Everyone is sharing tactical solutions, which is great, but I've found that the root of the problem lies in not knowing your values, and I wish I was introduced to this concept at your age.
I learned about this in an excellent book called "10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management" by Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin Day Planner.
It recommends that you write your own Personal Constitution; much like the United States has a Constitution written by the Founding Fathers that guides the creation of future laws, you should create a Personal Constitution that guides your future behavior.
It's essentially a prioritized list of what you hold most dear. Then whenever you need to make a decision, you act based on that list. Of course, you may choose to amend it at any time, so it's not a static document.
The process of creating your Personal Constitution is a difficult one so be prepared to set aside a few hours to really think things over. But the exercise is utterly priceless, as you'll have extraordinary clarity of mind and a rock solid decision making framework that allows you to focus on the things you most cherish.
Stephen Covey wrote a book along these same lines, First Things First [1], which advises to first define your roles in life, such as developer, parents, home owner, and so on, then identify the priorities in each of those areas, and schedule those things into your week first. He gives the "importance/urgency" matrix which is helpful for identifying which things you should be focusing on. After you have scheduled the important things into your week, you can schedule the unimportant items.
Having said that, you still have to make choices and stick to them. For this, you need to look at the science of habit change, which a good book is The Power of Habit [2]
I highly second using smile.amazon.com to do your online shopping and selecting the EFF (or ACLU) as the beneficiary. There's no change in prices for you; as a result, Amazon only donates 0.5% but every little bit helps.
Things in Shanghai aren't anywhere near as good as my memory of the States, but I'm concerned that either 1) my memory isn't serving me correctly and/or 2) the US has deteriorated since I left.
I actually started it for my then girlfriend whom I wanted to go snowboarding with me by buying a board to guilt trip her into coming along. We couldn't find a place with a lot of women's snowboards so I pulled up some datafeeds and scraped them just for the women's boards, some friends asked for the list, I got lazy emailing everybody so I made a site, threw up the affiliate links for funsies, and actually started making some money.
It's a seasonal earner which I don't recommend to anyone because my winter makes or breaks my year. It helps a lot that I don't live in the Western world anymore which reduces my cost of living, but Shanghai is getting more expensive by the day so I'm working on other revenue streams.
I completely agree with mixmax - webapps are just beginning to garner interest in a variety of different niches.
Most of the webapps you see are geared towards tech minded folks, but there's still a world of opportunity in other sectors.
For example, my startup provides real time analytics data for universities regarding their student enrollment. Nobody in this space is using a cloud hosted solution. Our competition has to install servers, go through the university IT department, and batch process reports... we're blowing people out of the water.
Another example is Woobius, which is basically providing a Basecamp for construction workers.
I believe that webapps are only going to get more popular as the younger, more tech-savvy generation is moving into the decision making roles in the workforce.
I think you might have a different idea of "passive income" than the rest of us here.
Passive income is money generated without requiring you to go to work, trading a set amount of hours for steady cash. Instead, it's spending the effort on building something (whether it be a book for royalties, a website for subscription payments, investments for interest / asset worth increase, or real estate for rental money) that generates a cash flow without requiring the 40 hour work week.
Granted, it's not "passive" in that you still need to spend the time and effort to get it up and running, but once your system in place there's usually much less time involved to keep it operating, which is why this type of income is much more attractive - you can scale this system to make much more money than you ever could through salary.
However, the risk is correspondingly higher; if your product doesn't do well, you don't get money, whereas you can get away with a reasonable amount of subpar performance at larger companies without too much problem.
Another try -
Do term deposits / Government Bonds / ?? pay a higher rate than the inflation rate?
If so - that is passive income. OBVIOUSLY it requires capital / time / effort / luck / something to start with... But once that part is done - the rest is passive.
Thanks for submitting! This was really important news for me.
I'm actually a huge fan of Prosper - I'm a lender with $500 invested, and I've actually gotten a 20% return because I spent a lot of time screening my borrowers, who have still yet to make a late payment, much less default.
I only accepted B and above credit ratings and generally just used common sense when selecting a borrower; very well written, well thought out profiles got priority, limited (1 or 2) late payments in the past were required. I always checked how much of their credit they were using versus how much they made, I never funded a loan near the $25k borrowing limit to avoid a hit-and-run default, I only funded good causes that suggested the borrower spends wisely, etc. Prosper gave a lot of financial information about these people, so I felt that I could make a pretty educated decision.
I hope Prosper registers with SEC so they can continue doing business. The platform is pretty amazing, and I think they really added value to the world. I was totally looking forward to scaling up my selection system by automating it, and Prosper was working on an API that would actually let me do that.
I never bought into their math, and didn't even really think about it. My plan was always to pick loans very carefully so that very few if any would default. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't do any subprime lending. :)
That said, I probably jinxed myself now and everyone in my portfolio will default...
They're not really a startup since they only accept donations, but I loved the idea so much I made my own version which does not randomly assign a string but instead allows users to pick their own phrase:
http://www.oneryng.com
Disallowing reassignment would leave a finite amount of (useful) keyphrases; my business model is to charge for people who wanted to keep their keyphrases for a duration of time.
Maybe I should make that more clear...
Detecting circular assignments is a great idea though, thanks!
I learned about this in an excellent book called "10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management" by Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin Day Planner.
It recommends that you write your own Personal Constitution; much like the United States has a Constitution written by the Founding Fathers that guides the creation of future laws, you should create a Personal Constitution that guides your future behavior.
It's essentially a prioritized list of what you hold most dear. Then whenever you need to make a decision, you act based on that list. Of course, you may choose to amend it at any time, so it's not a static document.
The process of creating your Personal Constitution is a difficult one so be prepared to set aside a few hours to really think things over. But the exercise is utterly priceless, as you'll have extraordinary clarity of mind and a rock solid decision making framework that allows you to focus on the things you most cherish.
Give it a shot!