Passive income can be a beautiful thing. Generating cash from your investments that you can use to pay your bills and purchase the things you want can place you on a path to true financial freedom.
Here are two highly profitable businesses that can help you build your own streams of passive income today.
Enterprise Products Partners
Global conflicts such as the war in Ukraine have made clear the vital need for dependable and affordable energy sources. Enterprise Products Partners (EPD 0.45%) is built to help the U.S. meet its requirements for reliable power while delivering hefty cash payments to its investors along the way.
Despite the growth of renewable power from sources like wind and solar, fossil fuels still account for more than 80% of worldwide energy consumption. An expanding global economy should ensure demand for oil and natural gas remains strong in the coming decades, even as more green energy projects come online.
Image source: Enterprise Products Partners.
Enterprise Products Partners links energy producers to consumers. It operates processing plants, storage facilities, deepwater docks, and more than 50,000 miles of pipelines. This indispensable infrastructure stores and transports crude oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, and refined products across the U.S.
Most of Enterprise Products Partners' revenue is fee-based and secured by long-term contracts. This helps to insulate its profits from commodity price swings and adds a high level of predictability to its business.
As a master limited partnership (MLP), Enterprise Products Partners is designed to pass its profits on to its investors as passive income. The MLP has raised its cash payout for 25 straight years. Its units currently yield a solid 7.5%.
Moreover, the energy leader has $4.1 billion worth of growth projects under construction, which should help to boost its profits when they come online in the coming years. With many more infrastructure projects likely to be needed to satisfy the world's growing need for energy, it's a safe bet that Enterprise Products Partners will continue to reward its owners with rising cash payments for many years to come.
Altria Group
Altria Group (MO -0.37%) is beloved by income investors for its sizable and steadily growing dividend. The tobacco titan has increased its cash payout 58 times over the past 54 years. Its shares currently yield a whopping 8.9%.
Smoking rates may be declining, but selling cigarettes is still a highly profitable endeavor for Altria. That's likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future. Altria has used price increases on popular brands like Marlboro to offset lower sales volumes. Cost cuts have further helped to boost the company's profits. 
MO Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts
As it continues to crank out cash from sales of traditional tobacco products, Altria is also expanding its lineup of smoke-free offerings. In June, Altria acquired electronic vaping device maker NJOY Holdings for $2.75 billion. Notably, the NJOY ACE is the only pod-based e-vapor product authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be legally marketed in the U.S.
Altria's other smoke-free initiatives include its on! oral nicotine pouches -- which saw a 48% surge in shipment volumes in the second quarter -- and a promising heated tobacco-focused joint venture with JT Group. In all, management is targeting $5 billion in smoke-free revenue by 2028, up from $2.6 billion in 2022. For context, the company generated $20.7 billion in revenue in the trailing 12 months. These reduced-risk products are clearly set to become a much more significant portion of Altria's business, which should benefit its customers and shareholders.
Altria has also established a beachhead in the burgeoning marijuana market. It owns a roughly 40% stake in Canadian cannabis provider Cronos Group. The pot industry's efforts toward legalization received a boost in August when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services took steps to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug. Legalization could make Altria's holdings in Cronos much more valuable -- and potentially open a massive new growth market for the tobacco giant.
