Lawmakers in the US are considering a new bill called America Saving for Personal Investment, Retirement, and Education (ASPIRE Act).  This act will provide every newborn baby in the US with a $500 savings account.  The idea of this proposed bill would be to increase personal saving by Americans.  The money could be used for education expenses, buying a home, or saving for retirement once the child turns 18 years old.

I do not know much about this new proposal so far, but at a glance, I think it is potentially a good idea.  If only I had $500 in the bank when I was born and it was put in a high yield interest account.  It would be worth quite a bit right now with all that compounding.

Still, I would like to hear more about what this bill would entail in terms of taxes, restrictions, and other details.  I wonder if you would get taxed when you take the money out of the account and if there are any specific restrictions on what you could use the money for.

What do you think of this proposal? Would giving every newborn be a good idea for our government?

I am a big fan of generating more sources of income.  In particular, I really like the idea of earning passive income.  The passive income concept involves working to set something up that will continue to generate income in the future with little to no effort in the future.  Of course you would need to work hard in the beginning.  Examples of this would be if you purchased a real estate investment property in cash and had a management company maintain the property for you while you leased it out.  The income from the investment property could be considered passive income since you do not need to do too much work to continue receiving the monthly rent from your tenants.

A number of bloggers have started to write for eHow.com to generate modest passive income.  If you have never heard of eHow, it is a website in which people write “how to’s” about almost any subject.  If you wanted to know how to do something, you could google it, and it is likely that an eHow article about the subject would rank on the first page of the search.  eHow pays you for articles that are particular helpful to readers.  If your article is visited often, you will receive more money.  Although the payment is quite modest, if you have many articles that get a lot of hits, you could generate some significant income.

I want to do a little experiment.  My goal is to end up with over 1000 eHow articles and then to not write one again.  Hopefully, I can continue to earn income as people read my articles and I can enjoy a few extra dollars each month.  I am going to start writing articles tonight and will update you all on how this goes. It will probably take me a couple month’s to ge to 1000 articles, but I am hoping this will pay off in the long run.