Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
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 […]
Since I started teaching on DMM Eikaiwa, I’ve been wondering if I can get more out of my time when sat at the computer. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far: Learning from students I have so many students that work in Medicine, IT, Engineering and Finance, or teach at high schools and universities. These are clearly highly educated individuals doing quite well for themselves, so I can probably […]
When I finished teaching at kindergarten, something I had done for nearly 20 years, I found myself needing to replace the lost income. I had assumed that I could get some private students, but living 5 kilometers from the nearest train station, and only being available on weekday mornings really limits the potential for that. So I looked online. I was surprised to see how little the big companies pay […]
For anyone who has been patient enough to wait 7 years for a new blog post, thank you! Blogging used to be cool. We built whole communities around it. Very few of us were experts on anything. We just enjoyed writing about our experiences – mine being in Japan, where I still am – and shared comments of support. Somewhere along the way, big social media sites took off and […]
Last weekend I took part in my first 100km race, the OSJ Ontake Ultra Trail. It came a bit too soon after the Utsukushigahara 80K, and I wasn’t particularly up for it, especially as it started on the stroke of midnight when I’d usually be fast asleep in bed! I opted to start at the very back of the 1,000 runners, intending to follow a very conservative race plan that […]