THURSDAY, 12 JULY 2018
You burn up a lot of energy and desire to do things with the type of English teaching we do. For example, for my evening classes I leave at 17:00, and I’m back home at 22:30. The work is not difficult and not physically demanding, but you spend time travelling with a bookbag over your shoulder, pedalling your bicycle, climbing stairs, sweating in the sun, getting soaked in the rain. All of these things either burn energy, or your desire to do other things after you get home, or both.
People who have regular 9-5 jobs also burn up just as much, and even more energy. But – these people with full-time jobs, how much do they contribute to paid holidays when they burn up energy and desire to do other things? How much do they contribute to a pension fund that will keep them alive in twenty or thirty years’ time?
FRIDAY, 13 JULY 2018
The questions that the long-term English teacher in Taiwan should ask him or herself:
“What did I do today to make up for the fact that I do not get paid holidays? What did I do today to make up for the fact that I do not pay into a pension fund?”
(Same applies to anyone who does part-time work with no fringe benefits.)
MONDAY, 16 JULY 2018
You know how there are some people in modern, industrialised societies that simply don’t “make” it? The homeless people sleeping on a park bench or on the sidewalk on a piece of cardboard late in the afternoon or early evening when office workers are on their way home? Who try to rustle up some leftovers from a trash can?
Two things saved me from such a life: 1) I had no appetite for hard liquor and drugs – strong contributing factors for especially young men who end up on the street. 2) I could get a job teaching English in Korea, and then in Taiwan. (Would I really have ended up on the street without the latter option? I would have skated on thin ice, probably for years. Maybe I would never have fallen through, but I definitely would have been on thin ice for years.)
WEDNESDAY, 18 JULY 2018
Energy is the key. Without energy you can’t work. Without energy, you can’t do anything extra when you come home after the work that pays your rent and buys your food. Without energy, you can’t put up any resistance against thoughts or people or incidents or events that undermine your morale.
How do you get energy?
You start by thinking correctly. Then: Get enough sleep, eat the right food, and do regular exercise.
TUESDAY, 20 MARCH 2018
Suppose you are 25 years old, you’ve just arrived in Taiwan, and you are ready to start your career as an English teacher. Other people may see it as just part-time work you do after you graduate from university, before you start your “real life” as an adult, but you see it as a serious occupation – the answer to the question of how you’re going to prepare for your eventual retirement.
The problem is that, the way most foreign teachers do it in Taiwan, it’s a part-time job, with no benefits. You don’t make contributions to a pension fund. You probably won’t get a fixed salary. You don’t get paid holidays, and you won’t receive a bonus at the end of the year. One way you can provide for your retirement is to save money.
How much money do you need to save?
Let’s say NT$75,000 [USD2500] per month is enough for a good retirement (if you had to retire today). You can rent a good home or apartment (if you don’t own the property), afford decent health care, eat well, and take one or two trips per year. Considering that it is estimated that you must save at least 200 times your monthly income before you can retire (if you retire at the age of 60) you need to save approximately NT$15 million [USD500,000].
How long will it take our young adult to save that kind of money, working as an English teacher in a place like Taiwan?
Part-time work means you can only hope for eleven full months of income a year if you take compulsory holidays like Chinese New Year, and even so-called typhoon days into account. As you probably have family in the West you’ll want to visit once a year, you will need to budget at least one month’s savings for that. Those few weeks you go on vacation will also have to be subtracted from the number of months a year you earn money. Let’s say you can save a fixed amount of money for your retirement for ten months each year. Let’s go on and assume that you can put away as much as NT$30,000 a month (which is more than the average office worker earns in a full-time position in Taiwan).
How long will it take you to reach NT$15 million when you save at a rate of NT$300,000 a year?
The answer is a somewhat shocking fifty years. If you invest your savings and get at least 3% per year and never use any of the capital, it will still take you more than thirty years to save enough money.
To spend fifty years teaching English classes week in, week out, month in and month out, is in my opinion … let’s just say a unique challenge. To do it for thirty years would still require extraordinary endurance, a particularly thick skin, and a great deal of luck – to keep your flow of part-time work going month in and month out, year after year.
Is there a better solution?
My advice would be a schedule of 20-25 hours a week, ten months a year. Keep your expenses low. Live a simple life. When traveling, don’t be extravagant. In the three to five extra hours that ordinary salary-earners spend “at work”, you need to learn skills and gain knowledge that you can use to make more money. Any extra money must be kept aside to invest in projects that you will embark on when you have gained enough knowledge and you have sufficient confidence in your skills.
MONDAY, 19 NOVEMBER 2018
What kind of skills and knowledge should you acquire if you wish to make more money?
In Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, T. Harv Eker advises the reader to focus on the following four factors to improve his or her net worth: increase your income, save more money, increase the dividend you earn from your investments, and reduce your living costs by simplifying your lifestyle.
One of the books I read this year (I thought I knew which one but couldn’t find the text) suggested the following areas where you should at least master the basic skills to increase your income and your net worth: You need to learn how to advertise a product and/or service; you need to learn how to effectively manage people who work for you; you need to learn how to invest your money; you need to learn how to sell and do marketing.
And in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams shares his list of skills in which every adult needs to develop basic competency: Public speaking, Psychology, Business writing, Accounting, Design (just the basics), Conversation, Overcoming shyness, Second language, Golf, Proper grammar, Persuasion, Technology (hobby level is sufficient), and Proper voice technique.
Take all this advice into account and you will at least be able to lay the foundation for a good retirement after twenty or thirty years as an English teacher in Taiwan – or after a few decades in any other freelance or part-time job situation.
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