Picture Perfect: The English-Speaking ExPat’s Guide to Making Money Abroad

Additional Money-making Suggestions

Whether you’re a native-English-speaking ex-pat or not, there are still many more ways in which you can pick up some good, steady wads of cash while living in or extensively visiting a foreign country. This can be especially true if the local language of the country is a foreign one. Here are some additional money-making suggestions you might want to consider for establishing or boosting your overseas or travel-related income.

Photo: Ansel Adams, 1984 courtesy of www.jimalinderphotography.com/.../portraits.htm

Picture Perfect

Not only will English language rags and websites worldwide crave your local stories and cultural news, but they’ll pay good coin of the republic for pictures of it all too. Don’t think that just because you’re not an Ansel Adams or Margaret Bourke-White doesn’t mean that you can’t hawk images online and off. If you have even rudimentary photographic skills they can pay off quite handsomely. Photos of what, you ask? Everything and almost anything will be subject matter for you. Like we said, the clothes and fashions, the food, occupations that are new and unusual to you will likely be of interest to many others – who’ll have cash in hand to pay for them. For example, take a look at one stock photo website which accepts photos for sale worldwide at: http://www.hq-art.com/.

It’s almost a standing joke on me now, I hardly eat anything without taking a few photos of the food first. And not just my plate either. My dining companions usually don’t squawk too much about me taking a quick shot or two of their food either before they dive into it.

By the way, get photos of people eating their food too.

Other good photo-selling topics are recreation, festivals and holidays, architecture and unique-looking people shots of kinds. I have an increasing store of vendor, student and every-day life photos from around my corner of Latin America. Look at what kinds of photos appear in local newspapers and magazines. Take your own “versions” of these types of shots, and BINGO – you’ve got a saleable portfolio that editors in other lands may pay quite generously for.

Wherever you go, whatever you do in and around your new digs, get documentary, close-ups and “art” photos of it all too, from great to small – and then SELL them! Say, do you know what the Colombia-Ecuador dish “Yaguarlocro” looks and tastes like? See what I mean?

More About Schools and Institutes

Let’s get back to schools and institutes again. Whether they have native English speaking teachers or not, there’s one thing they don’t have – and that’s enough authentic English language materials to work with. How does this benefit you? Plenty! You can write or prepare materials for the teachers and staff to use in classes. Create a menu from one or more of your favorite restaurants back home. Write it up use photos, drawings and images to dress it up a tad, and be sure to write descriptions of each dish, beverage and dessert; then print or publish it as an authentic menu (which, by the way, it is).

In addition, you can create simple games and puzzles that foreign language teachers will fight over. Word search puzzles, crosswords, coloring books, illustrated poems and nursery rhymes, riddles and tongue-twisters can all be written up, illustrated with your photos or graphics, then bound into a published or photo-copiable book you can sell in lots to kindergartens, primary and secondary schools and English language institutes at a tidy profit. These types of materials are cheap, quick and easy to produce. You’ll almost never run out of ideas, topics or themes to keep you cranking out an almost endless supply of highly sought-after materials. Walk into a large educational institution with a selection of your custom-prepared materials and you’ll almost surely walk out with cash in hand and orders for more.

There’s More, Much More

In this multi-part article, we haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg yet when it comes to the cornucopia of money-making possibilities you have before you while living or traveling abroad. The only real limits to your possibilities are those that your imagination and creativity may have.

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 how to get your copy of his full multi-media, hypertext-linked pdf ebook, “The English-Speaking Ex-Pat’s Guide to Making Money Abroad” by send 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?

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.