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How to Make Money Blogging

How to Make Money Blogging. Hint: It’s not Easy You’ve probably heard of someone who knows someone who made it big in the blogging world. They struck it rich with a fabulous idea, were in the right place at the right time and made a ton of money. I’m here to tell you that that’s not the reality of most (almost all?) bloggers. If you want to make money blogging not only do you need…

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Bad into Good- A Story from Work

Turning Bad into Good-Work Style What Happened I’ve been working at South Korean universities for the past decade or so and during that time, I’ve always taught extra classes for more money. My contract currently is only for 9 teaching hours/week, so I’ve usually added on another 10-15 to substantially raise my pay. However, this past semester all the extra work seemed to dry up and I was left with almost nothing in terms of…

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My Ideal Retirement Plan at 65

A Reader Question: Ideal Retirement Plan at 65 A reader  asked me what my ideal retirement plan at 65 would be. Let me start off by saying that my thinking is perhaps a little different than the normal person. I in no way envision myself working a 9-5 job for the next 30 years and then “retiring.” An Alternative Plan Instead, I hope to live a life that is characterized by non-traditional work opportunities. Perhaps…

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All-In Digital Entrepreneur when I Go Back to Canada: Crazy?

all-in

Canada: What to Do I’ve talked about moving to Canada in previous blog posts, and it’s now less than a year away (March 2016). I’ve started preparing in numerous ways such as gathering information about how to get the cats and my stuff back to Canada and also giving away/selling lots of my stuff that I wasn’t really using that much. How Can I Make Money in the Great White North? But, the really big…

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Indecision

I waver back and forth when it comes to moving back to Canada, quite possibly forever and making a life there, or living the expat life which is kind of amazing in a lot of ways. I mean, who wouldn’t be happy working at a university in Korea where you get paid an astounding amount of money for a very little amount of work. I go on exotic vacations a couple times a year, cruise…

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Teaching ESL as a Career

When I peruse the personal finance, early retirement and digital nomad blogs around the Blogosphere, it seems like a lot of people were working at “serious” jobs making “serious” money by being a lawyer, working their way up the corporate ladder in some other field or selling things and making lots of money doing it successfully. Then, they left these jobs after hating the 9-5 or more often, the 9-9 kind of life they were…

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How to Write an Ebook: choosing a topic

This past week, I haven’t had classes at my day-job due to midterm exams, so I’ve been busy working on my first Ebook. I’ve wanted to write one for a while because I think diversity is the key in trying to live off passive income. I really have no idea whether affiliate marketing on Amazon or Iherb will be successful in the future, whether Hubpages will shut down, or whether there will a huge crash…

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Life, post English-teaching in Korea

These days, I’ve been seriously contemplating what my life is going to look like, post-Korea. I have 1.5 years left on my contract and there’s a 99% chance I’ll be leaving at the end of it. I rarely say never, but unless there’s some very compelling reason for me to stay, I’ll go. Going to my homeland of Canada isn’t really an option either since the death-like cold and very short winter days just don’t…

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Stagnation, and the Day-Job

For my day-job, I work at a university in South Korea, teaching anything under the general umbrella of “English.” I’ve been doing it for the past 7 years and can honestly say that there’s really no class that I haven’t or couldn’t teach. I’ve moved onwards and upwards in this small world so that now, I’m at the top in terms of the classes I teach, the salary I make and the total freedom I…

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Retirement and the 4% rule

The often-quoted model of how retirement works is that you need to save up a huge chunk of money which you invest in stocks and bonds, and upon quitting work, you can withdraw up to 4% of it per year and in theory, it should last you until you die. I don’t hate this model, but it seems to me that it’s kind of outdated for the following reasons: 1. People are living a lot…

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Assumptions and why they’re not helpful

Everyone knows the old saying, “Assumptions make an ass out of you and me.” It’s kind of cheesy, but it’s definitely true in almost all areas of life, and especially with regard to personal finance. Just because someone doesn’t own a nice house and a fancy new car, doesn’t mean that they don’t have 200 000 or 500 000 or a million dollars in the bank. Maybe it’s that they choose to live a different…

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Passive Income and ESL Teaching

If you want to be a digital nomad and build up passive income streams, ESL Teaching might seem kind of like an attractive gig to get into. You get paid to live overseas. And you often get a free plane ticket (Middle East /Korea) as well as paid for, or subsidized housing. And you’ll have so much time to get your online ventures up and running. Sounds fabulous! Except the thing that many people forget…

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Don’t quit your day-job

Yesterday on the train, I was listening to the Digital Nomad Podcast Episode #11 about not quitting your day job.  They were talking about the sad stories of people who quit too early to go into things like freelancing or online marketing or blogging and stuff like that, except it sometimes doesn’t work out like you think it will and you end up broke and desperate.  So they suggested the better way is to not…

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