a larger audience. So if you can find a way to be able to do that again, whether it's on Instagram or you want to start a newsletter or you are thinking about YouTube, then that'd be a great platform to be able to have some of those multiple layers of income, right? You can earn money just off of the views that you receive on a YouTube video. But you could also be talking about an affiliate brand and whoever signs up for that, you also get money for. So thinking through having multiple layers is also going to be really beneficial for long term monetization. Yeah. And you can make a lot of money through affiliates. So I'm thinking of two YouTube creators right now. Gabe Bolt does a like a minimalism channel and he has like, I don't know, like 600,000 followers, but he started a second channel where he I think reviews portable saunas or something like something very niche, but an expensive product, something he's interested in. And his channel has maybe 2000 subscribers or something. And he said he had made with that little few subscribers, $20,000 because he's using affiliate marketing for these sauna reviews. And so if you find something that's very high ticket that you're very passionate about, then you could do a review channel on it. There's review channels for treadmills, for ice baths, for all kinds of trendy things. Now, obviously the more expensive you go and the less platform you have to start with, you'll probably have to buy some of these before they're just given to you. So that you have that startup capital to think about, right? But this can be something where you can make a substantial amount of money. If you know about the product, if you're passionate about the product or the service, you can make it quickly. Our friend Jamie Troll on YouTube, she helps business owners choose bookkeeping software. So she has an affiliate partnership with several bookkeeping softwares and does review videos. And when somebody signs up for that product through one of her videos, because of one of her videos, they click on her affiliate link, she gets a kickback. And she makes tens of thousands of dollars a month with not a large channel. So you can scale very quickly with affiliate marketing. If you do some of that initial groundwork with a YouTube channel specifically, you're not going to do the same thing with with social media. I don't think you can do the same thing with a newsletter even, because even that you're going to have to keep sending over and over. You can get a set like an email sequence that goes out on automation. But I just think YouTube is the is the best passive platform for that. Next is selling digital products. So we criticize this a bit in our last episode. But here's where I think digital products can truly be a passive moneymaker. So they're not that hard to get started. You can get a free Canva subscription and do a lot with a free Canva subscription. No kidding. And it's so affordable, you know, two or three hundred bucks for the year and you can do even more. And then you can tack you can mention that in your YouTube video. We have three digital products. They're spreadsheets. We have a spending planner, which is a monthly budget. We have an annual finance planner where you can literally plan your entire life in a couple tabs on a spreadsheet. And then we have a meal planning spreadsheet where you can organize all of your meal planning and prepping and food inventory. So we'll link to those in the description if you're interested in seeing them. That's it. That's a simple mention that if it fits in with the review of whatever you're doing, like I also have a digital product that's an ebook that tells you like my journey into getting into this or can better explain how to do it or whatever. As a tack on then within the digital product, you can even include affiliate links where it makes sense. So then you have them on the video and in the digital product. All of this does take some back end knowledge, things that you could you could understand and YouTube videos will help you to be able to do. But in order for it to be truly passive, someone could be buying this product while you're sleeping. You've got to know how to set up a landing page, be able to take money, have that product be delivered to the person who purchased it. There's a lot of automations that you need to set up and some kind of technical things to know. But again, learnable, all available free knowledge on the Internet. You don't need to buy anybody's course to learn how to do those things. All available for free. OK, this next one, you have more knowledge on this, but it is print on demand merch. So being able to have a design, whether that's the t-shirts or hats or mugs or whatever it is, that you don't actually have to have the inventory for. But the designs for allowing people to be able to purchase them. And once they're purchased, those products are then made and shipped to them could be a way for you to make money. Yeah, you can do this on Amazon, Printify, Printful. Printful is what I use and you can sell them on Etsy, Amazon. So you don't actually need a platform to do this. The algorithm on Amazon or Etsy can really get you far if you're using the right keywords. You also don't need to be an artist. Honestly, it's better if you're not an artist because trending shirts that just say words on them honestly did best for me. You know, seasonal like Halloween, Christmas, as long as it's not copyrighted, copywritten, just like very funny shirts that say funny things on them that are very relevant to whatever is going on in the world right now. Like that's going to do best. You could pay to run ads to them if you do some good like search engine optimization. So like good key wording, then the algorithm will will push it out pretty well. Which could be fun if you're especially witty. You've got some good ideas, but I think it's worth considering just the the sustainability side of things, which I think is the reason. I mean, why we don't have a merch shop for frugal friends, which sometimes is a bit of a bummer, but also realizing most of us don't need another T-shirt or a mug. It's a so for us not having merch is an intentional move. But you can if you build a community around your YouTube have merch with funny inside sayings. So I'm thinking of Pat Flynn, who is known for smart passive income. That's his his brand. But then he started a YouTube channel with his son just for fun, which I which has honestly become more of his business now about like Pokemon. And so they say like weird Pokemon related things in the video. And they have made merch based on those like phrases. So that is an option that just becomes it's another one of those compounding things. These days, I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well made and versatile, it's not worth it. That's why I love quints. 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Quints.com slash frugal. Everyone has that one friend who somehow finds the best deals like the cute jacket that was only $12 second hand. Well, lately that friend has been me thanks to what not. It's the number one live shopping app in the US where you shop in real time with real sellers and real people. We hopped on a stream the other night and I grabbed an athletic set for $20 and a belt for $10 and you got a Disney sweatshirt for 30 bucks. All things we were already planning to buy, just not at those prices. Something I enjoy is actually seeing the items live. Sellers hold them up, show close ups, talk about sizing and answer questions in the chat. It's like thrifting with a group of people who totally get your style and also your love for a good deal. The sellers curate great stuff, including clothes, handbags, beauty and collectibles. You almost never pay full price, which we obviously love around here. And I enjoy using the app for a fun way to find second hand pieces and deals on brands you already love. Download the what not app today and get free shipping on your first order. Just search W H A T N O T what not in the app store and start scoring amazing deals. Next is hear me out. Online mini courses. Don't love it. Don't love it at first. OK, so people will pay for shortcuts for the things they need to know. So you can buy. I think if you're going to learn passive income, buying a mini course is a safe bet. There is no reason you need to pay a thousand, two thousand, five thousand dollars to learn this. There is absolutely no reason. But if you're going to spend a couple hundred dollars, no more than five hundred from somebody who you've listened to a lot and you trust, that could be an easy way to find out about these websites where you need to sign up for to learn how to set up the automations that you need to set up to make this stuff passive. So all these like kind of nuanced things that you can learn on your own, but you want to learn them faster all in one place from one person. That is really good. And so if you have a skill or know something that you could make a one to five hundred dollar course on, then that could be really helpful. And that could be an addition to your, you know, your platform that you have that you're already making passive income on. But then there are also these new mini course sites. Like it started with masterclass, but now there's a ton of them where people can just go and find mini courses on different things and then just sign up for them. So there's also now, which is why I think many courses are the way to go. Now there are places people are already going where they want to learn random things and are searching through mini courses. And I don't know if you know any of those sites like off the top of your head, you can put them in the comments. I think one of them might be school with a K. Skillshare. But yeah, there's a lot of new ones. So I think putting it on that can help you get it out there with if you're starting out without an audience, it can just be like one extra place to get it out there before you build the main thing. Yeah, which is kind of like if you've got ideas for a YouTube channel, this would kind of translate to that too. Like you could do it in a more extensive explainer on something that is an upsell to people. And here's one place that I'd be careful finding information. People who are on YouTube making money, telling you how to make money on YouTube. Because if you're telling people how to make money on YouTube, where is the place everybody's going to be going to learn? YouTube. So of course they're going to be really popular. So if you're telling people how to make money on YouTube, if you see that, I want to see them having a B to C, which is business to customer, not business to business or business to consumer. I want to see them having a totally non related YouTube business that's current, that they are currently running and they know currently what is working. Yeah. So just who you are learning from because the data could be, at building businesses about YouTube on YouTube, but are they good at building businesses about other things on YouTube? Again, I feel like this is such an area for teachers. I know that we often feel like, OK, teachers don't have much room to be able to increase their salary within that specific role. And it does stink that, OK, you'd have to have this like side business. But it could be you take one summer to put in some extra effort to do a mini course on how to build out curriculum or lesson plans week to week. If you are really good at your job, which most teachers are, there's a reason you went into it. There's a reason you're still in it. Because if you wait, you ain't good, you probably ain't in it anymore. Yeah, you do one course on classroom management, whatever it is. You know, the stuff that you didn't actually learn in college and now you've had to had real life experience and you've come to the. You don't have to be an expert in it either. You just have to be a step beyond somebody else that you're teaching. Oh, my gosh, hear that again. You don't have to be an expert in it. You just have to be one step ahead of the girl who is just starting out. OK, there's value in that perspective because experts who get so far ahead forget the perspective of a beginner and as somebody who's not a quote unquote expert, you're probably more of an expert than you think you are. But somebody who just considers themselves a little bit ahead of the journey can empathize with that perspective in a modern way that somebody who maybe remembers what it was like to be a beginner 20, 30 years ago could never. So there is room for you and there's a need for you if you have something to teach. And we, especially women, always think we have to justify our expertise with some kind of like accolade and and no, I think it was Alana Marr, the rugby. Now she doesn't play rugby. I don't know. I'm so sorry, Alana. You're not listening to this. So. But she was saying how like a man who played basketball in high school will be like, yeah, I'll coach my son's basketball team or baseball team or whatever. Whereas a woman's like, oh, I didn't play in the WNBA. I didn't play in college. Like I can't coach. I can't coach. Right. No. Like if you have experience that's a little if you played in high school, you're going to be better than somebody who like is in elementary school, who hasn't even been to high school. You know, like you don't need to be this out of touch expert to be helpful to the person coming up behind you. And I think we would all do better to just internalize that wisdom. Yeah. So. Yeah. So consider. What are you? What are you good at? What are people coming to you for? There could be room for you to make a course about it. OK. Number six. I really like this one. I know a lot of people who this has worked for, including this one sitting right here. Self publishing. Hear me out. It is it is high effort, but that return on time energy investment can be real decent. If you can write a good book and it doesn't even have to be a long book, it can be short book. But something again, kind of similar to like creating a mini course, this is just writing. You don't have to use your your verbal voice at all. Put something down on paper that could be an explainer or a how to or some sort of guide. This could even be planners, workbooks, journals, right? It doesn't even have to be you writing out a whole fiction story. But if that's your jam, go for it. And not needing to get the contract with a big publishing platform. You can actually make more money by self publishing. Thanks to Amazon. And you might be able to make by getting signing with a publishing company. Yeah. So self publishing is what one of the big things that makes me passive income. Literally, it is truly passive income. And I make at least a couple hundred dollars a month. Just even now. Even now. So I have all the books been out since 2017. So it's nine years, a couple hundred bucks a month. It used to be a lot more when I was doing more promotion, when the books were newer. So it ebbs and flows. The more effort you put in, the more you make. Duh. OK. Let's if you haven't gotten that by now, you haven't been listening. So tune back in and the more effort you put in, the more you make. Right. So at least in this. Not if they tell you that in an MLM or network marketing, they're lying. OK, that's where this doesn't apply. But for self publishing, I don't put any effort in and I still make a couple hundred bucks a month, but I did put a ton of work in on the front end. So mine is a shorter book. It's maybe like 20 to 30,000 words. Whereas Buy What You Love Without Going Broke are traditionally published book that is available at libraries, bookstores, online, everywhere. That one is closer to, I think. Sixty thousand. Sixty, yeah, sixty to seventy thousand. And even that for a traditionally published book is short. So you don't have to write a super long book. Mine's also in nonfiction. It's the No Spend Challenge guide. And I also have meal planning on a budget and pay off your debt for good. So but No Spend Challenge guide is the one that makes the bulk of the sales annually. So you have a couple options for self publishing. I recommend going that route of taking one thing literally as niche as no spend challenges, let's not go really broad, but one how to that you can really write a guide that you can insert your experience. And this is something you don't need a platform for either. Again, just like print on demand, if you've got some good search engine optimization. If you read the book Launch by Chandler Bolt, he owns self publishing dot com. That, I think, is the ultimate like everything you need to know about how to self publish online. I don't think you need his course, but the book is fire. So doing all of that to a tee every single thing in the book will get you good results. You've got to do everything, though. And so that's like a lot of effort into the front end for that really passive income on the back end. Literally all I do, I log in every three months, set up a series of Kindle countdown sales and I log back out. That's all I do for maintenance. So I think that is really good. If you're a fiction writer, I think you could turn this into a full time business as a fiction writer because fiction readers are voracious. If you write a series with six books in it and you do that three times, you could be making a full time income. Twenty books to 50 K is a group on Facebook where they help people do that. But I think they have like a website and maybe some articles too. But kind of that's the concept. If you write 20 books, you should be able to earn 50,000. Now you're going to have to get those books edited. You're going to have to pay for a cover on all those books. Let's not forget 20 books. But it's not super expensive like covers and editing. You won't pay more than a thousand dollars per book. And if you're really on a budget and your books are shorter, you could get that down. The bulk of it is editing. So that's where I think fiction and nonfiction books are where I think really the money is. You could also do what's called low content or guided books, planners, workbooks, journals, logs and trackers. Those are also a good option. But I do think self publishing, if you're not into building a platform, print on demand and self publishing are your best options. And when you add them again to a platform, it's just those like diversifying the passivity incomes. It will just add on top of each other and be brilliant. Yeah, this one's the most tempting to me, honestly. Now that I have co-written a book, I'm like, OK, maybe I could self publish something. It is a one. So I'm a writer at heart and the like planning out a journey for a reader to take to start at one point, which is I'm hopeless, I'm desperate, I need to figure out how to solve this problem. Empathize with them on different parts of the journey and answer those questions that they may have, which again is why it's good to be closer to the start than further away from it, not even considering yourself an expert, but just a little bit ahead of the journey because you can empathize, empathize and remember all of those struggles and questions you had throughout the journey and then lead them to a desired outcome is really gratifying. And it's not. Yes, I do believe you need to be an expert to write on certain things, I think in the medical, medical for sure. Or if you're writing about personal finance in general, yes, but like small things like I wrote the book on literally meal planning on a budget, right? One thing, how to pay off your debt for good. One thing, no spend challenges. So one thing you don't need to be like the ultimate expert. You just need to have accomplished it and have enough perspective on that one thing to be able to take somebody else on the same journey. And we've gotten there, folks. The last one, number seven, that is the only actual truly passive way of earning money. If you heard one through six and you're like, no, not for me, tune back in because number seven is for you. I don't care who you are, seven is for you. It's investing. And hear me out. Hear me out. Investing and compound interest is the only truly passive way to make money without doing anything. And I'm not talking about real estate investing. No, real estate investing is a lot of work. I'm saying investing in your 401k or your IRA. And if you've maxed those out, your HSA, taxable accounts. Stuff like that. So when you put a dollar into an investing account, it grows. Say it grows 7 percent, it's growing you seven cents. That seven cents you can put back in. And now your dollar seven grows at 7 percent and then more compound interest. So maybe it goes to seven or a dollar 14 and then we're compounding. Right? We're never just a dollar is just adding simple interests like your loans are. No, we're going up, up, up. It's our moment. That is compound interest. And that is the best way to get paid passively. So if you are not into a side hustle, if 2026 is not the year of hustling for you, you need to be prioritizing investing like a maniac. And to be fair, we're not talking about investing for being able to live off of that investing income within that year or the next year. Like primarily when we talk about investing, it is for retirement. Most of us don't have the level of wealth to start being able to draw from our investments. That's what we do in retirement. But this is still us earning passive income for ourselves, maybe at a later date. It could be that because you become so good at this and you do earn more and you do have some of these other passive incomes that you are able to eventually get there. That's not going to be where you start. We're going to start with the tax-advantaged retirement accounts. But eventually it could be. It may be that you end up being able to earn money, pull that money out year over year from your investments. It's not tip currently what we're talking about. It is possible. But at the end of the day, earning interest on your money is the most passive thing you could do. And that doesn't take away that it requires more work in the beginning. Right? This just because you don't have to do more physical work, you know, like building a business or making videos or whatever, does not mean you won't do work. You will do more work to invest more in the beginning because the more time money has to sit in the market, the more it makes, the more it can withstand market dips and still continue to compound so that you get to a point where your money is making the amount of money you need to live in a month. So if you need four thousand dollars to live, eventually your money gets to a point where it is earning four thousand dollars a month. And that is when you can get to a point where you can you're living entirely on your passive income, which is, you know, what the fire community wants to do. It's not what everyone needs to do or will do, but that is kind of like the idea. So starting early, what we did was in our 20s, we maxed out everything we could. IRAs, 401ks, we just maxed out everything. And now in our 30s, when we had kids and we're paying for daycare and a lot of other expenses, we're not investing. But that money is going. So say we we invested an extra fifty thousand dollars by doing that. That fifty thousand dollars invested in our 20s versus had we had just spread it out over our 20s and 30s, it will make us more in the end that we did it in our 20s versus spreading it out over our 20s and 30s. We will end up with more money as a result of the same fifty dollar fifty thousand dollars being invested. It's wild. You can you can invest fifty thousand dollars over ten years and let it grow 20 or over fifteen years and let it grow fifteen or over twenty years and let it grow ten. You will always end up with more money in the end. All things given the same if you invest more up front, if you invested it over that ten years and then let it grow in the 20. Obviously, if you keep investing like you're going to end up even better. But like all things the same, the more time your money has to sit in the market, the more money it will make you while you sleep. And you know what feels like passive income? We set it up once. It just keeps happening. I feel wealthy. I know we we threw that we threw that link up there and we just keep getting paid dividends every single week in our sleep. The bill of the week. That's right. It's time for the best minute of your entire week. Maybe a baby was born and his name is William. Maybe you paid off your mortgage. Maybe your car died and you're happy to not have to pay that bill anymore. Duck bills, buffalo bills, Bill Clinton. This is the bill of the week. Hi frugal friends. This is Sarah. My bill of the week is awesome. I got the best kind of mail today. It was an unexpected refund check from my GI doctor for over $300. And I had completely written that money off. So getting it back feels like free cash. It is such a nice surprise and a reminder that sometimes good things pop up right when you least expect them. Thanks for everything you do. Love listening to you. Bye. Oh, Sarah. Yay. This is so fun. This is so fun. I love getting money. We love you. You do love getting. When you get money in the mail that you weren't expecting. That's passive income. I've had some passive income for a short. That's probably a refund and don't girl math. That's true. Don't girl math. That's not girl math. Yeah. Here's the downside of that, though. Every time you go to the mail, you start to think, maybe I'm going to get a check today. Like most days you don't get random checks in the mail. I don't go in. I think I'm going to get a bill today. I think most people go to the mail and they think they're going to get a bill today. I don't know why you think you're going to get money. I've experienced getting money in the mail and refunds. And and then it just kind of like makes me think this is just going to keep happening to me now and it doesn't. But it's a good day when it does. And I'm celebrating with you, Sarah. Glad it happened for you. Enjoy that refund check. Please spend it values based values aligned. If you are listening and have a bill that you want to share with us, if it has to do with random money being found in your mailbox or found on the ground or found in your pockets, I love that. I love found money. Or if it has to do with being Bill and maybe you're dropping money. OK, doesn't matter. Your name is Bill. We want to hear from you. For girlfriends podcast.com slash Bill. Can't wait for it. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale ups online in person and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your one dollar a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. And now it's time for the lightning round. All right. What's the first passive income you ever tried and how did it go? You first. So I was trying to think back and I think I think I started with affiliate marketing when I was a baby blogger. Signing up for referrals and affiliate links was what I tried first. And when I then I think self publishing was next. I added a resource page kind of like we have in buy what you love. We have a resource page that you go to. You can get the link when you get the book and it's got all these resources on it. And I did the same thing with no spend and put affiliate links in there. So it was good. All of these things that we mentioned, they build upon and they are intertwined. Like if you're going to do one, you might as well do the other six, right? So there's just no reason not to. And I yeah, that was the first thing I did and it went well. And I still do it on things that we truly believe in. You know, we've got CIT for savings accounts. We've got ethos and ladder and fabric for life insurance, which we like believe are super important, Rakuten, which can save you a ton of money or get you cash back on like literally things you're already buying online and all the other things that we mentioned. Yeah, mostly in the friend letter. So if you're not getting the friend letter for girlfriend's podcast.com, we send an email every time we upload an episode and we'll also kind of like give something educational and oftentimes that will include an affiliate link to a relevant place. I'm realizing that so much of my trying to earn money is so active, which I'm going to have to dig into the reasons behind that later on my own. But Eric and I did try to have like a vlog at one point, like a YouTube channel when we were living in the motor home, like documenting the renovation of the motor home, lifestyle within the motor home. And Jennifer, if we would have stuck with it. That video, I saw it. The video did well. If we would have stuck with it, we would have done so we would. I wouldn't be sitting here right now. I'd be truly retired. I'd be 100 percent. It's just another like sell for YouTube that they said it and forget it. And they never got monetized. Yeah. But like without any promotion. Yeah, we've got like 20,000 views on one of the videos. Yeah, this really has popped off. And YouTube did that for them. Yeah. Yeah. And this was 2016. This was before everybody was making like the big YouTube channels now talking about like van life or minimalist life, whatever. They are after 2016. I'm like, no, I just there's like three of them. We couldn't keep up with recording and editing and. It just felt like so much work. It's work up front, which is why the first thing you hire out is editing. And you don't know you're not making any money off of it. So you don't know like is all of this effort going to work out for me. So there is an element of like you really have to enjoy it. Yes, some degree. To be able to keep going with it. But yeah, man, I look back and I'm just like if I had kept going. But you know what? We've kept going with this and I'm so grateful for that. Like we can say we weren't making any money off of it. We just loved it enough to keep with it and the consistency has paid off. Yeah. Yeah. OK, well, thanks everyone for being here. Thank you also for reading our book, which we did get traditionally published so that you can get it from library. OK, so if you've read the book, even if you've read it because you got it from the library, please leave us a review like this one from Karen. It's five stars. I just love Jen and Jill. Their podcast is one of my favorites. And so I bought this audio book. I'm really glad I did because it was just as enjoyable as listening to the podcast. Yes, this book isn't a nuts and bolts finance book. It's way more than that. This gets into what money is as a tool and what emotions dance around money. The soul of what life is like dealing with money and making decisions that uphold your values and goals rather than budget graphs and piles of numbers on a chart. If you're sick of a capitalist society and Dave Ramsey an equal measure, but know you still have to buy stuff and pay attention to finances. This will help you keep your soul intact at least. Karen, what a phenomenal review. You get us. We feel seen. Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much, Karen, for reviewing. If you've read the book, we would so appreciate a review on Amazon, even if you didn't buy it there. We would love if you would subscribe to the YouTube channel. It helps us grow this channel, which we just told you is so important to the foundation of everything that we do, even if you're an audio listener. If you come over here and just hit subscribe on YouTube, we would be eternally grateful and let us know in the comments what you think about passive income, what you're going to do, what you're not going to do, what you've tried. I hope that everyone's at least going to invest. Minimum. I hope that for you and we will we'll see you next time. Bye. Frugal Friends is produced by Eric Siriani. Jill, when you were making notes mid episode on our our last episode, you wrote photos, but initially you wrote photos like potato like you would potatoes. Like it was a mashup of photos and potatoes. Oh, wow. Did you correct it? No, you corrected it. Oh. And you were there. And I was just like, oh, potatoes and you love potatoes. I do love potatoes. And then that's what I thought about. So if you're hungry, these are the things that I think about when we're recording episodes is not always the episode that I'm thinking about or the subject matter. Sometimes I'm thinking about like, oh, potatoes. Jill loves potatoes. It is wild how our brains can not like totally multitask, but kind of just be in a different place while still semi present. Like there are so many times when I look at you. Dissociate reality. I'm also looking out the window and there are so many interesting things that can happen out there. Like for instance, at one point you were talking and I could see the moon and a small airplane coming in for landing. Oh, cute. Like that'd be a cute photo. I wonder where they're landing at. Like are they going to St. Pete Clearwater or are they going to what's that smaller airport? Um, the one. Yeah, we know. Yeah. And then there's also another building being built and there's cranes happening and things going back and forth. And sometimes I'll try and get a look at like, what's the progress happening? You can see it a lot of times like in the video where I'm just like clearly looking at something far off in the distance. And I'm thinking about potato. I'm looking at my screen, but I'm thinking about potatoes. So that's a behind the scenes of a passive and you know, every podcaster is doing the same thing when you look at Alex Cooper, Joe Rogan. You know, at some point she was sitting there looking at Cardi B being like potatoes. Maybe not Cardi B, but somebody. I mean, they're probably you all are probably listening to us. Thinking about potatoes randomly. Yeah, thinking about. If you're if you're a real one, you're still here. This doesn't play on the YouTube version. So why don't you go over to the YouTube comments and comment potatoes and let us know you're a real one. Oh, that's a good challenge. All right. OK, bye.