About Income Investing

What this site is

Income Investing is a research reference for passive income. It covers income you can buy on an exchange — dividend stocks, preferred shares, bonds and bond funds, options premium and cash — alongside income that comes from lending, property and resources (private credit, commercial real estate, royalties, international income) and income people build rather than buy (side hustles, digital businesses, AI agents).

Every income type gets the same treatment, in the same order: the mechanism first — who pays you, out of what, and under what contract — then what it currently pays, what it costs, how it is taxed, how quickly you can get your money back, and how it fails.

The Learn library holds one reference page per income type, grouped into twelve categories. The course explains the six mechanisms that every passive income stream on earth uses, with a quiz to check what stuck. The calculators let you run your own numbers rather than take ours on trust.

Who it is for

The reader we write for is intelligent, financially literate in general, and new to the specific instrument in front of them. Someone who has just heard the phrase "business development company" or "ground lease" and wants the mechanics without a sales pitch attached.

It is also for the reader comparing two things that look similar and are not: a certificate of deposit against a Treasury bill, a REIT against a rental property, a covered-call fund against a plain dividend fund.

It is not for traders. There are no signals, no price targets, no model portfolios, no watchlists to follow and no trade ideas here. Framing is United States tax and regulation unless a page says otherwise, and pages say so when it matters.

What this site will not do

Four limits define the product more than any feature does.

• It will not give advice. No page recommends buying, selling, holding or allocating, and no page tells anyone what belongs in their portfolio. Ranked tables are research screens with the ranking rule published on Methodology, not buy lists.
• It will not manage money. We hold no client assets, take no orders, open no accounts and have no discretion over anyone's money. We are not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, bank, insurance producer, tax adviser or law firm.
• It will not sell your details. We do not sell, rent or broker personal information, and we do not pass an email address, a contact message or a calculator input to a broker, bank, lender, sponsor or platform as a sales lead. There is no lead-generation business behind this site. See the Privacy Policy.
• It will not invent a number. Live figures come from the database, and the database comes from the providers named on Data Sources. Illustrations are computed on the page from inputs you can see and change, and are labelled as illustrations.

How it makes money

Two ways, both disclosed, neither of which touches the data.

Display advertising. Advertising slots on this site are filled by third-party ad networks, principally Google. We choose where an advertising slot sits on the page; we do not choose the individual advertisement that appears in it, and an advertiser cannot reach us through it. Ads are kept out of data tables and are not dressed up as content. Advertising cookies and how to opt out of personalised advertising are covered in the Privacy Policy.

Affiliate links. Some outbound links to brokers, banks and platforms are affiliate links: if you open an account through one, we may be paid a commission at no extra cost to you. Every such link is marked "Sponsored" and routed through a labelled redirect, so you can see what it is before you click it.

Where no affiliate programme is in place — the position across most of the site today — the outbound link is a plain link that earns nothing and carries no Sponsored badge. That is how you can tell the two apart at a glance.

What we do not do: sponsored articles, paid guest posts, paid links inside body text, paid inclusion in any ranked table, and any arrangement in which a commercial partner sees or approves a page before it is published. A partner can buy a labelled slot. A partner cannot buy a mention, a ranking, a score, or a kinder sentence.

How it is built

The site is server-rendered from its own database. Scheduled jobs fetch prices, dividend histories, fundamentals and rate series from the providers listed on Data Sources, store them, and derive the yields, growth streaks and scores you see. A page never calls a data vendor while you wait for it, which is why every figure carries the date it was observed rather than pretending to be live.

Editorial pages are written specification-first: a human-authored outline for each topic sets what the page must cover — the mechanism, who pays, the costs, the tax treatment, the liquidity, the failure modes — and a large language model expands that outline into prose under a system prompt that forbids advice and forbids stating any current rate, yield or price. Numbers are injected from the database at render time, never written by the model. The full process is on Editorial Policy.

Every derived figure on the site has its arithmetic published on Methodology, down to the weights inside the income score. If a number cannot be traced back to a source or a formula, it does not belong on the page.

Independence

This site is published independently. It is not owned by, affiliated with, or compensated by any issuer, fund sponsor, bank, broker, lender or platform whose securities or products it describes. Coverage decisions are editorial: a company appears because it fits a published screen or a curated catalog, not because anyone paid for it.

Advertisers and affiliate partners get no advance sight of pages, no right of reply before publication, and no influence over what a page says about them or about anyone else.

Corrections and contact

We would rather be corrected than be wrong. If a figure, a date, a definition or a source looks off, tell us which page and which number and we will check it against the provider before changing anything. Corrections policy is on Editorial Policy; the form is on Contact.