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All About Side Hustles We’re going to get into practical tips for getting started with Teachers Pay Teachers, but first, we’ll talk a little bit about side hustles. Maybe one of the following sounds familiar to you: You’re struggling to pay the bills You don’t like your day job, but aren’t sure what to do next It’s difficult for you to save enough money for something like a down payment on a house, or going…
Are you Ready to Change your Life? Get your Side Gigs On! It’s a fact that teachers around the world are underpaid. Maybe you’re one of them, and feel like you just can’t get ahead financially. You have bills to pay and you’re not sure where the money is coming from. Or, you just can’t seem to save for retirement, or your children’s education. It’s time to get your side hustle going on. You can…
Full-Time Online Stuff = Hard I’m going to get real in this post and talk about what it’s actually like doing the online thing full-time and why I don’t think it’s for me. Let me go a bit back in the past and explain how this whole thing came to be. I lived in South Korea for 10 years, teaching English at two different universities. For the last year or so, I wasn’t really happy…
Online Business: I Love It! If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably already open to the idea of starting an online business and perhaps even have a few projects on the go so you don’t need a lot of convincing. However, maybe you’re not that person and are reading Freedom Through Passive Income trying to decide if this online business thing is really worth the time and effort to get into it. I’m not going…
After an entire year and a half of back and forth and then back again, I finally made a decision about what I’d do when I moved to Canada. Despite being a little bit crazy, perhaps, I decided to go all-in on the digital entrepreneur and make my living off of Amazon Affiliate niche sites and self-publishing books. I got my last paycheque from my university in South Korea about a week ago and now…
Many people find that it’s extremely difficult to get ahead these days. Such wasn’t the case 20 years ago. People used to be able to live quite comfortably with one “good job” and have a balanced lifestyle with their families. Today, life is hard, and there are some legitimate reasons for that. If you’re wondering why it’s so hard to get ahead these days, these are a few scattered reasons that life is like that:…
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…
How Working in Korea for 10 years Set Me Up For Life I think working abroad is great as I talk about over on my other site about teaching in a Korean university: Top 5 Reasons Working Abroad is Awesome. In that post, I didn’t talk about the money, but working in a Korean university has given me a solid, solid foundation for my financial future. Part of it was luck in that I happened to…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Last night, I had one of my coworkers ask me about pension plans in Korea because I think she assumed I would know since I wrote a book about finance for ESL teachers: The Wealthy English Teacher: Teach, Travel, and Secure Your Financial Future. There of course is a wealth of misinformation floating around on Facebook and other online forums, as well as expat bars. This is compounded by the fact that the official information…
Yesterday, I gave a ride to a newbie to Korea in my car who I’d never met before. She was a friend of a friend and the first thing she said to me was, “You’re so lucky to have a car.” Now, I’m not picking on her particularly because she is a nice person but my answer to her was my standard one: “It’s not luck. Anyone can do it.” Sure, it takes a bit…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I’ve started writing my new book about personal finance for English teachers abroad, which I hope will have a broader appeal than my first book, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams and have now realized just how serious of an undertaking this actually is. There are so many rabbit holes one could get lost in and never escape out of. Thankfully, I have plenty of…
The other day while wasting time perusing Facebook, I ran across this article: 35 things to do for your career by the time you’re 35 It has plenty of good stuff but I particularly liked #2: Know your Superpower and #3: Know Your Weakness. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately as I consider options for what to do with my life post-Korea (it’s not 100% certain that it will involve teaching, but it’s…
