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2 Charities I can Trust

One of the best things about making far more money than I need each month is having enough to share with people or animals in need. I’m a big believer in the idea that if you are generous and help others, it will come back to you eventually (not necessarily in a monetary way), one way or another and that the universe has a way of working all that out. Here are two charities I…

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Top 5 Tips for Writing an Ebook

writing an ebook

I talked extensively about the process I went through when writing my first Ebook, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams; check out all those posts here if you’re interested: How to Write an Ebook. Even though my second book is almost finished editing and should be up on Amazon within a few days, I haven’t talked that much about it here. The reason is that…

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Personal Finance Rules: Build Strong Relationships

Inspired by The Simple Dollar, I’m doing a series on personal finance rules and have previously talked about: Spend Less Than You Earn, Keep it Simple Stupid, Pay Per Hour Worked, and Ignore Professional Stock Pickers. Today is how you (and me too) should build strong relationships. Over at The Simple Dollar it is rule #19 and they offer some helpful reasons why you would want to do this.  I’ll add my own thoughts to…

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Top 3 Reasons to Ignore Professional Stock Pickers

I continue on with a series on personal finance rules inspired by this post over at The Simple Dollar. The first three parts in this series were: Keep It Simple Stupid, Spend Less Than You Earn, and Pay Per Hour Worked in case you missed them. Today, some good advice from The Simple Dollar, which is to ignore professional stock pickers. You know, the ones you see on TV (Jim Cramer at Mad Money) and…

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Pay Per Hour Worked

Today I’m continuing with my series on personal finance tips, inspired by this post over at The Simple Dollar: 60 Simple Rules of Personal Finance. I’ve already talked about keeping it simple and spending less than you earn. Today, it’s all about knowing what your pay per hour worked is. This has been on my mind lately for 2 reasons: 1. I’m writing a book called, “The Wealthy English Teacher” and there’s a chapter about…

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Top 5 Ways to: Keep it Simple, Stupid

Inspired by a post, 60 Rules of Personal Finance over at The Simple Dollar, I’m continuing my own series of personal finance rules to live by. The first rule I talked about was: “Spend Less Than You Earn” and this one is, “Keep It Simple, Stupid” (the KISS principle).  Here are my top 5 ways to do that: 1. Automate Bills and Investments. Paying the bills and contributing money to retirement and savings accounts can…

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Spend Less Than You Earn

I ran across this article, 60 Simple Rules of Personal Finance over at The Simple Dollar the other day and thought I would do a series, talking about some of my favorite points. Spend Less Than You Earn This is probably my favorite personal finance tip of all time and if you do only this, and nothing else for your entire life, you’ll probably retire rich, or at least comfortably. I’m currently writing a book…

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January 2015 Passive Income Report

Better late than never! I was traveling around Vietnam for the past few weeks and wanted to take a technology break, which is why this report is only happening in the middle of February. I earned a total of $272.92 this month-for all the details you can check out: January 2015 Passive Income Report. While not a huge number, I’m pretty optimistic about it for the following reasons: 1. Ebook sales of How to Get…

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Multiple Domains One Host

Ask Pat Podcast Anyone who is trying to build passive income streams I’m sure has heard of Pat Flynn over at Smart Passive Income. Not only does he have extremely helpful information, but he seems like one of the nicest guys around. I was listening to his podcast Ask Pat, episode #259 while I was out hiking yesterday and I came across a piece of information that was ground-breaking for me. Maybe most people knew…

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Respect the $10- It’s how you become rich

Thanks Mr. Money Mustache I was just over at Mr Money Mustache and was reading this article, “A Millionaire is Made 10 Bucks at a Time” and felt inspired to post. The Quick Summary Basically, the article talked about how we seem to have lost respect for the $10 bill and that we don’t actually think of it as that much money. We just spend it without even thinking about it, but it can actually…

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Do it Now! Update Your Public Profiles

I Was Shocked to Discover…Outdated Public Profiles! In my recent effort to focus more on quality over quantity in my Internet ventures, one of the things I did was to spend a few hours and update all my public profiles to have some sort of cohesive message. In some cases, like on Blogger and HubPages, I had stuff from years ago that didn’t really make sense anymore. Even more disturbing was the fact that both…

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Hubpages Marketing through Pinterest

Driving Traffic to my Websites In my effort to focus more on quality over quantity, I’ve decided to focus on getting more traffic to the sites that I already have, such as this one, my new one (Jackie Bolen), My Life! Teaching in a Korean University and my various HubPages instead of building new sites. I think these sites have some quality content on them, but just don’t have enough traffic for me to make…

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Reviews of “How To Get a University Job in South Korea”

Check out what others are saying about my first Ebook, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams in the reviews on Amazon. You could go straight to Amazon and read them there, or check out this page on my new website, JackieBolen.com. Sales of this book are still going strong into the third month, averaging around 1 sale/day. My goal was to consistently earn around $20-30…

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HubPages Referral Trackers

Sometimes I have to kick myself for not figuring out basic HubPages stuff like this out sooner after Squidoo became HubPages a few months ago. Anyway, onwards and upwards to the land of HubPages Referral Trackers, which is basically their affiliate program. It essentially works by pasting your personal tracker code onto sites like this one or social media (find the set-up page by going to Earnings—>referral trackers) and then if the person that clicks…

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Depending on the Government in Retirement: a Good Option?

Depending on the government in retirement might not seem like a terrible plan because you can just work, enjoy your life, spend your money freely and then get your retirement taken care of. No sacrifice, or giving up any fun required! English Teacher’s Precarious Situation I’ve been thinking about the question of when is too late to start saving for retirement as I’ve been writing my book about personal finance for English teachers. I think…

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Website Development with WordPress

wordpress

On the encouragement of a friend of mine, I’ve just bought my own name (www.jackiebolen.com) and plan to develop this website, with the goal to make it my “mother-site” that connects all my other Internet ventures in a coherent kind of way (Hubpages, Ebooks, teaching blog, and Hubpages. I’ve gone with the GoDaddy for the hosting and domain name and then WordPress.org for the platform, basically forcing myself out of the drag and drop platforms,…

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Moving and Getting Rid of Stuff: Easier than Expected

I Love Simplicity–How Did I Accumulate so much Crap? Over my decade in Korea, I have accumulated as astounding amount of stuff, made all the easier by the fact that I now live in quite a large apartment and despite the fact that I’m actually all about the simplicityand I have this vision of myself as living out of a couple suitcases. It is not the reality that I live in however, and since I’m…

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What about Investing in Gold and Silver?

My Old Coworker’s Obsession I remember a few years ago when I worked with a couple guys who were obsessed with buying gold and silver. They were totally and completely convinced that stockpiling these two assets, physically was the best way to put their hard-earned dollars to work. I remember thinking that this seemed like a complicated endeavor because you had to go buy the product and hope you were not getting ripped off, then you…

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Is Insurance Necessary?

Of course there are times when insurance is necessary like it you have a car, but other times it’s a lot more ambiguous and really depends on individual circumstances. I’ll talk about 2 kinds of insurance (supplementary health insurance and life insurance) where it really depends on your individual circumstances whether you’d need them or not. Supplementary Health Insurance For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to assume that we’re not talking about the USA,…

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An Emergency Fund is Necessary

This topic is especially relevant to English teachers abroad who seem to be some of the worst offenders when it comes to not having an emergency fund and then when something bad happens, they post all over Facebook asking for donations But, an emergency fund is necessary! I don’t want to be all judgey because some of these people are totally legit; I’ve actually donated a good amount of money to them over the years.…

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Rabbit Holes and what is all comes down to in the end

I’m writing a book about personal finance for English Teachers abroad. While Andrew Hallam has this topic covered pretty well in The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat, his book is quite technical and not exactly easy reading for the average somewhat financially illiterate person. I’m taking a broader view of things and trying to target the absolute financial beginner. As I’ve been writing, what I’ve discovered is this: there…

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What I’m Selling: Wal-Mart Stock

With the recent run-up in stocks over the past year, I’ve been slowly exiting positions in my portfolio that I wasn’t 100% confident in and reducing the money I’ve borrowed on the margin and going to cash in anticipation of a medium-large drop within the next year (hopefully!). Wal-Mart stock is one of them. Why I’m Selling Wal-Mart Stock Retail is Ultra-Competitive Retail is an extremely competitive space as consumers are pretty fickle. It’s just…

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