this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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"The money runs out. What do?"
you do not need a remote friendly skill set to find an online job that will pay you a few hundred dollars per month.
so you get an online job.
if for whatever reason you only want to work in person, you can go berry picking in a lot of countries or harvesting on farms, you can teach English in person in 40 different countries immediately, au pairs, housesitters, a lot of countries hire seasonal workers.
so if you need a job, you can find one.
and if you plan ahead at all (oh no! I only have four more weeks of money), your overhead is so cheap that whatever job you get will cover you, you'll be able to catch up and hopefully learn to plan ahead a little bit.
example: this month you somehow forgot you needed money. but you remembered in the last month before you ran out and you taught English for 10 hours and you got rent for the next month.
now you're one month ahead, so you teach English for 10 more hours, and now? you're 2 months ahead, and you have one whole month minus 10 hours to figure out what you're going to do next.
or what you want to do next.
most travelers don't have this problem, I've never met one that ran out of money without some sort of plan in place.
you have so much time when you don't have any financial stressors, and there are jobs in every country, and a billion jobs that you don't need skills for online, plus countless online certifications if you want a professional online job.
there's no reason why you would end up in a situation where you surprisingly ran out of money.
"you're living paycheck to paycheck with children. You try to save money to travel for the reasons you've brought up here. It's not possible. What do?"
do you have a phone? easiest way is to teach English online for 10 hours a month If that's all you have.
you have enough money to move your family after a few months.
"No offence, but your account of travel as a solution here seems deeply naive"
That's because you don't know anything about traveling, so you are imagining that these simple solutions won't work because you don't know how to solve these problems.
I do.
"naive"
I don't think you know what this word means.
i know exactly how to travel immediately and indefinitely, I've brought other people along and taught them how to travel, I have simple practical solutions to any question off the cuff because I know and have lived this stuff back and forth.
I have as much practical experience with travel and insight into traveling as anybody you're going to find.
you're assuming that because you don't know how to travel, other people cannot know how to travel.
but we do.
"It can work for some, sure, but "just leave the country bro" simply isn't an option at all for many, many people."
travel can work for anybody, leaving the country is an option for anyone with a valid passport and 100 bucks.
and especially if you need financial relief, It's a heck of a lot easier and more liberating than borrowing money from friends or family or living in your car or on the streets, or moving back in with your parents.
people are afraid of traveling, especially Americans, because they live in a monoculture, they're told that the world outside is scary and other cultures are scary, but other cultures are beautiful and compassionate.
other countries function better than the US does in most respects, and practically all livability.
if you travel, you will learn that.
Naive in the sense that it doesn't adequately account for the situation of many people. Not everyone has the circumstances where they can do this. I can't help but feel there's some survivorship bias influencing your position.
I'm curious, though, if you're up to illustrating (if not, totally fine): You are a single mother of two sons, ages 7 and 8, living in Generic State, USA. You have a high school degree and no post-secondary education. You have limited support, solely in the form of limited childcare, from family/the wider community. You make about $1600.00 USD per month, after taxes, working 50 hours a week at a physical workplace. You're finding yourself with $10 left at the end of each month, after all legitimately necessary expenses (rent, food, basic utilities) are paid for. Let's make it easy and say you have no debt.
What are you doing, and where are you going, if following your advice? It should be noted these circumstances are actually quite a bit better than other folks in the U.S. To be clear, I don't think this is a gotcha, nor is it intended to be - I just want to see your approach here.
Edit: Monthly wage should be after taxes, not before, and changed $900 to $1600 (based roughly on monthly takehome pay at Ohio's minimum wage rate, and I calculated for 1 pay period rather than 2 per month)
"Naive in the sense that it doesn't adequately account for the situation of many people."
this is not my naivety but projection your own: another example of you not believing in something you have no experience in.
as I've made note of: families can travel, disabled people can travel, minorities of all walks of life can travel, what are these circumstances you're imagining?
some other theoretical esoteric scenario?
"..if following your advice"
Don't worry, this is definitely not a gotcha, I have hired this person before.
TLDR: get tefl certificate, get job, buy plane tickets, sell stuff.
details below.
if we imagine that your troubled lady can only save 0.6% of her income, with zero savings, possessions, skills, experience, or motivation to leave the status quo but is forced to out of necessity, it could take them up to half a year to become financially independent the easiest and stablest way that I know the ins and outs of.
in real life, the destitute people I know got the certificate, sold everything and started teaching online or abroad in under a month, the abroad ones paid off $2,000 of their debt a month in the states within a few months while living very comfortably,, and kept traveling and saving money.
but for the make-believe person:
right now, a full internationally accredited TEFL certificate for life is $30.
40 hour course, works out to about 8 hours of tests.
I've never seen anyone take longer than 12 hours with this course, but if we pretend they took the full amount of time with the limitation of $10 extra a month and 15 minutes of free time a day, she can either charge the course to a credit card and pay off the course and finish the course at the same time, or save up for 3 months until she has $30, then take the course and add on another 2 months.
I knew someone with zero savings, kids, and "literally no free time", and they got the certification (which was 40 at the time, not 30 like it is now) and completed this course in a week and a half.
once you have that certificate, Google TEFL teaching apps and TEFL teaching platforms, there are dozens of places you can teach online with only a phone or a laptop if you have one, with the TEFL certificate she's making $20 an hour pretty easily, If she's terrible at technology and teaching and everything, that she's making $12 an hour.
to get to the highest paying jobs in Asia, we'll assume she'll need the most expensive ticket, $300 per person.
at the lowest pay, she'll need to work about 75 hours to make that amount of money to relocate her family, subtracting the costs of what she's going to sell before she leaves and any assets she has, the sale of which which are probably enough to cover the entire cost.
so she works 1 hour a day, 2 months later she has enough to leave.
half an hour a day, 4 months later she has enough to leave the states with her kids.
The lady with two kids I mentioned was in Thailand maybe 3 weeks later, their international schools are great for expats.
another single mom I know just stayed in the states and kept teaching online, because at $20 an hour you're making you're making closer to $4,000 a month if you work 50 hours a week.
she makes closer to $30 an hour now, It's been a few years.
Can I do this from the USA, because every listing I see requires degrees or certifications. Can you toss a few websites my way, please?
yes.
College degrees are nice but not necessary, I would suggest getting TEFL certificate, teaching English as a Foreign Language.
It's an online PDF course, that lasts the rest of your life it is greatly influential and how much you get paid for teaching English.
you have to make sure the tefl course is internationally accredited.
Full circle is internationally accredited and is almost perpetually on sale on groupon.
right now it's $30 for the course on Groupon.
https://www.groupon.com/deals/n-tefl-fullcircle?srsltid=AfmBOoqFYZwQR0qx9rYRLhscJVtcMwVRegIqmTAVW8IbDOyJdzSn_20T
it took me 4 days of a few hours a day reading at PDF and taking the tests on the full circle website.
It's the program I recommend to anyone interested in teaching English.
it might take a few weeks if you have less free time
as for teaching english, there are so many websites, Just find whichever one looks the least burdensome that has high reviews from teachers.
If you have a laptop, these ones:
https://www.tefl.org/teach-english-online/
If you only have a phone, these ones:
https://www.goodairlanguage.com/online-english-teaching-app-list/
you'll get paid about the same, so trial and error and find out which one is the easiest platform for you to use and provides the greatest compensation.
I'd suggest one of the apps where you can talk to people on the phone conversationally so you get used to acting and sounding like a teacher before you jump into one-on-one tutoring or group teaching kids on the laptop, which might pay a little more but might be more work.
Go through the lists and see which ones sound good to you,, they all function a little bit differently but fundamentally the same so you might find one that suits you better.
Thank you, I'll look into that.
For sure!
I love talking about this stuff all the time, but especially while I'm traveling and see a meme like this that posits a lack of alternatives to the struggle of surviving in the United States specifically, I feel it necessary to just let people know that there are ready, low-barrier alternatives.
Doing the work, spreading the good news. Haha 😆