Passive income is the source of a money that flows into your bank account regardless of whether you go work or not.  It’s a stream of income that continues to pay you every day, whatever you’re doing.

Passive income is a support line.  It not only bolsters your working income, but it pays you when you’re sick and it pays you when you’re on holiday.  It also pays you if your working income source dries up for whatever reason.  Everybody needs passive income, but very few people actually do anything about getting it.

A pension is passive income, but unfortunately, you have to wait until you reach retirement age in order to benefit from that source!

If you rely on a single source of income, derived from either going out to work for someone else or within your own business, you could be setting yourself up for hardship or financial difficulties at some point.  Injury, sickness, family circumstances, job loss and market down-turn are just some of the reasons that your salary or main source of income could suffer or even come to an abrupt end.  Of course, you can buy insurance to cover such events, but there are always catches and clauses that must be met to get that insurance money.  Furthermore, you only receive that money if you experience a loss of income and in the meantime, you have to pay the insurance premiums!

A couple of people I spoke to recently about passive income, both said “I don’t have time for a second job”.  Passive income is NOT about having a second job!   Of course, there will be some time and effort and perhaps expense at the outset, but the idea is that you are rolling a ball down a gentle slope – once it starts moving it will continue on its own.  There are also countless people for whom the passive income has become so good, they’ve quit their day jobs and focused their attention on creating more passive streams.

Over a series of articles I am going to discuss some of the many options for creating passive income.  Some streams require time, some streams require more effort and others require more money to get them rolling.

As a very general rule, those that require the most money require the least effort.  Those that require very little in the way of capital investment will demand more of your time.

FOREX falls into the first category and I want to share with you the results of my studies and investment into this lucrative, but scary business.

For many years I steered well away from foreign currency trading or FOREX as it’s generally known.  I’ve  had deeply ingrained images of highly stressed individuals, with bulging eyes from too many double espressos, hunched over computer screens studying unintelligible symbols.  That notion came from somewhere a long time ago and it’s been sufficient to deter me from FOREX trading ….until one day I removed my beliefs and emotions from the concept of Forex and gave it some REAL thought.  This is how the banks and Hedge Funds and other financial institutions really make their money!  Not from charging their customers  interest.  That just fuels their trading habit.  Every dollar they extract from customers is being played on the markets.  That’s where the billions of dollars of profit comes from.

The bottom line – There must be a way to consistently make a profit from currency trading.

Lifting the lid off the FOREX can, I discovered the following fascinating information.

Forex can be ‘played’ in one of two ways: either manually or using Expert Advisors (EA’s) also known as Forex Robots.

Manual trading requires a great deal of training and experience to reach the level where you can consistently make a profit.  Once you achieve this standard however, the potential profits are astounding.  $10,000 can become millions within the space of 12 months.  Allow me to dampen your enthusiasm here though – Between 90% and 97% (depending on whose statistics you use) of people who start trading Forex lose their money and quit.  You have to be tough, emotionally detached and thoroughly disciplined to trade the markets manually.

Forex Robots on the other hand, are computer programmes that trade automatically, without any other human intervention.  They work the markets unemotionally, according to strict parameters and based upon years of market analysis.  They know the best times to enter a trade and they know when to exit a trade.  EA’s play the forex game on the side of caution.  Some days they may not trade at all, if the market does not fall within its trading parameters.  Profits are considerably smaller, but they can still be well above anything you could achieve from other types of investments.

There are of course good robots and bad robots.  They might all have started out as good robots, but they have to be continually updated and that’s where my research directed me to a small cluster of excellent EA’s.

I will talk in more detail about these EA’s in another article, but if you itching to have a closer look now, I list for you here the top three EA’s:

Forex Legend – A brand new robot with live streaming video showing actual trading.

FAP Turbo – A long running, highly respected EA, which is updated monthly.

Megadroid – A highly specialized EA focusing on the most consistent currency pair EUR/USD

All three have a great reputation with proven profitability.  They been designed by experienced trading groups and all are regularly updated.

The great thing about these robots is that you can test them out for yourself.  Broker accounts are free to open and they will give you unlimited monopoly money with which to trade on the live markets.

Have fun with them and I’ll cover more details in my next article.

I have just recovered from the biggest challenge I have faced with MS Office 2010 – an incompatibility issue between Excel 2003 and Excel 2010.

Creating analysis tables for a client with numerous columns and rows should have been a simple, but time consuming task (that’s precisely the kind of work we love at Bright Green Future), but it turned into a nightmare when using two different versions of Office Excel.

Compatibility shouldn’t be an issue, the new version of a software programme should simply be an upgrade of previous versions.  In the case of Microsoft Office Excel, a work book can be saved either as a 2010 XLS file or as any one of a number of other formats including XML, PDF or Office version 97 – 2003.

To begin with the file was saved as straightforward xls 2010.  When the file was opened using Office 2003, the SUM values appeared as links to the computer that created the file.  When we tried to overwrite the links with the SUM values, the AUTOSUM feature wouldn’t work.

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Also, any data copied to other cells within the original sheet changed to #REF values from the original sheet and a number of other minor, but important errors just compounded the frustration.

I then had to return to the 2010 file and save it as Excel 97-2003 version.  This removed the link problem, but the SUM values were still not correct.  After ages spent fiddling around trying to get the data to match, the project had to be abandoned and started from scratch using Office 2003 to ensure absolute compatibility with the end users computer system.

This problem cost several hours of lost revenue, lost credibility and a great deal of frustration.  I have managed to overcome all of the software problems so far, but this one was too costly and I have decided to abandon Office 2010 and revert to Office 2007.

I sent a little ‘Frown’ to Microsoft, although my comments in the past have fallen into the pot with the millions of others I am sure they receive, so I don’t suppose they will reply now…..but it would be really nice if they did!  I would love to publish their response and if possible, I would like to publish the solution for anyone else having this issue.

It’s a shame, because the presentation of Office 2010 documents is excellent.  It’s so easy to create a really professional looking document in a nanosecond.  The toolbar and navigation systems are also far superior to the previous versions.

Are you having compatibility problems with 2010 Office?  Leave a comment.