if you're a native English speaker, you can start doing this next week.
every month you teach english generally results in 2 to 3 months of savings.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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My friend spent a few years in Taiwan and Thailand this way, no need to be a teacher by trade either.
it's a great job.
teach as little or much as you want, save as much money as you want, go pretty much wherever you want, and then chill out the rest of the time.
I taught for several years and am still traveling on the savings a decade later.
did you use to teach online or in-person? i have heard of people doing this but i always just assume its already too full of people doing it that it would be hard to make space for yourself to get into it
both.
I taught in person in China at first, and then after I started traveling full-time I taught online because all you need is a smartphone.
and no, the market is not at all saturated, it is wide open. there are literally thousands of jobs available right now across dozens of countries and online.
if you have any interest in traveling, or you need money, and are a native or fluent English speaker, teaching English is such a great deal.
I'm happy to answer any other questions you have.
thats great thanks for being so open to share your experience, how did you manage to get people driven to enroll to be your student? i get that online you would usually join a platform for it (there are many which is hard to know which to use, but they have many users so they do the work of marketing your service for you, but so comes with the competitiveness for students with other teachers)
for sure! I love talking about this stuff.
if you join an online platform with in-place curriculum, then they assign you to classes so the students are already there.
I didn't want a schedule, so i made myself available to casually chat with ESL learners on an app called palfish.
enough people called me up for me to make a few hundred a month, which is all I needed to travel. dorms are $100 a month in SE Asia, food is 1 to $4 a portion in all of asia, and I was backpacking half the time anyway.
when I landed in a country, I bought the unlimited data-only plan, clicked the "online" button, and then people called me up whenever they wanted to practice their english with me.
that online work was partially to offset using my savings, but i had already taught in person for ~7 years.
with each month of in-person teaching affording me ~3 months of living expenses, i had enough savings to travel for a couple decades by the time i started traveling full-time.
quick note: there's no competition for ESL students at the teacher level. there are way too many ESL students and not nearly enough English teachers to fulfill the demand. it's not even close.
I did one cycle of it, but now I'm too burnt out and despaired and in need of medical care to think of going back to any form of employment and I'm really lucky that I dont have to worry about it too much
Didn’t know this phenomenon had a name. That’s what I’m doing right now however. I want to have enough money to be unemployed for a year or two.
This gets a lot easier if you have somewhere reliable and preferably free to stay when you need to start working again. Even if you have paid off your own place or been given a place for free you have bills to pay on it. I guess you can rent it out while you are away, but that seems less than ideal to me as how do you keep it maintained if you aren't in the country? It just ends up being another cost.
I would have loved to have done this but the housing situation has always put me off.
Nothing new.
This is literally the route I took in my life. Entered the workforce in the early 2000s in IT as helpdesk. Worked till I had a resume good enough for the next level up. Lived below my means. Take several months off to do whatever. Apply for a higher level position. Rinse and repeat every couple years until I was in my 40s at a company I intend to retire with.
I always lived in a smaller place than what I could afford. Never owned a new car. My current vehicle is a 2001 pickup truck, purchased in like 2018. So, gotta trade one luxury for another.
2 caveats: IT as a career was not in the state its in now. Much easier to move up and around. I'm also now in my late 40s and looking to buy my first home, since I wasn't building a nest egg my whole life, and that's no fun.
Also, it was really important to have some significant achievements on the resume as I left each place to show growth professionally so I could always jump up in role/salary with each move.
My career is solid and I make a great salary for my age, but homes are just insane. My brother is 6 years younger and took a more traditional route and started a family, he was able to score a good home before COVID.
Still, I wouldn't trade anything material for the life I took and the places I went.
Honey, that was a lifestyle boomers actually lived once. Though it's more of a silent generation lifestyle
[off topic]
I am a fan of the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald. Introduced to them in childhood and still worth a re-read.
Travis was a 'salvage consultant' who would rob loot back from criminals, and then retire for as long as the money lasted.
What's funny is I just typed a comment trying to analyze what types of jobs would allow for this, and one category was the "discrete projects that have a defined beginning and end" type jobs, and it did cross my mind that movie-style heists tend to have this kind of arrangement.
So many people talk about doing this but few actually do.
I've done something similar involving working holidays. I'm tired now and Covid fucked up my plans and my career is going to be hell to get back into, but I want to change anyway. Just hope I got enough experience and education and brains to climb up the ladder, I just don't know where yet.
I'm glad I did it but it isn't for most.
As someone with kids, that's not happening. Then again, my sibling did this and went on a year-long trip with their kids, and it worked out for them.
This is what my old housemate did, starting in the 90s. Worked out quite well for him. My dad used went round the world with the navy in the 50s and used to talk about how some other cultures did stuff like this.
How does that work when you don't live with your parents?
Rents are extremely expensive and would slow down the "build a safety net" part of the cycle.
Live with roommates, stop living with roommates since you're now traveling, no rent payment.
If you're gonna do this, go drive a truck in a mining area. (In Australia this basically means WA) They're often desperate for drivers and the pay is insane.