A life of personal finance, world travel, teaching ESL & personal development
A good chunk of this blog’s foundation is teaching English abroad. For good reason, I’ve been teaching English around Asia for nearly two years now. It maintains a large chunk of my resume up to this point. While most days I do enjoy it, it’s not overly demanding and boasts a whole whack of other benefits I’ve written about previously, it’s not something I plan to do forever.
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I’ve written about how great teaching English can be for someone who values time freedom, traveling, and saving serious money. But despite these benefits, you still have to get up everyday and travel to a school. In spite of having over 2 months of holidays, you are still bound by when the school chooses to take those holidays. And if you suddenly get assigned more classes, you probably aren’t going to get paid any more.
I’m not sure I’ve written nearly enough about my secondary source of income related to teaching ESL. And that’s teaching English online. Most months I generate more money working on the evenings and weekends than I do at my day job teaching at a public school in China.
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Cryptocurrencies, digital money that is transforming the way to view transactions. Blockchain, a decentralized ledger system on which these cryptocurrencies operate, is here to stay. Arguably the concept of Cryptocurrencies is here to stay, as well. As revolutionary as they are, the space remains a speculative and extremely risky place for investment. We’ve seen wild run up and quick crashes in the market over the last number of years.
If you are new to cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and blockchain, you can read an introductory guide I wrote here. Cryptocurrencies have made a lot of people a lot of money other the last number of years. But there’s a whole other domain of the crypto world that blew up in popularity starting in 2017 and has made many overnight millionaires even quicker. Initial Coin Offerings; ICOs. Similar to the concept of an IPO, where an company uses crowdfunding to gain capital to produce and scale their product and company.
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I’ve found over the years showing your true colors and being painfully blunt usually isn’t the best strategy. People either lock up defensively when you come at them with the raw truth, or the honest reality is too painful to hear that they create and hold on to illusions rather than face the truth. It’s easier for myself, and generally more effective to get the point across to sugarcoat truths and tailor the message for the audience.
Sometimes though, tough love is the best remedy.
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Sometimes I think to myself “I can’t believe I’m teaching ESL to children for a living”. Growing up, never one did I ever consider becoming a teacher. Yet here I am. Last year at this time, during my first year as an ESL teacher in South Korea there’s also no chance I ever imagined I would now be teaching ESL in China.
Yet, here I am.
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