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Moving to Canada, An Update

moving-to-canada

Moving to Canada: I’m Now in Vancouver, the Farm was a Bust! I’ve talked for a whole lot of months about moving to Canada, after teaching English in South Korea for 1o years. A few of the things previously mentioned include: What to Do With My Pool of Money The Plan to Never Get a Full-Time Job Ever Again Anyway, a little update after moving to Canada a month and a half ago. Here are…

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What Would you Do With $80,000, Updated!

buy-website

An Update on What to Do With My Pool of Money A couple months ago, I talked about a few different options for what I was going to do with the pool of money I’d accumulated from teaching English abroad in South Korea (for all the details about teaching in Korea, see my other blog: My Life! Teaching in a Korean University). For the original post, see: What Would you Do With $80,000? In the blog…

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On Being a Writer, a Few Thoughts

being-a-writer

A Few Thoughts on Being a Writer For a lot of people, it seems like their identities are wrapped up in their jobs. When you meet someone for the first time, one of the first questions that gets asked is, “What do you do?” Or, if someone asks you what you’re all about, your answer will often be related to what do you for a living. In 2 Days, I’m a “Teacher” No More In…

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What would you do with $80,000?

What would you do with $80,000?

What Would you do With $80,000? I talked recently about how I have quite a large amount of money coming my way soon as I’m finishing up my time teaching abroad in Korea. Pension payouts, housing deposit, etc, combined with the best exchange rate for Korean Won—>Canadian Dollars in a decade means that I’ll have roughly $90,000 come March 2016. Since I’m ridiculously frugal, and am living for free on a farm when I move…

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Teaching Abroad and Going Home: I Got my Money Pool Ready

Teaching abroad-Get a pool of money

It’s Really Time to Go Home I’ve decided to move back home to Canada after teaching abroad for 10 years in South Korea. It’s not without some trepidation, as I do certainly know that things in Canada are ridiculously expensive and that employment is not that easy to come by. However, it really, really is time to go and the thought of signing another 2-year contract at my university was making me feel sick to…

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October 2015 Passive Income Report: Holding Steady

Passive income for 2015 could best be characterized as “holding steady.” I earned $1713, a little bit less than the month before of $1752. It’s mostly because September is traditionally a much better month than October for dividends as it’s the end of the quarter. For the second month in a row, I earned more than $400 on my ebooks on Amazon, and I also saw some early sales from a few new affiliates that I added:…

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Going Home After Teaching Abroad, My Plan-Updated

Korea: I’m Kinda Over You These days, I am totally and completely burnt out on the teaching in Korean universities, as perhaps demonstrated by some recent posts over on my other blog, My Life! Teaching in a Korean University: Korean University Jobs: The Golden Handcuffs Some Less than Exciting Work Options Anyway, not to worry since it is my last semester and I’ll be leaving the land of the kimchi in February or March of…

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The English Teaching Empire Grows: A New Book is Out

  Maybe I’ll Live in a Station-Wagon? Maybe you’ve seen some of my posts from a while back about how I’m moving to Canada, after living for 10 years in Korea, in a few months from now (March 2016)? The plan for how I’m going to avoid living out of the back of a station-wagon and going surfing in Tofino every day is kind of up in the air for now. Wait, that plans doesn’t…

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How to thrive in South Korea- The Empire Grows

It’s all Coming Together! Another book is up on Amazon, bringing the total to 4. One more is in the editing stages and I have lots of ideas, but this summer is going to be all about getting my websites up to speed and focusing on promoting the content that I already have, instead of creating more stuff. The empire is building, not so slowly at this point and I kind of feel like everything…

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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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The Canadian Financial Industry

canada banks

Last week, I met a guy who had been working for quite a few years in the Canadian financial industry, but had had enough of it. He quit, gave up a lucrative job and moved to Korea to teach English. Give me the Information! I naturally pumped him for all the information I could get, since it’s one of the options I’m considering for my move back to Canada (although by far the strongest possibility…

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All the Good Stuff Comes from Leaping- Seth Godin

Seth Godin is a big guy in the Internet world and someone that I totally respect. He shares his wisdom in short snippets over on his blog and one that I read the other day was “But How Can You be Sure?” The quote I liked best was at the end, “All the good stuff comes from leaping. From doing the things that might now work.” That made me think about my life and how…

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Why Do We Have to Work?

work

An interesting article I ran across over at Life Advancer- Humans Why Do We Have to Work? Basically, we’re brainwashed by the media into thinking the current system we have of work, work, work–consume, consume, consume is the only choice. It’s not. Living in Korea, working a kind of part-time job for the past 10 years or so has been ideal. Now, I’m ready to take it a step further when I go to Canada…

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Giving up Good for Better

good better

Thinking about Life If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m leaving South Korea after 10 years to move to Canada which is certainly a big move. And as I ride my bike through the beautiful Korean countryside, or paddle my board in the ocean surrounding my city, I think a lot about how life here is good. Like really good. But, then I also think about how it is…

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Giving Stuff Away for Free Makes Me Happy

giving stuff away

Over the decade of so I’ve been living in Korea, I’ve collected a lot of stuff and ever since I moved into a large apartment (about 700 square feet for just me!), it’s been extremely easy to keep getting more since storage really isn’t an issue. Except now that I’ve decided to move to Canada in a year, it’s time to unload. My Unloading Stuff Strategy 1. Sell the stuff that had some value. I…

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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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2014 Passive Income Report

This past year, I earned $4375 in passive income, for an average of $365/month. The bulk of this was in dividend payouts (over $3000) and Hubpages (formerly Squidoo) with just over a $1000. I am going to write 2 more ebooks within the next year (hopefully the next few weeks actually!) so that revenue stream will increase significantly for 2015. And although Hubpages sometimes feels like a bit of a tough slog, I earned $1000…

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