Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
Here in Brazil we have it easy. The most boring funds (the ones which track the interbank rate - CDI) easily return around 12% per year (depending on the administration fee; the smaller the administration fee, the higher the return). With the inflation around 6% per year, this gives around 6% returns before tax. If you stay with the fund for at least two years (and it&#x27;s of the correct kind), the tax rate is 15% over the gains, so you have an after-tax return of around 5% per year above inflation. And that&#x27;s for a fund which basically never gives negative returns.<p>You can go further and buy government bonds directly, through the Tesouro Direto system. Those indexed by the SELIC rate (which is sort of related to the CDI) are currently around 13.5% per year, before administration fees and taxes (in fact, the boring funds I mentioned above mostly invest in these SELIC-indexed government bonds).<p>This will change when (and if) rates get lower, but so far, investing in these funds or bonds is the simplest (and one of the best) way to have passive income.