Stickman Readers' Submissions February 22nd, 2010

Living In The Land Of Smiles And Earning An Income Without Being A Teacher (It’s Possible)

Well, I thought I would write this little piece on my experiences about trying to survive on little income. If you don’t teach and don’t have some specialized skills it can be pretty hard to survive here unless you have a bucketload of money
sitting in the bank back home. Not to mention getting a work permit here ain't easy even if you were able to get hired for some job that there are plenty of Thais lining up to do ahead of you.

So this left me with the problem of how I could live here in Thailand with not a great deal of savings back home. Well enough that is to lead a decent lifestyle that wouldn’t significantly eat into my savings. I think, unlike a lot
who come here, I thought I need to have a nice steady amount of income coming in to live well, otherwise I would certainly find that my quality of life would be far less than in the west, so really, what would be the point of continuing to stay.
I didn’t want to turn out like some of those mongers here who are living a disheveled lifestyle running away on bar tabs etc.

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This had me thinking and searching for a way to achieve this, and what I was left with was needing to be self-employed, and not having a fixed place of business. Perfect, the internet was my answer! So I searched around a bit on the net about
starting my own website to make a bit of cash, not an easy task especially for a mature gent like myself (I'm in my 40s, not old, but certainly not up to speed like all the whizz bang tech savvy kids of today). Anyway I came across the site
of a website investment advisory firm. I will just give them a quick plug since they were very good, (www.nequityonline.com) . They helped me find a website business that was for sale that fitted all my requirements, valued it to see if it was
a good price, and checked out to make sure there was nothing dodgy and now I find myself pulling in 30,000 baht a month extra income from this site! Websites are very well priced. It was a small investment in comparison to the income earned. I
paid around 200,000 baht.

This extra income has really made me a lot securer now and allows me to blow off a lot of extra steam here in Thailand. 30,000 a month can go a long way here in the land of smiles. So I am fairly pleased to say that I can live here and be
able to earn an income. All the money I earn goes through to my UK bank account, keeping it all safe and secure there.

Believe it or not there is money in all types of websites. I would guess Stickman earns some nice extra money from his site, and why shouldn’t he? He’s is providing a service that we all enjoy, and clearly he spends a lot of
hours on it. Myself, I have bought two sites. I bought one e-commerce site which involves the sale of electronic products. There is a drop shipper supplier in China that sends all the products directly to my customers and I earn a margin on this.
It requires an hour or 2 a day to make sure orders go through and other feedback queries form customers. My other site earns money purely off advertising. It’s a blog that I bought on a topic that I am really into (buying holiday farms),
and all I do is write a new article or 2 every week for the blog and I enjoy this so it’s a great way to earn a crust. So I’d definitely recommend it if you are interested in a website to often try and go for something you are passionate
about.

I know that if I lived here and worked as a teacher I wouldn’t be enjoying my life and would have to devote a lot more time to that, or some other crappy job. I thought this could appeal to many readers on here who are looking for
extra income to make ends meet in Thailand, because things definitely aren’t as cheap as they used to be, and the restrictions on working and the low salaries are hard to get around, but this solution seems to work for me.

My other recommendation is to make sure you get a good connection to the internet here and are able to get online when needed. Things internet wise are pretty good here in Thailand, so it’s not too much of a problem. And the great
thing about this incomes is I can earn it wherever in the world I am, whether I am back home, in Bangkok, or lying back in my hammock on Samui!

Stickman's thoughts:

There are more Westerners making money in Thailand than you would expect. From those running blogs, to pay per view ladyboy sites to EBay traders to those playing the sharemarket to translations to all sorts of things. I could not even begin to guess how many are doing it. As you rightly point out, one you get established you can make more from a site that you would teaching – and you don't have all of the office politics or nonsense to put up with.

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