I’ve got 4 Legs

November 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

My last couple of posts have been pretty negative about those who claim to be making money online and want you to part with your hard earned money. Some of you may have even gotten the impression that it’s impossible to make money online when you are abroad.

No, it’s not impossible, just difficult. It takes a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears to make it happen, and even then it may not happen at the scale needed to support a life abroad. You might find yourself eating the cheapest food you can find and living in a hovel, things you’d never consider doing in the US. And if you’re too prideful, you might never admit the truth of your situation.

It doesn’t have to be like that though. I’ve made my life abroad recognizing that online income is just one leg in my financial strategy. I usually mix it with at least one other form of income, and sometimes a couple. With more than one, I keep maximum flexibility and am not stuck doing the things I loathe.

Right now, most of my income comes from teaching English. In the past I’ve taught Math, Science and Computers. Teaching pays the bills, in some places I save some of the money, and other places, like Thailand, teaching paid for the necessities and not a lot else.

In Thailand, I used my online income to augment my income and used it to buy extras that my teaching income didn’t allow for. In the Philippines, I used it it for the majority of my expenses. Here in China I save 100% of my online income.

I mentioned that my personal finances rely on three legs, Those are online income, teaching income and consulting income. I’ve always done consulting when traveling abroad. I give advice from my knowledge base and help people do things better and more efficiently. The thing about consulting though is that it comes and goes. I’m sure if I focused more on it(and I plan on doing that in the future), I could make it a bigger slice of my income.

There is a fourth hidden leg in my financial picture and for some people, it’s the biggest leg in their finances. This is savings and credit. For many years, I didn’t have credit because of past credit problems in the US and I didn’t have savings because I focused too much on just one financial aspect. I was in an earn it and spend it type of lifestyle. I can’t really blame myself because my income was so low and I thought saving what amounted to a few dollars a month didn’t seem worth it.

It’s different now. I’ve been able to build up some significant savings and with that make some good things happen. Combined with my savings, I’m repairing my credit back in the US. This may not seem important, but both savings and credit allow a person to better even out their high and lows income. Granted, savings is better for that, but credit can see you through a tough jam. I guess this is pretty simple, put something back in the good days to see you through the tough times.

Soon I’ll write another posts and begin talking about strategies to build your three or four legs to get the money needed to live abroad indefinitely.

Filed Under: The Essentials Tagged With:

The Truth About Those Guys Who Say They Make Money Online

November 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I find it hilarious reading about the BS that some spout and some actually believe in the world of making money online. I read a forum post the other day that brought to mind how some actually believe the lies that many internet marketers spout in their quest to separate the naive from their money. Let me set one thing straight: Very few of the people who say they are living on the beach in some third world country like a king from the money they make online are actually doing it.

Travel around enough with your BS detector on and you can smell the truth from the shinola. If someone says they are making money online while traveling the world, you can bet your sweet bippy that they’re in one of these groups: the trust fund/investment fund rich, the scammers, the disabled, the embarrassed, the differentials, and the pirates.

The investment/trust fund rich are those who have an investment income or trust fund income, but don’t want to deal with those negative connotations as they search for some kind of enlightenment that only they can understand. They’ll make up stories about earning money online in just a few hours of work. The naive lap this up and help inflate the egos of these fake proletarians. The naive dream of doing the same thing and in some extreme cases begin funding the life of these trust fund travelers through book and product purchases. These gullible netizens think that one day they too can live this kind of life, but they don’t know the whole story.

I met Jacob in Malaysia on a bus to Thailand. He was in his mid 30’s and talked a good talk about how he was making money online day trading. He liked to talk about what made and not about what he lost. After getting to know him more, I found that he did very little day trading. He was living off of a trust fund, but that wasn’t cool to brag about.

Next in my examination of the weird and the wild in the world of online income abroad, we fall into the scammers. I’m not talking about the kind of scammers you might think I’m talking about. No, I’m talking those who have pulled scams in their home country and are spending their ill gotten gains abroad. This might be from insurance scams, forex scams, financial scams, drug sales, you name it. They’ve rather silently scammed the money and their cover story is that they are making money abroad and living like kings.

I met Mike in Honduras and he was running several small businesses with Hondurans. This was before the time of online money making and he had several businesses that made a little bit of nothing. Of course he told the friends back home he was a successful businessman making big money in Honduras. The truth he shared with after a few beers was that he had made a killing selling drugs in East Texas. When the heat got too much, he hit the road to Honduras.

On to my favorite group of making money abroad dudes are the disabled. No, I’m not talking about the truly disabled. I’m talking about the people who have convinced the US government that they are disabled in some way. They collect either SSI or SSDI while living abroad. Since it’s kind of embarrassing to talk about getting disability and because it can be against the law to collect some forms of it outside the US, many make up elaborate stories about where their money comes from. Making money online is a popular out because so many people have actually bought into the myth. The bonus is that if some gullible person actually buys into their story, they might make some money from a product they are selling.

Back when I was still in the states, I had a friend who got on SSI by going to the university library and researching OCD and how to be diagnosed with it. It’s one ailment that you could SSI with and not worry about being locked up for observation. After studying it well, he mimics the conditions when visiting the doctor. Got through the visits and got the diagnosis. He got his SSI. He collects it while living abroad right now. But don’t be tough on him, he needs for another ailment that isn’t covered by SSI.

When I first hit the road traveling abroad, I met John. John was a happy go lucky guy in La Ceiba. He showed me where all the girls were and the best places to get drinks and whatever. He had a relatively carefree life or so it seemed. He loved to talk about how he was living off of business income. After too many beers, he confided in me why he was in La Ceiba. He said he made $500 a month in SSI and there was no way he could survive in the US on that.

Now onto the embarrassed. I can’t think of a better way to say it, but these are the embarrassed English teachers who realize that their life teaching English sucks. They are looking for a way out, but going back to the US without any opportunities sucks even more. The solution is to hide their real source of income and make money online.

Jerry was a teacher I taught with in Thailand. He hated his job and made it very clear every day. He didn’t want to go back to the US and desperately wanted to quit teaching. He put up a website with lots of BS concerning how much he was making online. I was shocked that people actually bought the line of BS he was selling. People were lapping it up.

The differentials are the most true group. They might call themselves location independent, but the truth is that they take advantage of wage vs living cost differentials. In short, they earn their money in a place that pays a relatively higher wage and spend their money in a place with a relatively lower cost of living. It’s very rare though to come across people who are really living a good life solely based on differentials, many of them have a savings or investment income that they are living on and their backstop is money from family. I call them the most true group because the differential is the common theme among those who actually do make a real living abroad. It’s cheaper to live in a developing country than it is to live in the US is the mantra of those selling the dream.

I met James and Peggy while waiting at the immigration office in Cebu City, Philippines to extend my visa. James was a professional poker player. He made his income playing poker online. Granted his income was not a lot and wouldn’t be enough to live a decent life in the US, but all he needed was relatively stable internet access and his laptop to earn enough to live relatively well in third world countries. Their previous port of call was Argentina. From my short conversation, I did learn that the income was variable and there were fat and lean times.

The pirates are hard to pigeonhole into any category, but without a doubt they are the most dangerous. Basically these are the guys who will do anything and everything to make money abroad and they conceal the source of their income behind an online money making facade that people buy into lock, stock and barrel. They build trust with people by talking about how they have made so much money online and people want to emulate them and have what they have. This where the pirates prey on the naive and separate them from their money. What separates the pirates from the other groups is that they are not trying to make money online as much as they are trying to scam money off of people in person.

I met Peter* in the Philippines when he was still on SSDI. When SSDI found out that he was abroad, they cut him off from it. He had to find a way to make money and he did. His front business was a website and service to help other foreigners in the Philippines. His real businesses were in the murky area of sex, alcohol, loan sharks and underground businesses. Last I heard, he had to leave the Philippines to Cambodia after being involved in a six figure pyramid scheme targeting other expats.

It’s crazy, isn’t it? Keep your eyes open and your brain out of the fog when evaluating anyone trying to sell you something about making money online while abroad. They’re probably not being truthful and they’re probably trying to make money themselves…using your money.

Filed Under: Online BS Attack, The Essentials Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Write, Make Millions, And See The World

November 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Ok, I want one of my first posts to be about the whole BS surrounding making money writing on the internet and seeing the world for free. I’ve seen websites around saying how easy it is and that everyone can do it. Let me start off by saying, it’s all BS. I’m going to deal with that in a minute, but first I want to mention travel writing.

I’ve been traveling for most of the last 16 years and I’ve tried more than once to make money online writing travel articles. I bought into the BS and guess what? I learned the hard way that it’s not true. I’m not going to write much about it because Wade over at Vagabond Journey has a post about travel writing that does at least a little to clear up the BS. The bottom line: forget making money travel writing. Write articles for the fun of it, for Aunt Gertrude and the local rag back home, or to build up some cred when trying to get some discount(good luck at that!), but forget doing it for the pesos.

Ok, back to making money online writing. Making money writing online is a hard slod. It’s tough work. I know it. I’ve made money writing online in the past and actually supported myself doing it, but it wasn’t a real enjoyable way to make money and it left me mentally drained after awhile. I’ll share with you how I did it and let you know why it’s even harder now to make it happen. One note: I never did all of these at the same time, but rather rotated them around.

1) I wrote paid blog posts. I pimped myself out to the highest bidder. I still do it on some of other sites. Back in the heyday, I made about $1200 a month writing paid posts for anyone who would pay. Google was hitting sites hard so I’d have to constantly create new sites and get them ranked so I could keep getting paid posts. That all came to a crash when the double whammy of Google updates and the economic crash put everything to rest in September 2008. I still make $70 a month or so on paid posts, but it’s not like it was and it never will be again.

2) I wrote articles for spammy websites. I wrote dating articles, articles on weight loss, articles on adult toys, articles on psychedelics, articles on credit repair, articles on health problems, you name and if it is spammy then I probably wrote articles about it. I made $5 for a 300 word article. I could churn out 6 to 8 of them in day without too much hassle. That was back in the golden age when there was little competition among people willing to earn such a pittance. How has this changed? Everyone and his dog is an article writer these days and the market rate is low. Article length is up to 500 words or more and you get less than $3 after Paypal fees.

3) I created blogs and content and monetized them with Google Adsense. For a few years, this was an ok way to try to make money. Basically, I would buy a domain, write 5 or 6 articles about a topic, place all of Adsense ads on the articles, get as many links to the site I could and hope that people searching would land on my site and click an ad because my content sucked so much and just wanted to get the heck off of my site to somewhere useful. Google caught onto this trick and sites like these just aren’t making the money they used to. If you see someone flogging a way to make money with Google Adsense then you can bet that they are talking about this method.

4) I created blogs and content and tried unsuccessfully to make money with affiliate offers. This was a lot of wasted time. Some people make money with this, but this was a time waster. Most of the sites were turned over to paid post sites where I actually made some money with them before Google hit them.

You can still make some money writing online, but forget the big bucks of old. Writing alone isn’t the best way to make money for traveling. Don’t pay anyone to tell you that what I’m saying ain’t true.

Let me touch upon a few ways to possibly make some money writing online these days. Please don’t think you’ll make enough travel on this. I’m not selling that BS.

1) Write articles for a legitimate article broker service like Text Broker. They’ll set you with topics and clients and you’ll make a penny a word or so. Not exactly big money, but if you are truly a good writer, you might make a few hundred or so per month doing it.

2) Do niche writing. Do one kind of writing and do it well, make yourself out to be an expert. Put yourself out there on Fiverr or other similar as an expert. Only accept articles in your niche area. If you get a sale great, if not, wait for another day.

3) Consider writing a real book. Spend your time writing a decent book. It doesn’t have to be a travel book, it can be a fiction book or a book on some topic you’ve always been into. Make it available on Kindle, IBooks(or whatever that Apple Books thing is), and CreateSpace and then make a blog that can market it.

Got it? I hope your blinders are off a little bit now. I just want to get that you are your own boss and you got put together your own compensation package when you are trying to make it out there. Maybe you’ll do some English teaching, maybe you’ll do some consulting, maybe you’ll help sell some real estate, maybe you’ll do some writing, but together you get a package that helps you get what you want out of life.

Filed Under: Online BS Attack, The Essentials Tagged With: , , ,

Get Pesos: The Premise

November 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

There are a lot of ways to look at Get Pesos and figure out what this site is all about. Unfortunately, if you don’t understand the premise behind this site then you won’t understand what it is all about. This first blog post is here to clear this up and help you understand why I write what I write.

Everything I write about on this site revolves around the premise that my readers:

1) Do not have a trust fund or other benfactors who are supporting their life abroad.

2) Are not high flying executives who want to drop out and live off of savings before returning to the real world.

3) Are not interested in spending their days in an alcohol or drug induced stupor.

4) Are interested in supporting themselves or their family by earning money while living abroad.

5) Are tired of the status quo in the US and want to experience real freedom.

6) Are not afraid to change their paradigm.

7) Are willing to take responsibility for their own actions and choices.

If that premise fits you, great. If not, feel free to take what you can from what I write about and meld it fit your own. In fact, even if that premise fits, you should still meld my posts and ideas to fit your own situation.

I think it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyways. Nothing I post should be construed as “professional” advice. I’m not a lawyer or a doctor so if you have a problem that needs a professional then get off the net and see a real professional. For every post I make, remember that you are responsible for the actions that you take. Get all the information you can before making a decision.

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