As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. What does this mean? I recommend products (only ones that I like) and if you purchase a product through that link, I earn some money.

OT at the day-job vs. Passive Income Building

One of the big debates that I have in my head all the time is whether to work more at my day-job, or whether to spend more time building up my passive income streams  through things like building niche websites, self-publishing books and HubPages.

My job at a Korean university is kind of ideal actually because according to my contract, I only have 9 teaching hours, although I usually get forced to do 11 or 12 with extra pay.  Prep and admin of course takes some time, but usually not more than around 1 hour/1 hour of class time.  So generally, my work life only uses up about 20-22 hours of my time each week and since I live right by work, I only spend about 10 (!) minutes a day commuting.  It is really a commute if it’s only 5 minutes?

Anyway, there is always an abundance of overtime floating around, waiting to be snapped up.  Early morning, mid-day, late night.  Basically as much as you could physically do.  If it was some paltry sum, say like $15 or $20/hour, I would always say no since I could spend that time on Squidoo or blogging and end up making more/hour than that.  But, the OT ranges from $30-50, which makes it a lot harder to say no.  Sure, I could spend an hour blogging and building websites but it’s really not likely, at least at this point in time that I’ll end up making more than $50/hour in passive income from that time.

So my decision ended up being to work about 12 hours of OT/week.  If you average it out at around $40/hour, you can see that it’s a substantial amount of money at the end of the month.  I’m busy though.  Like feeling the stress busy.  Head exploding sometimes kind of thing.  And doing a single post/day on this blog and my other one (My Life! Teaching in a Korean University) seems like almost too much effort at times.  However, I’m motivated by the fact that this money is going directly to investing in dividend paying stocks.  So not only will I have that $40/hour, but that money will keep earning for me down the road.  More than one way to build passive income for sure!

4 Comments

  1. Id rather be rich of heart. Life can get lonely when a penny saved becomes more important than the value of the people around you.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *