Part 1 The English-Speaking Ex-Pat’s Guide to Making Money Abroad

Are You an Ex-Pat or Gap-Year Traveler?
So you’ve done it. You’ve decided to escape the rat race once and for all. Gone are 60-hour work weeks. Gone are the 5am wake-ups to brave a hard overnight snow and sub-freezing temperatures to get to an office where corporate back-stabbing and vile gossip flow like polluted drops from a leaking roof. Criticism and complains are squeezed forth like the juice from a bitter lemon. Forget making lemonade advice – you just got the freak out of the whole situation.

Or are you taking a year-long gap year break from your studies to refresh and revitalize your body and spirit before once again resuming the mind-altering plunge into academic life?

Could it be your imagination or does the air smell sweeter, the grass look greener and the food taste better in your new environs? Everything is new and interesting. You’re stimulated on every side. Life seems fresh and new again. Whatever it is, the die is cast. You have a new home. You may be working on a new language, making new friends, savoring new tastes and having a few financial problems with getting the steady income you’d envisioned. Extensive travel and expat living are most frequently life-altering experiences.

Without the family, professional and social networks you build after years growing up and living in your native land, suitable income streams can often be much harder to establish. You won’t qualify for “unemployment compensation” if there’s even such a thing in your new home. Sure you have your “main” occupation – you know, the one you studied in the university for, worked in for umpteen years or even retired from.

But many countries place an “embargo” on foreign nationals working in key, often high-paying, occupations. It promotes unemployment among their own citizens, they say. That’s absolute balderdash – but no matter. Let’s look at a number of highly viable options that you – the English-speaking ex-pat can apply to not only survive, but even grow and prosper.

Native English Speakers
If you’re a native English language speaker you have a mountain of options available to you right there, in more ways than you might think. What might those be? We’ll take a peek at some of them now.

Teaching English as a Foreign Language
This is large, broad category which encompasses several opportunities, so don’t pooh-pooh it just yet. Many people where you now live want to or need to communicate better in English for work, future employment, education and study, travel, romance and a myriad of other personal reasons. It can be as simple as you “conversing” informally with someone on a regular basis to allow them to improve their listening and speaking skills, up to more formal employment as an English teacher at a school, company or institute. There are more options than just these available however.

In the next of this multi-part post series we’ll look at several additional money-making opportunities you can seek out or create for yourself while living or traveling extensively abroad whether you teach English as a foreign language or not.

Larry M. Lynch is an English language teaching and learning expert author and university professor in Cali, Colombia. Now YOU too can live your dreams in paradise, find romance, high adventure and get paid while travelling for free. For more information on the lucrative, fascinating field of teaching English as a Foreign Language, get your copy of his no-cost, full multi-media, hypertext-linked pdf ebook, “If You Want to Teach English Abroad, Here’s What You Need to Know” by sending an e-mail to lynchlarrym@gmail.com with "Making Money Abroad" in the subject line. Contact the author directly if you need professional, original content for your blog, newsletter, e-zine or website, want more information, have a comment or special request.