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The Wealthy English Teacher

wealthy English teacher

The Wealthy English Teacher: Teach, Travel, and Secure Your Financial Future is available on Amazon in both digital and print formats. You DON’T need to have a Kindle to get the digital version, but you can get the app from Amazon and read it on any smartphone, tablet, Mac or PC. If you’re living abroad, teaching English as a Foreign language and want to learn how to pay off debt, get started with investing and…

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Money Diet Challenge: Week 2 Update

money diet challenge

I’m doing a March Money Diet Challenge to kick-start my return to Canada savings. My goal is to spend less than $400 for the month on discretionary things. Week 1 was not fabulous at $117, but week 2 came in at a solid $76 with no unexpected expenses (last week I had a $40 bicycle repair). Here’s the week 2 money diet spending breakdown: Transportation: $9 Groceries: $4 Entertainment (coffee, eating out, drinking, karaoke): $63…

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YOU are taking a vacation?

As I exercise, I listen to podcasts and once of my favorite financial ones is Suze Orman, author of The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke. She takes calls on her show from people who have serious financial problems, but are quite often in just as serious denial. Examples of the Financial Crazy 1. Someone has $60,000 in credit card debt, but they just leased a $20,000 car. 2. Another person is struggling…

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Investing Books for Beginners: My Recommendations

If you’re new to the investing world, it can be a bit overwhelming to get started on the path towards financial freedom. There are plenty of helpful blogs out there, such as Mr. Money Mustache, Wise Bread, or The Simple Dollar but it can be difficult to get the “big picture” while you’re scrolling around from post to post at random. It’s perhaps a much better choice to read a book because you get the…

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Personal Finance: 7 things you should have learned in High School (but didn’t)

Whenever I talk to my friends, I’m almost astounded when I hear stories of the mistakes that they made in their late teens or early twenties and I find it hard to believe that they graduated from high school without knowing this stuff (I would have been clueless too, but I freakishly was interested in financial stuff from an early age and used to read books about it in my teens). Maybe it’s the responsibility…

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The Return to Canada: let’s talk Money

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’m going to return to Canada next year after living in South Korea for almost 10 years and that in order to do so, I feel like I need to have a giant pool of money so I can sustain myself for at least a couple years while I go back to school and look for full-time work. Those expats who go home without this money pool often…

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Expat Investing: Resources to Get You Started

Investing in the financial markets when you live abroad can be a bit complicated due to things like currency conversions, tax laws and just fewer options for things like brokerage accounts. But, it’s not impossible and with a bit of reading and research, almost anyone can do it. Here’s where to start: Expat Investing Resources 1. Andrew Hallam’s- The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat. One of the best (and…

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“Investing” with No Research

Research Would Show: Mutual Funds are Terrible I was just talking to my Canadian friend this morning and she was telling me about her mom who has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in mutual funds. With even a minimal amount of reading about investment options, you would know that mutual funds are basically a total rip-off, particularly if you’re from Canada since the fees there are the highest in the world and you’d be…

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Expat Brokerage Options

A common question that I get from my friends who are teaching English abroad is what brokerage I use to invest in the stock market. It can be quite complicated and a brokerage in your home country might not necessarily be the best choice for tax-related reasons. Andrew Hallam and Expat Brokerage Options The best information out there on this topic is from Andrew Hallam, in The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher…

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Money Diet Challenge, Week 1 Update

The Total: $117 In order to save up for my return to Canada in one year from now, I’ve undertaken a Money Diet Challenge for March. For the first seven days of March, I spent a total of $117 and had three “zero days” during that time where I spent nothing. Week 1 Breakdown Entertainment/Eating Out/Drinking: $42 Transportation: $9 Groceries: $12 Miscellaneous: $54 (Bike repair-$40, Dentist-$14) Not Terrible, but Not Great I can’t exactly say…

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Money Means Choices

Money Diet March has been in full force this past week and I’ve discovered that I am not actually the queen of frugal that I thought I was. Perhaps that ship has sailed and since I’ve paid off all my debt, have a fat stack of cash in various bank accounts around the world and significant investments, I’ve gotten out of the hard-core frugal lifestyle that I lived while I still had student loans. I’m…

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Top 10 Life Lessons I’ve Learned while Living Abroad

I’m coming up on my 10th year anniversary of living in Korea and along the way, I’ve learned a lot about myself, life and finances. I’m sure I would have learned these things, eventually while living in my home country just as a result of getting older and wiser, but I think there’s something about leaving everything familiar that can speed this process up. Top 10 Life Lesson I’ve Learned while Living Abroad 1. People…

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Frugal Living: Dental Care

A Confession I have a confession to make, but I feel pretty okay putting it out there into the blogosphere because i think it’s something that a lot of people also neglect. I loathe going to the dentist and at previous points in my life, sometimes years would slip by between appointments. Except that once I hit my thirties and started getting cavities and root canals, I knew that this strategy was clearly a bad…

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What I’m Buying: VDY (Canadian High Dividend Yield ETF)

The problem that’s not really a problem I’ve talked a bit about how I’ve been sitting on almost $10,000 of cash, waiting for the market to crash so I can buy. I actually like to have all my cash invested, along with around $30,000 on the margin, so that was $40,000 I didn’t have put to good use. Now, I do realize that having too much cash isn’t really a real problem, but it was…

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February 2015 Passive Income Report

February 2015 came in with a total passive income of $471.03. Check out the February 2015 Passive Income Report for all the details. Everything was pretty much normal except for a $150 sponsored blog post that I did over on my other site, My Life! Teaching in a Korean University for a car insurance company offering English service to foreigners. Sales of my eBooks which came in at an impressive $85.38. February is a slow…

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Money Diet Challenge: Top 5 Tips

And so it Begins The money diet is starting tomorrow and although it’s been a few years since I’ve gone on a diet, I’m super excited for this challenge. In years gone by, I’ve totally kicked butt at money diet challenges and don’t think I’ve ever lost one. Here are my secrets and even though they’re secrets I’m going to share with you because I want to help my readers be as awesome as they…

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The Wealthy English Teacher: Samples from the Book

My second book, The Wealthy English Teacher is hot off the press and now available on Amazon in both digital and print formats. Initial sales have been promising with more than 20 copies sold in just a couple of days with no paid advertising. I’m hoping that people will really like it and tell their friends-there really is no other financial book (or even resource on the Internet) that is specifically for ESL teachers. If…

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Money Diet Challenge

One of my Biggest Fears I’ll be leaving my home for the last 10 years, Korea and going to Canada in about a year from now. In preparation for this move, I’ve been officially on money-spending lock-down and am all about the frugal living, even more than I was previously. There is truly nothing scarier to me than arriving in Canada with basically nothing more than what I can fit in 2 suitcases, nowhere to…

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Too late to Start Saving for Retirement?

It’s never too late to start planning for retirement You might be reading this post when you are in your late forties, fifties or even sixties and thinking that your financial landscape is pretty bleak. You are perhaps thinking about if it is too late to start saving for retirement. Perhaps you have lots of debt, including credit cards, no emergency fund and nothing in the way of retirement savings or other assets such as…

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Plan Your Day

My Sweet University Job in Korea I’m pretty fortunate working at a university in South Korea in that I get quite literally months of vacation. And even during the semester, I quite rarely work 5 days/week, so that leaves me with a lot of days in the year where there is nothing that I have to do. I just did a quick calculation and in any given year, I have about 240 days that are…

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The Wealthy English Teacher- Available on Amazon

 The Wealthy English Teacher: Teach, Travel, and Secure your Financial Future is now available on Amazon. It has a much bigger potential audience than my most nichiest of niche first book about how to get a university job in South Korea. I’m hoping that it’s the type of book that people really like, and tell their friends about, who in turn tell a few other people. So far, I’ve sold a decent amount of copies in…

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Going Home After Living Abroad

These days, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to be successful in the transition back home after living abroad for so many years (10 in my case!). I don’t hate Korea, but I don’t love it either and sticking in a place for 10 more years just because I work 3 or 4 days a week and get 5 months of vacation in not a good way to live. It’s onwards and…

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