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.

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

The Stock Market Crashes-Here’s What I Did

Stock Market Crashes-Time to Get Greedy Investing is all about fear and greed. When the stock market crashes, people get fearful and start selling. This leads to even lower stock prices because there is less demand, which leads to more selling, and then the stock prices drop even further. When the stock market is going up, people get greedy. They keep buying and buying, even when it’s apparent that the top is near which forces…

Continue reading

Is it too Late to Start Investing?

I answer the question of whether or not it’s ever too late to start investing in this short video. For everything expat finance, check out Andrew Hallam’s excellent book, The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat.

Continue reading

The Minimum Amount to Begin Investing

A short video about why I recommend people save up at least $10,000 in order to get started with ETF or dividend stock investing. For some solid investing advice, check out Steve Peasley’s book: Above Average Investing for the Average Investor. It’s one of my favorites for giving you the goods about investing, minus all the hype and fluff.

Continue reading

Trading vs. Investing

trading vs. investing

A short video about trading vs. investing and which one I recommend. For some solid advice on investing from one of the greats, check out: The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle.

Continue reading

Investing Basics: Fundamental vs. Technical Analysis

fundamental vs. technical analysis

In this short video, I talk about the difference between fundamental and technical analysis and which one I like. It can be quite confusing when you’re new to the investing world, but I try to break it down for you in a simple way. If you are an English teacher abroad and are trying to figure out the personal finance thing, check out this book: The Wealthy English Teacher: Teach, Travel, and Secure Your Financial…

Continue reading

Scared of the Stock Market? You should be Scared of Inflation

inflation

I’ve recently created a series of short YouTube videos about personal finance. I hope you’ll find them helpful and if you have questions you want me to answer, or tips about how to make them better, please let me know. I’m very new to the YouTube world. Here’s the first one explaining how most people are scared of the stock market, but what they actually should be far more scared of is inflation. If you’re…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

Why I Don’t Like Mutual Funds

I was happy to see that Andrew Hallam in his book, The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat dislikes mutual funds as much as I do. It actually surprises me that more financial gurus, such as Dave Ramsey (from The Total Money Makeover) don’t jump off the mutual fund bandwagon and onto the index investing or dividend stock investing one. Anyway, mutual funds are a pretty terrible investment choice especially…

Continue reading

Am I Worried About Losing All My Money in a Stock Market Crash?

I was talking with a friend yesterday and she was asking how much money I can gain or lose in a single day and if I was worried about a stock market crash, or not. Short Answer: I can gain or lose $3000 or $4000 or even more in a single day and I’m not worried about it. Here’s why: the gains or losses in my portfolio are not actually real gains or losses because…

Continue reading

Book Review. The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat

Disclaimer: I was sent a free copy of this book by Andrew Hallam, The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat in exchange for reviewing it on this blog. Overall, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to any expat looking to get into the investing arena and do it right the first time, instead of through trial and error and losing a lot of money in the process. I…

Continue reading

What I’m Buying: Energy Stocks

I normally like to have around $20 000-40 000 invested on the margin (money borrowed from my broker), which I can get at a really low interest rate (1.62% for the first $100 000 with Interactive Brokers) and then invested in dividend paying stocks that pay 3-5%, which leaves me with a nice profit of around 1-3% (after taxes) on that money. Except lately the markets have been going up and up and I’ve been…

Continue reading

November 2014 Passive Income Report

November 2014 Passive Income came in at $288.14. For the breakdown and comparison to the previous few months, check out: Passive Income Report The bulk of my income came from dividend paying stocks and Hubpages (formerly Squidoo), as usual but a nice addition was $42.68 in sales from my my new Ebook, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams. Compared to previous years: Nov. 2013: 268.98…

Continue reading

What if the Stock Market Crashes?

US stocks are flying high lately, with the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting record highs. I just checked my portfolio and was shocked to discover that I’d just made $7000 US in the past 30 days. Now, I’m under no illusion that these are “actual” gains because what goes up, must come down. Here’s what I do to prepare for the inevitable. I like to have at least 5 or 6…

Continue reading