Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
Any and all money-related topics.
I’ve been watching a lot of Andrew Kirby recently. This kid is less than half my age, but has twice the wisdom! Recently, he talked about how you can look at your past behavior to plan a strategy for the future, and included a quote about a boat needing to know which port it’s heading to, or it’ll get lost. I’m in my late-forties, which seems like a good time […]
Since we’re halfway through 2022, it’s time for a blog update, don’t you think? Building my Eiken Empire It doesn’t really excite me much, but there’s a strong demand for Eiken (English test) material in Japan, so I’ve continued to add to the worksheets on my school’s website, and recently made more interview practice videos for YouTube. In my last post, I told you that I had reached 400 subscribers. […]
Let’s start with the negative so we can finish with the good stuff. Teaching on the side I gave up teaching on DMM Eikaiwa. It was okay, but when so many people around me told me I could do better, I began to resent working for such a low wage. I decided to try Cafetalk, where I could set my own rates and… hardly any students have booked my classes. […]
When I first started taking an interest in Bitcoin, I thought, “Hmm… maybe I could just buy one Bitcoin.†Little did I know that a single Bitcoin costs a year’s salary! A few days, and a little research later, I was gung ho about earning my first satoshi instead. A “satoshi†is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, worth one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin, or 0.00000001 BTC. Apparently, it was […]
During my first few years in Japan, I was fairly proactive in figuring things out for myself. That changed after I got married, though. Time and time again, I deferred anything that required Japanese to my wife. That included booking doctor and dental appointments, hiring handymen for home maintenance, planning family trips, running the administrative side of our English school, and most significantly, managing our finances. Not surprisingly, she reached […]
Since I started teaching online for $5 a lesson, I’ve found myself weighing up purchases based on how many lessons I have to teach. Take, for example, a single cup of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. That would cost me half a lesson (15 minutes), which is certainly worth it! Some real examples Looking through my orders on Amazon this year, here’s how much time I’ve spent working for each item: A […]
It was way back in 2008 when I wrote about My Dot Com Lifestyle in Japan. In which I egotistically described how I’d quit my teaching job and was living off internet earnings while sitting on my ass. So how did that turn out? Not quite as well as it started. You see, I had seven websites in the childhood education niche – the ones making money, yet I spent […]
It’s been a couple of months since I unsubscribed from Netflix and Apple Music. Losing Netflix I’d watched Netflix for four years and it had become part of my evening routine, so to give it up was hard to do. I was prompted to quit by the price increase in May this year. Maybe Netflix will come through on their promise to add more, high quality content, but I was […]