 Hi guys, hello, welcome to another live session. My name is Linda from ITTT. And today we're going to talk about a very, very exciting topic. I'm sure a lot of you are going to find it useful. It's all going to be about how to save money and also pay off loans and debt when teaching English abroad. Yeah, so thank you so much for joining. If you can see me, if you can hear me as always, please just leave a high in the comment section. I'd really appreciate it so that I know that you can see me and hear me because sometimes there are technical difficulties. And I might not be aware of it. So just kindly let me know in the comment section. And yeah, thank you so much for being here again today. Last week's live session was at a different time. You might have noticed we're kind of experimenting with a couple of new different times to reach people who maybe normally don't have the chance to watch if we always do it at the same time. So last week I was live six hours later than today. So now it is 10 AM in South Korea where I am. And last week I was live at 4 PM in South Korea. Yeah, hi, Juliana. Thank you so much for joining. We have Joao, hi from Recife, I forget how it's pronounced. But hi, thank you so much for joining. That's awesome, awesome guys. Thank you. Awesome, cool. I'm really hot today. Oh my god, I think today's one of the hottest days in Korea. And actually, this room, I don't have air conditioning. I have a fan on behind me. So if that's kind of interfering with the mic, do let me know. But I can't turn the fan off, or I think I'm going to have a heat stroke. Hi, Yayan from Indonesia. Very cool. Thank you so much for joining. Yeah, I picked this topic, and I hope you guys are going to find it useful. I hope you're going to take away something away from this today because it's a, you know, paying off debt and saving money is one of the reasons why a lot of people decide to go abroad and teach English. And so I think a lot of people are going to probably find it useful. And I hope so, at least. So yeah, before we jump in, as always, I just want to mention that please like and subscribe, you know, like our Facebook page. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. We always share a lot of useful information for TEFL course takers, also graduates, you know, teaching information, teaching ideas and material and stuff like that you can use in your classroom and also job offers we post and all of that stuff. So I highly recommend you like and subscribe. And then you also never going to miss any of our future live sessions. We actually do go live twice a week once me and then once my colleague Lisa. And she's many of you know, probably she's from Russia and she's an amazing teacher. She's teaching English online and she also has experience teaching English in China, just like me. And so I think, yeah, you get the best of both worlds, native English teacher and non-native English teachers. I think that's really great. Please also don't forget we have a 30% off discount code as we do every live. But we only share them during our live sessions. So that's what makes them very special. And 30% is a big discount. So I highly recommend if you haven't started your TEFL or T-SOL journey yet, I highly recommend you get on it. And this discount hopefully is an incentive and will help you out. So how can you get to this discount? One, you can either scan this QR code in the upper right hand corner. Or we also have a discount link. If you've seen my live sessions before, you probably know this already. And it's just the same old, same old. But here you go. It looks like this. You click on that, you apply. It will lead you to the application form. You fill out the application. And on the next page, you'll see your discounted price. That's how it works. Yeah, as always, feel free to ask your questions during this live session at any time. There's also going to be a Q&A session at the end, where you can also have the opportunity to ask some questions before I sign off today. And typically, our live sessions are between 45 minutes and an hour long. If you don't have that much time, that's no problem. You can always come back and watch the replay. We always keep our live session videos on YouTube and our playlist, and also on Facebook, on our playlist. So they're always available. And we also always turn our live sessions into podcast episodes. So if you're listening to this as a podcast, thank you so much for the download. You can find our podcast on all major podcast platforms. It's called the Tefl and TESOL podcast by ITTT. So if you're into audio-only formats, I highly recommend checking it out. I always love listening to podcasts, especially when I'm driving. So maybe that's something for you. And yeah, then we're ready. Let me have a look at the comments when we're time. There are a lot of people here now. Awesome, we have Rabindra from India. It's 6.35 AM. Wow, thank you so much for being here so early. That's awesome. Letturg, thank you. Have a great day. Thank you, have a great day as well. Juliana says, I like your hair today. Thank you, it took me some time to do that today. And I don't know, the side is a little bit weird, but we're gonna work with it. Okay, awesome. What else? Is there anything else to say before we jump in? I don't think so. I think we're good to go. Yeah, so we're gonna jump right in. I have a lot of cool stuff to show you today, a lot of tools that you can use for saving money and budgeting and figuring out cost of living and things like that in different countries. So I hope you're gonna enjoy that. And yeah, let's jump right in. I'm gonna make myself smaller as always. So you can see the slides here and I'm also gonna take a sip of my coffee and then we can get started. Okay, so first up is always, you know the drill, I have a quick self introduction because we do get a lot of new people in our live sessions. Yeah, my name is Linda. I'm a travel writer and content creator under my name, Linda goes East. I've been living in Asia pretty much since 2012. I started out in China and now I live in South Korea. I've been here for six years and you can find my own content at Linda goes East.com and also an Instagram at Linda goes East. I love sharing my content there. So if you're on Instagram, follow me and hit me up in my DMs. I'd love to start a conversation with you guys. So if you have any questions, always feel free to reach out, no problem at all. I'm originally from Germany in the U.S. My mom is German, my dad is American. And yeah, I'm based in South Korea now for the past six years. It's been a pretty exciting ride. I taught English in China and also in South Korea full-time in my first year in Korea. And then I transitioned into this side here. So becoming a Teflon TESOL marketing professional for ITTT. But I also still teach on the side because it's just fun. I love teaching, meeting new people. That's always interesting. And there's so many opportunities here. So why not take it? And yeah, ITTT stands for International Teflon TESOL Training. You can find us at TeflonCourse.net. And on Instagram also at International Teflon Training. Also do give us a follow and like our content over there. ITTT is a leading Teflon TESOL course provider. Worldwide we offer a variety of different courses from online in class combined in over 30. Destinations globally and also obviously a wide range of different online courses. So yeah, and I know many of you already have taken a course with ITTTs. That's nothing new, but I still need to mention it because we do get new viewers. So I don't want them to be less out and not knowing what's happening. Okay, so that's that. Then we're moving on to the topic today. And I see there are a lot of people here today. So I see that you are interested in this topic. As I said before, we are live on Facebook and YouTube at the same time. So do leave your comments and I can all see them in one place here and I can get back to you. Yeah, so today's topic as you can tell is all about saving money and paying off loans and debt when teaching English abroad. And I already mentioned that in the beginning, but saving money and paying off debt is one of the main reasons why a lot of people actually decide to teach English abroad. I know many, I've met many people along the way who came to China or Korea or other different countries for that reason. And many of them also successfully paid off their student loans within one or two years of teaching abroad. And obviously the saving money part, a lot of people I know are regularly sending money back home or obviously saving money for then being able to go on amazing trips while teaching English abroad. So a lot of different options here. Yeah, and today we're going to talk about basically a few like smart techniques and tips and tricks, how you can save money when teaching English abroad, what you can do, the tools you can use to just maximize your saving potential and pay off debt and loans and all that kind of stuff. Because in a lot of times like we're just out of college and yes, you do wanna go abroad and have fun and everything but you're also, it would be just a smart thing to also think about the financial side of things and saving money and stuff like that. And so this is just very important and a part of adulting, isn't it? Okay, so first off, I just wanna start off by basically with these three things. So before we can talk about saving money and paying off any loans, we need to determine these three factors. So those are the main factors that you need to think about in order to figure out how and how much to save. So first off, we have the disposable income. So that is your income, your teaching salary that you're gonna get minus all the taxes and insurance and stuff like that. That's gonna come out of it. So that's one number we need to look at. The other number are then the fixed expenses. So those are things like your rent and your utilities and any kind of other like insurance things or then any monthly payments that you have. Also things like your phone plan, things like that. And then the third thing are your saving goals. That's what we need to look at. So the saving goals and with these three numbers, once you have that determined, you can then go from there and figure out your savings plan basically. And yeah, it's gonna take some time to basically figure out these numbers. I think the number that takes figuring out the longest are the fixed expenses. So that's probably gonna take, if you move abroad, especially the first month, you're gonna have a lot more expenses than the next month. And it's gonna just take some time for you to figure out what your fixed expenses are and are going to be. But once you have those three things, you can then work on your savings plan basically. So that's our ground work and base of everything that's gonna, basically the soil that's gonna where we're gonna grow our flower out of. Basically that's an analogy we can work with. But yeah, so that's how it works. I mean, that's the same everywhere, not obviously only for teaching English abroad, right? So yeah, great. All right, this is the first thing to remember. And then let me just say hi to Amitava. Hi, hello, Linda. How are you faring now? This is Amitava from Calcutta, India. It is 645 a.m. now. Yeah, it's super early. We just had another one, another person, Rabindra from India, it's also 645. It's super early. Thank you so much for tuning in. I really, really appreciate it, it's awesome. Okay, so now we're gonna start off looking into different strategies and tips and tricks, how you can save money when teaching English abroad and pay off debts and a couple of the tools that you can use for that. All right, first off, we have a little bit slow. A little bit slow. Hello. Okay, there we go. Basically you're Teflon T-SOL certification. So I know you're gonna say like, how does this help me save money? Because you need to pay for a Teflon course. It's not, you need to spend money on a Teflon course. So how does that help me save money? I get it. But listen, basically getting a Teflon T-SOL certification will maximize your earning potential, right? If you are certified, you have a T-SOL certification, you then have access to the best salaries and also the best working conditions. And it will also widen your choice of teaching jobs. So with a Teflon certificate or a T-SOL certificate, your salary is actually going to be higher, right? So compared to someone who doesn't have a certificate, who's not certified. And I've seen that and witnessed that in many, many instances. I actually taught English in China before I came to Korea and I was not Tefl certified at the time and it was not a requirement in China at the time. Now it is a requirement to have a Teflon. But when I was there, it was not. But I knew that I wanted to maximize my earning potential when I go to Korea. So I decided to take the Teflon course while I was still working in China. And then when I applied for jobs and I moved to Korea, I actually got a higher salary compared to other teachers because of my Tefl certificate. And so the money you're gonna spend on the certificate, you're pretty much gonna make or get back with your first paycheck. So it's really, really worth it to make extra. A higher income. So that would be the first step towards saving money and paying off debt. Definitely get a Teflor T-Sale certificate to earn a higher salary so that you can maximize your earning potential. All right, that's pretty much self-explanatories. I'm not gonna talk anymore about that, but yeah. I'm sure that makes sense to you. And for anyone who's joined just now, I just wanna say again, we do have a 30% off coupon code or link. So you can get Teflor T-Sale certified with 30% off. You can either scan the QR code in the right-hand corner here or you can click on this link that I shared in the comment section. Looks like this. So it gets you straight to the application form. You fill out the application and then you get your discount. Okay. Good. Let's look at the next point. So that would be the next thing. So first you would get your Teflor certificate, you take your Teflor course, you get certified and then you're gonna think about where you wanna go teach. And if your goal is to save money, to pay off debt, you need to choose the right destination. So what do I mean by right destination? You need to find a destination that has the highest salaries, the best bonuses, the best benefits, all of that. If your goal is to save as much money as possible, you need to, yeah, choose the right destination because where you teach has a big impact on how much you can earn and how much you can save. So a lot of people, they really wanna go to the great European capitals like Paris or Rome or London, but those places are very, very expensive. The cost of living is super high, apartment prices are high and usually the teaching salaries aren't that high either. So you're not going to be able to save a lot of money if you're teaching those destinations, unfortunately. And if you're interested in teaching in Europe or teaching in Asia or any other destination, we did live sessions about that in particular before so you can go back in the playlist and take a look at that because I'm gonna go in those live sessions, I'm going into cost of living and salaries, how much you can earn in different countries. So if that's something that interests you, I highly recommend checking that out in our playlist. So yeah, that is that. And basically the highest earning potential is in Asia, is specifically East Asia and I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the best countries when it's time and also the Middle East. Basically the Middle East has the highest salaries in all of the world for TEFL teachers. Also mentioned the Middle East before in one of our live sessions, so I recommend checking that out as well. But yes, choosing the right destination is very important. If your goal is to save as much money as possible, then you should look into Asia and the Middle East. And so one big thing to remember is the cost of living and one really great way to figure out the cost of living in different places. If you don't know obviously, because you don't live there, I'm gonna show you this really, really cool tool. It's the cost of living, what is it called, cost of living calculator. So it looks like this, this is how you can find it. And I'm just gonna show you real quick. So if you're, for example, we're just gonna take Korea as an example. And I'm actually gonna share that with you now and we can do it together so I can show you how it works. We're gonna stop that. Let's see, here we go. Hope you can see that soon. Okay, so this is the cost of living calculator thing. What is it called? The largest cost of living database, there you go. And actually this is really great. I've used this a lot and there's over 7 million prices from 10,000, over 10,000 cities in the world and by over half a million contributors. So what this is basically real people can add real prices of the city they live in into this database to then offer you a firsthand real world idea of the cost of living in the place. So we can pick a location, we can pick a city. So for example, we could pick Seoul, Seoul, South Korea, and then you can find a little bit of a summary right at the top. So it says family of four estimated monthly costs are 4.431,001 without rent using our estimator. Okay, now it says once then you would have to probably calculate that. Oh, you can actually change the currency here. Okay, great. So let's change it to US dollars. What happens? Okay, here, great. So this is what a family of four will need, monthly costs for family of four, a single person's monthly costs without rent. And then it also says things like Seoul is 20% less expensive than New York without rent, but rent in Seoul and rent in Seoul is on average 64.49% lower than in New York. So for example, and then we can even go lower down here and then you can see different prices or different items for example. So here we have a McMeal at McDonald's, how much that is, a meal for two people, domestic beer, imported beer, a cappuccino and the prices right here on the side. Also grocery items, what they're priced at in that location, transportation costs, utilities, also different activities, childcare, clothing, apartments, rents, that's very interesting to know. And also I like that they do it by in city center, outside the center, one bedroom, three bedrooms. So we get a great variety of different things here. So yeah, and also monthly average, average monthly net salary for people. So yeah, I think this is a really, really great tool to use. If you know or you think about, oh, I want to move there, I want to move to Seoul, I want to move to Tokyo, I want to move to wherever, you can kind of compare the cost of living with this tool. And here you can also see the distribution of expenses, for example, and just a lot of other little effects. Good, and I think you can also, I don't know if you can compare, oh, compare with, yes, that's a really great feature too, so you can compare that with maybe your hometown, right? So if we do maybe like Chicago, so you can compare Seoul with Chicago, for example, and right at the top, the differences you can see. So consumer prices in Seoul are 1.7, 24% higher than in Chicago. However, rent is lower, rent prices are lower than in Chicago, restaurant prices are lower than in Chicago, but grocery prices are higher and the local purchasing power in Seoul is lower. And then here you can kind of compare. A meal in an inexpensive restaurant in Chicago is 1,750, but in Seoul it's 699, so a little bit of a difference here. However, look at milk, milk is a lot more expensive in Seoul than it is in Chicago, for example. So yeah, this is a tool that you can use to kind of compare and see before you go what the cost of living is like in the place where you're interested in. I hope that makes sense. I hope it's interesting. Feel free to leave a comment also if you are from Chicago, I know Juliana is from Illinois, that's why I picked Chicago real quick. But yeah, we can do this for any city and you can just compare. Yeah, they also see have a lot of different indexes here, also crime index, healthcare index, pollution, all of these things. So this is a really great website to kind of just get an idea of the place where you wanna move to. All right. Good. Then let's go back to the slides. One second, if it makes sense. Thank you, Juliana. Awesome. Yeah, so if I think that's a really great tool for people moving abroad, definitely very useful. So you can check that out, numbeo.com with a lot of great statistics. You can compare cities and countries, cost of livings and all of that stuff. So very, very useful. Keep that in mind, something to remember for sure. Okay. And now let's talk a little bit about the recommended locations with high earning potentials. So those are basically the four biggest places with the highest earning potentials. So we have China and South Korea over here and then we have Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on the other side. All of these locations share these two things. So all of these locations typically have paid accommodation, free airfare and also bonuses and severance. So very high earning potential. Paid accommodation means your employer, your school will give you accommodation. You don't have to worry about rent, which is great because rent is actually the costliest expense per month, typically. So if you don't have to worry about that, that is going to give you a lot of opportunity to save money. And then also obviously free airfare is great and then bonuses and severance typically, there's things like end of contract bonuses. So if you finish one year, you get a extra bonus and then also severance is great for when you leave the country, for example. In Korea, it's like that, they have the national pension scheme. So you pay into the national pension scheme every month. But then when you leave Korea, you get all of that back. And depending on how long you stay, that's a couple of thousand dollars that you can actually get back, which is great. You can then use back home to pay off debts and things. And yeah, in all of these locations, you can save between 30 and 50% of your monthly income. So in China and in South Korea, that means you can save between 500 and 1500 US dollars per month. And for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, this even means you can save as much as $2,000 per month. So the saving potential is very high in those four locations. Is anyone interested in teaching in one of those four locations? Let me know in the comment section. And then which one are you interested in and also why? I'm curious. So I've personally lived and taught English in China and South Korea. So I know a little bit about that, but maybe if there's someone who has experience with these two locations, that would be really interesting actually. And LaTarque says, that's a nice tool calculating the cost of living. Thank you for sharing. I don't know about it, it's interesting. Yeah, you're welcome. I also really liked, I don't know who showed me that, but I also really, really thought that it was super interesting when I learned about it and it's just great to get an idea about it. But yeah, so China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the locations with the highest earning potentials. So if your goal is to save as much money as possible to pay off debts, you should look into those four locations. And we did live sessions about the best locations to teach English abroad before where we mentioned all of these and then I also did a separate live about just teaching English in Asia, where I go in depth about teaching English in China and South Korea. So do check that out, I highly recommend it if you're interested in one of these. Okay, moving on, next we have a great tip and that is earning extra income. So a great way to obviously save more money is making more money. So what you can do is earn an extra income, for example, by providing private language lessons in your free time. That's probably not something new. A lot of teachers do that. And what's interesting to know is actually that in many Asian countries, parents, they sent their children for additional English instruction outside of school hours, that is very, very common. In Korea that's very common, in China very common, and also Japan and Taiwan. And in these locations, you can charge anywhere from 20 to 50 US dollars per hour for a private class. And I know a lot of people who are doing that, I am doing that. So pretty much everyone I know is doing that because it's just so lucrative. There's a super high demand, especially if you're a native English speaker, because that's what parents are looking for basically for their children. And then you just, yeah, tutor them in your free time. You're a lot of great resources as well where you can get material from. Obviously you need to create your own material in most cases for private tutoring, but the more teaching experience you have, if you've taken your TEFL course, your TESOL course, you're gonna have a lot of lesson planning and like access to materials, and you can use all of that then for your private tutoring lessons basically. So yeah, that's a great way to earn an extra income. Next point, also earning extra income if you don't wanna do tutoring, private tutoring, that's totally fine. Another great way is just to teach online, which I've also doing, I started teaching English online in March of this year. And yeah, because the digital learning is the quickest growing market in the education industry at the moment. And what's great with that is you can attract students from all over the world and teach location independently. So for me, I teach a lot of students actually from Japan, I don't live in Japan, but most of my students are from Japan. I also teach people in Korea, but not in my town in Korea. I also teach people in Europe. So you don't need to worry about location, transportation costs or anything like that. And there's so many online teaching platforms to choose from. It's, I mean, you can do a quick Google search for online teaching platforms or teaching English online or something like that. And there's a plethora of different teaching platforms. So we have VIPKID, for example, Palfish, QKids, MagicEars, EF English First, say ABC, DataABC, Camly, Preply, CafeTalk and many, many more. There's so many out there. So this is another great way to do that. And also again, most of these platforms you do need to upload credentials. So if you also have a Teflor T-Sol and you upload that, you're also gonna earn more money. So again, a Teflor T-Sol you're just going to enhance your saving and earning potential. All right, we have a comment from Amitabha. I just wanna look at. I would like to venture into teaching in South Korea. One important aspect of choosing this country is that I can have you as a friend, philosopher and guide, guide whilst living in the same country itself. Oh, that is so sweet. Thank you so much. That's awesome. I love that. Thank you. I would love for you to come. Yes, hit me up and we grab some coffee and have a chat. That would be awesome. Okay, great. So private tutoring, face to face. Then we have teaching online where you are location independent. You don't need to worry about meeting any students face to face and gathering students in your neighborhood. You have access to thousands of students, thousands of willing students waiting for you basically when you teach English online. So, yeah. And actually we did, I know that definitely my colleague Lisa, she did a live about teaching English online because she's very experienced in teaching English online. So if you're interested in that, do check out that live session as well. That was really, really helpful. Actually, after I watched that, I started teaching online because of her tips and everything. So thank you, Lisa, that was awesome. Good. Next point, very important, how to save on accommodation. So we already talked a little bit about accommodation and basically accommodation, housing is generally the costliest expense, right? It can be anywhere from 40 to 50, even 60% of your salary that some people need to use for rent and things like that. So if you are not lucky and work for one of those, one of the schools that offer free accommodation, there's still a few things that you can do to save money on accommodation. But like I said, most places like China, I know also places in Japan and Korea, they generally offer free accommodation. But if you teach in a place where you don't have free accommodation that still doesn't mean that you won't be able to save, you can still do a few things to maximize that. So one thing you can do is share a house or apartment with a friend or a colleague. So a lot of schools, they will actually have like, they will help you out. So they have like their teachers and then they will help them find a teacher apartment together so that you then can save money. And also another great tip is to look for housing on the outskirts of the city rather than in the center, obviously. I think that's pretty much self-explanatory or like common sense. Usually the center is obviously much more expensive. Even though maybe your school might be in the center, you should still, if you wanna save money, look for an apartment outside the city or just on the edge to save more on rent. So, and there's also a lot, a lot, a lot of Facebook groups I know I love mentioning Facebook groups, but those are great to find people to share apartments with and also to find cheap rooms in shared apartments. Because if you move to a new place, you generally don't really know where to look or like the area or any websites that they use. So Facebook is a great place to start. You can find groups like TEFL teachers in Korea or TEFL teachers in China, wherever. There's a group for everything. And then you can ask there if anyone knows anything about shared apartments and housing and you can make connections that way. So that's another thing, I can't talk today, another thing to keep in mind. Let me take one more sip of my coffee. Okay, good. So that is accommodation. Let's see what we have next, how we can save more money. Okay, this is another great one. So this is once you're already there in the country and you're living your life, you're teaching abroad living expenses. So if you don't pay attention, you're living expenses, they can really bite a huge hole into your pockets and even it's just like little things. I know for me, like Korea has so many amazing coffee shops and you would just go to cafes all the time and get a coffee here, coffee there, coffee to here, coffee there. And then that's slowly heading up and then if you write everything down, we're gonna talk about budgeting also in a little bit. If you write everything down, what you spend and then you look at it and you notice like, oh my God, I buy way too much coffee at the coffee shop and the coffees are like five or $6, that's adding up. So that's what we're gonna talk about, living expenses. So another thing, especially for expats, living abroad are obviously the foreigner areas, right? We wanna eat at foreign restaurants, you go to foreign bars and all of those things, which is great, you can certainly do that, but maybe not all the time. So generally it's better to avoid bars, restaurants, shops and other services that are specifically aimed at expats workers, because those are a lot more expensive than like the local places, obviously. So that is one thing that you can do. And also another great thing is doing your grocery shopping at the local market compared to big supermarkets and also hanging out in areas that are not solely aimed at foreigners. So if you look at the picture here, this would be a great example of a local market. We have them in China, we have them in Korea, the traditional markets, the little street vendors, those are great places to get some of your groceries so you don't need to go to the more expensive supermarkets. And you're also helping out some local people at the same time, which is great. So this is my advice, and then also, yes, what Juliana just mentioned, Juliana said, my best tip is to cook by yourself. Yes, that's also what I added here. So cooking your own meals at home is often less expensive than eating out. I say often because it also depends on what kind of food you cook. So this is one thing what I realized in Korea. If I were to cook like Western food, food I eat at home like pasta and steaks and I don't even know that kind of stuff, it's actually more expensive than eating out at a local Korean restaurant. So because it's all like, it's not ingredients that are normal in Korea. So those ingredients that you use to cook your own food, are most likely also imported. So they're actually more expensive. So the way you can actually save the most money would be to cook local food at home. So I'm in Korea, if I were to cook only Korean food at home, that's how I would save the most money. Obviously I don't wanna eat only Korean food and I'm also not good at cooking Korean food. So this one's a little bit tricky. I do cook my own, like I cook like a bunch of different things, but yeah, I think a great tip, if you're not really into cooking is just to look for like smaller authentic restaurants and also street markets, those traditional markets to get new groceries and then also to eat out at like smaller, more like local places compared to chain restaurants or like foreign chain restaurants, international restaurants and stuff like that. So yeah, that is that. I think I have nothing more to add. Let me think, I think that's about it, but yeah. But that's what a lot of, I remember like my first year, also in China, actually my first six months in China, we used to just go to like foreigner bars all the time and that is very expensive. Also in Korea, you used to, because you don't have any local friends yet, you don't really know anything yet, so you always stick to what's comfortable, right? And what's comfortable are other foreigners. So you tend to go there, but that's more expensive. So obviously I'm not saying never go to foreigner bars or never go to foreign restaurants, but just know that they are more expensive and if you really wanna save money, maybe don't do it as often and also consider going more local. Yeah. All right, good. Next point, this is very important. Now, once we figure out all of these things, so those things, what I talked about are basically the two things out of the three numbers that we need in the beginning. So our disposable income, we can kind of change that by earning extra income, what we mentioned, tutoring and teaching online and you can also do a lot of other things if you have other skills, obviously. That is that the disposable income and then the other thing was your fixed expenses. So once we figure that all out, our rent, how we can save on our rent, our living expenses, how we can sort of keep them lower, that is that. And now we can set up a budget plan to then figure out how much you can save from that, if that makes sense. So for the first three months of teaching abroad and that also includes actually taking an in-class TEFL course, we have the, it's called the TEFL budget planner. I'm also gonna show you that in just a second and so you can use that for your first three months and then once you have figured everything out, the three things we talked about, you then set up a regular month-to-month budget plan. And I'm sure everyone at some point in their school life had probably had a class about how to budget. So yeah, but the thing is like we learn about budgeting but then we end up never doing it. But if you really wanna save money, you need to pay up debt, a budget plan, really is important and you should do it. And it's a great way to just find out where most of your money goes and what changes you can make. So by writing, like I said, by writing down everything, writing down all the expenses you have, every time you spend money, write that down, you're gonna notice, oh my God, I spend way too much time, way too much money on coffee or things like that. You're gonna, you can determine where you can make cuts, basically. So that's what we're gonna do. And yeah, let me show you that budget planner now. And I'm also gonna share a link to the budget planner so you can download that later. This is what that looks like. So this is the Tefl budget planner spreadsheet. And as you can see, you're gonna find first month, second month, third month, and then monthly budget. So the first, second, and third month are basically for people who are actually taking an in-class Tefl course abroad. So if you're not taking an in-class Tefl course four weeks abroad or you are going abroad to interview and finding jobs, you can ignore actually the first three months and then can jump right into the monthly budget. But I'm just gonna go over this very briefly. And then you can look at this more, if you're interested, I'm gonna share the link to it so you can just look at that later on your own time. But yeah, month one, this is your Tefl certification expenses. Here, where is the sheet? Okay, here we go. Good, all right. So these are the core expenses to become Tefl certified over four weeks. So if you take a four-week in-class course, it includes course tuition, food, incidentals, and accommodation, and you can add your own rows as well. So for example, Tefl course, you write down what it costs. You can also find what that would be daily per day. Your apartment, how much is that per day? Internet, food, transportation, living costs, and entertainment. And this is the budget that you need for your first month, the month where you take a Tefl course abroad, for example. Now, if you take an online course, obviously, you only have this one expense and it's gonna be significantly lowered in $1,200, depending on what course you take. It's like 200, 150, 200, 250, 300, something like that. And then obviously you do it in your own home so you don't need to worry about any of these other expenses, right? Good, then we move at month two. This is the interviewing phase. So this is for people who go abroad for their in-class Tefl course. They do their four-week course that is month one, and then they stay in the country and interview, right? So a person, let's say, goes to Bangkok. Takes the four-week in-class course and now they stay in Bangkok and try to find a teaching job. So this is month two. And then it says your Tefl tuition disappears in month two. Yeah, obviously. So we already paid that in full. And we have other things. We still need to pay rent and internet and food and transportation, and then you can add other things. So this is however long it's gonna take. Oh, this sheet is acting weird. Okay, here. So this is however long it's gonna take to find then a position. Typically not that long, maybe just hopefully just a month, typically faster than that. And then you add up your month one and your month two, and then you have this expense month one and two. And the third month is then your first teaching month. So in your first teaching month, you don't have a salary yet. So you need to think about that. So you need to find a way to be able to afford your first month without having your salary, right? So these are still all the same, and then you just add them all up plus your airfare. If your airfare obviously is paid for, and maybe then also your apartment rent will be paid for by your school if you have a contract where they pay for accommodation. So that will depend on what kind of job you get, but this would be the first month. And then this means if you add up all three months, one, two, and three, how much money you needed to begin your teaching career. Now, obviously, like I said, if you are taking an online TEFL course, this is much less and very different. You only have your TEFL course expense, and that might even be it. You might have some expenses like getting your documents for your visa. Those sometimes cost money. And then you might have to pay for your airplane, and then you get reimbursed by your employer, or your employer pays and books your airplane ticket. But yeah, if you take an online course, this would be much, much less, obviously. And then, so if you don't take an four-week in-class TEFL course, you can start here in this tab, the monthly budget tab, and you can just use this one for your month-to-month budget, okay? So here you have your expenses. You can put them in. There's also a tab for local currency. You can change that. This is bought now, but you can change the currency to whatever you need, if it's Korean won, or Chinese yuan, or whatever. And then you'll see that here. So you have your total expenses. They're all added up. And then also your paycheck. You would add that here, and then you'll see what's left to spend, basically. And it's very important that you also include your savings into your expenses already. That's a very important thing. So you need, and I'm actually gonna talk about this next. I'm just gonna wait. I'm gonna talk about this next, but this is the budget planner that you can use, obviously. There's many, many other budget planners out there online. If this one doesn't work for you, you can find another one, no problem. But I'm gonna share the link to this with you right now. Like so in the comment box. I think that's it. Looks like this. And then you can make a copy and use this for yourself. Very useful. Looks like that. Okay, good. Then I'm gonna go back to my other slides. And let me know if you have any questions about that. Okay, so this is that, your budget planner. And then that's what I was gonna say next. So make it a habit to pay yourself first. So pay yourself before you pay your bills. Basically, make automatic payments into your savings account every time you get paid and treat your savings account or your savings, the amount of money you wanna save, like a bill that you have to pay. That's why it is included in our budget under expenses. Cause if you leave it until, oh, this is what I have left to spend. So I'm gonna, this month I'm gonna save, I don't have that much left. I'm not gonna save as much. No, you need to treat your savings like a bill, like an expense if you have to pay. That's how you will be successful at saving and paying off your debts, basically. That's just my tip for you. That's how it should be done, basically. So pay yourself before you pay your bills. Obviously you need to pay your bills, if you can't make ends meet, that's not good. But treat your savings, savings account, like a bill that you have to pay. So you can get a savings account in your, there's a lot of different ways how to do this. Get a savings account in the country that you're teaching or you keep your own account at home and you send money back home. A lot of people do that too. And I thought about including that in this presentation, how to best send money home, what's like the cheapest way. But it literally depends on the country that you're teaching in, what kind of bank you use there, what kind of bank you use at home, where your home country is. So this, it's not really, I can't really include that because it's just really depends on case by case. Obviously popular options are always PayPal, Payoneer, Western Union, things like that, or just direct bank transfer, which might be really cheap depending on what bank you're using. Basically what you can do is ask other teachers, your colleagues or your employer about that because they're likely, they likely have more experience and they probably also send money back home or they know more what the cheapest options are. So it really depends on different situations, different countries. So I can't really say a lot about that, but that's my advice. Just ask people who have already done that. They likely know exactly how to go about and your employer. Okay, this is it. Those are my tips. I hope it was something was in there that was useful for you, the cost of living tool, the budget planner and some of the tips here and there. I hope you found that useful. It's always hard to say, you know, more specific things like sending money back home like I said, cause it really depends and varies from situation to situation and country to country. But this is what I came up with and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you took something away from it. And now is your time to ask more questions before I sign off for today. And also just don't forget the 30% off that we have so you can scan this QR code or I'm also gonna share the discount link just one more time in the comment section. If anyone missed it, they can see it now. Looks like this. This is the discount link. And then we're gonna start our Q&A session now. So now is your time to ask any questions about today's topic about Korea, China, teaching abroad, our TEFL course, anything that you're curious about, you can just feel free and ask. All right. And there was a really long comment that I didn't look at before. So I wanna just read that now real quicks from Amitabha. Do you have a local cheap and inexpensive Chinese and Tibetan restaurants in and around South Korea serving say chicken chow mein, chicken fried rice and or fried and steamed momos? By the way, are there any local Indian restaurants serving Indian dishes? Yeah. So there's actually a lot of Indian restaurants in China which I love. A lot of Indians and Nepalese people in Pakistani, they live in South Korea. So there's a lot of restaurants for that. Tibetan, I'm not sure. In Seoul, you can get pretty much anything. So I'm sure there's Tibetan restaurants. I know there's like Mongolian, a few like Mongolian places also around. And Chinese, yes. But there's more like Korean Chinese. So not so much the American Chinese version of the food but you can also find that especially in Seoul. So there's for example, Panda Express in Seoul and a few like American Chinese food places. There's actually one that opened near my house which is really nice. They also have like Southeast Asian, like fried noodles and things like that. So that's really nice. They also had Okinawan rice and Chinese chicken rice I think. So a lot of different options. But yeah, for sure, a lot of Indian food and Nepalese food in Korea. All right, that's a good question. I'm hungry now, I love Indian food. Love Indian food and Nepalese food. I went on this amazing food tour in 2019 in Nepal and it was so good. And I have chai every day and lassi. So good, hungry now. It's 11 and I'm getting hungry. The tour exists, interesting topic. I find it useful, I am learning. Thank you for walking me through it. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. I appreciate it, thank you. All right, if there are no other questions then I would sign off but I just wanna give it one or two more minutes just to be sure, making sure that no one's left out. But yeah, we are back again next week. I'll be back probably also Friday, maybe again Friday afternoon, so a little bit later than today. But my colleague Lisa, she will be back I think Tuesday. So do check that out. And also check out our playlists. Like I mentioned, there's a lot of useful information if you haven't seen that yet. Information about teaching in different areas, regions, like Asia, yeah. Also, careful contracts and I don't know, I talked about so many different topics before and now I can't think of a lot, but we have a wealth of information out there for you guys, so check that out. Juliana says, thank you so much. Thank you for always coming back here. I really appreciate it. It's really awesome. Amitava says, it is quite nice to know that you like and love both Indian and Nepalese cuisine food. In fact, I did my Teflin class course in Kathmandu in June of 2019. No way, oh that's awesome. Did you like it? Kathmandu, I was there in October 2019. So just a few months after you. Cool, I really like Kathmandu. It was so amazing. Very different from any other place I'd been before and I've traveled a lot around Southeast Asia, East Asia, but South Asia is really a whole nother region. And I was in Kathmandu for not a long time, like three, four days and then I actually did a tour in Bhutan. I was there for one week and you can't fly into Bhutan from every airport. So the closest airport to fly into Bhutan was Kathmandu. So that's why I decided to go there and spend a few days in Kathmandu before going to Bhutan and then going back to Kathmandu and then spend one more day there and then I went back home. But it was so nice. So I really wanna go back to Nepal again. Beautiful, beautiful country. It's so colorful and like the food is so great. Yeah, I loved it. Awesome. All right, if there are no more questions that I think I'm going to sign off before I just start rambling and it's not gonna be interesting at all. But yeah, if you're interested more into, you know, my travels, traveling around Asia, what that's like, do check out my Instagram here at LyndaGhostEast. I share a lot of my travel experiences on there. So that's something that's interesting to you. I recommend checking that out. Yeah. And then let me just read this comment one more time. Thanks, Lynda, a lot for your kind insights, suggestions and thoughts. I like Nepal. I also went to Bhutan in October, November, 2018. Both Nepal and Bhutan were wonderful to visit. Yeah, same. I really wanna go back to both. I wanna go back to Bhutan as well. And you're lucky because you're Indian, so you can just enter Bhutan and travel around by yourself. That's really cool. Only Indians, I think, can do that because you have like an agreement between India and Bhutan. But for non-Indians, you need to book through an agency and you cannot just travel around by yourself. So you have to have a local guide and a driver. So it was just me and my guide and my driver and we traveled around. Bhutan, it was amazing. It was so good. So yeah. Awesome. All right then. I'm gonna sign off. This was really great. I hope I gave you some incentives for saving money and some ideas on how to make more money. And then, yeah, I will be back next week. I hope I'm gonna see some of you again next week as well. I really, really appreciate it. And then I'm gonna think of a new exciting topic, hopefully, to talk about next time. And I can't wait to see you all again. And I hope you are gonna have an incredible weekend with great weather and lots of good food and fun and friends and anything that you want. And yeah, signing off. Don't forget to check out the budget planner that I shared the link with you and also the cost of living tool. And yeah, the 30% off link, of course, right? Don't forget that either. All right, then I'm signing off. This is it. And then I'm gonna see you again next week. All right, guys. Thank you. Bye-bye.