Most people searching for passive income for accredited investors are not short of income. They are short of time. A physician in year twelve of practice, an owner two years past selling the company, a retiree with a rollover sitting in cash — all three have money that needs a job and no appetite for a second one.
That distinction is the whole thing, because a good deal of what gets marketed as passive is simply work that hasn't shown up yet.
"Passive" is really a question about whose calendar the work lands on
Take the three routes people most often compare.
Rental property is the one everybody knows. It is also the one where the gap between the brochure and the Tuesday is widest. Somebody screens the tenant, takes the call about the water heater, chases the late payment, and decides whether to renew or turn the unit. A property manager moves that work off your calendar for eight to ten percent of collected rent, but the decisions still route to you, and so does the capital call when the roof goes.
Dividend stocks and income funds are genuinely passive in the work sense. Nobody calls you. The trade-off is that the income moves with the market, and the thing generating it is a company whose management, competitors, and capital structure you don't control and mostly don't see. A dividend is a board decision. It can be cut in a quarter.
Private credit — lending against an asset rather than owning it — sits in a different spot. You are not the landlord and not the shareholder. You are the lender, and what you hold is a contractual claim to interest at a stated rate for a stated term, secured by something specific.
None of these is better in the abstract. They fail differently, which is the useful way to compare them.
What accreditation actually unlocks
The accredited investor thresholds have not moved since Dodd-Frank set them in 2010: individual income above $200,000 for the past two years (or $300,000 jointly), or net worth above $1 million excluding your primary residence. Since 2020 there is also a credential path — holders of a Series 7, 65, or 82 qualify regardless of income or assets. The SEC's own summary is the plainest statement of the rules.
Worth knowing: adjusted for inflation, the $1 million figure would be closer to $1.4 million today, and the House passed a bill in December 2025 that would index the thresholds and add education- and experience-based paths. It is with the Senate, and the SEC has not finalized anything. For now the 2010 numbers govern.
What accreditation buys is access to offerings that are not registered with the SEC. That is the entire benefit and the entire risk in one sentence. These investments are illiquid, they are restricted, disclosure comes by private memorandum rather than public filing, and the diligence a registered offering would have done for you is now yours to do.
So the honest version of passive income for accredited investors is this: you gain access to a wider set of structures, and you take on the obligation to actually read them.
The questions worth asking about any income investment
Four of them, in the order they matter.
What am I actually holding? Equity, debt, or a share of a fund that holds one of those? In most private real estate deals the answer takes a paragraph — an interest in an LLC that holds an interest in a partnership that owns the building, sitting behind a bank loan whose terms you will never see. If the answer takes a paragraph, read the paragraph twice.
What has to go right for me to get paid? This is the question that separates structures. An equity position in an apartment building needs rents to rise, or cap rates to compress, or both. A first-position loan against a house needs one thing: the borrower finishes the work and sells or refinances. Shorter list, and every item on it is something you can check.
What happens when it goes wrong? Not if. Any lender originating for more than a year has loans that run long, borrowers who go quiet, and projects that need a workout. The question is what the paperwork lets you do about it, and whether the cushion between the loan and the value of the collateral is wide enough to absorb the answer.
When do I get my money back, and what does it cost to leave early? Illiquid means illiquid. If you might need the capital in eighteen months, a five-year note is the wrong instrument regardless of what it pays.
Where we fit, plainly
890 Capital makes first-position bridge and renovation loans to builders and investors buying houses that need work. Charleston first — most of the book is secured by property in Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester counties — and selectively beyond it, where the bar goes up rather than down.
The numbers, as of this week: 224 loans closed since April 2024, about $76.7 million funded, average loan roughly $342,000 on a six-to-nine-month term. Ninety-four of those have run the full cycle and returned capital. We cap loan-to-value at 75% and the book averages in the mid-60s, which means a borrower has to be wrong by more than a third before the collateral stops covering the loan.
Investors buy notes from the fund. The fund holds the mortgages. Notes pay 10.00% for one year, 10.50% for three, and 10.75% for five, distributed monthly by the 5th, with a $100,000 minimum. If you would rather compound than spend it, distributions can be reinvested. Retirement money can participate through a self-directed IRA — we wrote about how that works here.
It is a boring structure on purpose. There is no quarter where it gets exciting, and no market call embedded in it. We are not betting on Charleston appreciating or on rates falling. We are betting that a borrower who bought at the right basis can finish a house and sell it. The spread between what borrowers pay and what investors receive is the business.
If you want something that moves, this is not it. If what you want is a predictable monthly number from an asset-backed position, and you are willing to give up liquidity to get it, that is the trade on offer.
You can see how the mechanics work on our Easy Cash Flow page, read what we have been writing in our news section, or request investor access if you would like the offering documents. We verify accreditation before sending anything.
Offered only to verified accredited investors under Reg D Rule 506(c). This is not an offer to sell securities. Any offering is made solely through the Private Placement Memorandum. Investments are illiquid, restricted, and involve risk of loss. Past performance does not guarantee future returns. See 890capital.com for full disclosures.
