Category: Money

Job and Foreign Language Update

So, I didn’t take that new job after all. The only reason I felt able to take it is that I would stay on in my current job part time. But I had too many questions. It was only a 95% chance that they’d keep me on permanently. Another listing for a similar job said that a raise was possible, when it was basically promised to me, and the recruiter said that I would only be temp for three months until my boss pointed out that my prospective employer is known to keep people temp for six months or even more. When I asked the recruiter, he admitted that sometimes it does end up being more than three months. But, he added just a little too quickly, sometimes it’s less.

The entire thing made me feel sick, and if it didn’t work out, or wasn’t what I was expecting (like there was no raise, or the raise wasn’t what I was hoping), I would end up part time. Again. I’d been part time for five years before I finally became full time and, well, I turned down the job.

I’m still working on my foreign language skills. I finished my first year on the 15th (meaning that I’m starting on my second year as of today). I haven’t missed a day of study and have paid myself over $400 in that time. I’m hoping to start investing the money on the stock market sometime in 2018, which should bring me closer to my goal a bit faster.

I don’t know if I’ve posted this here or not, but I really should have majored in modern languages rather than elementary education.* Things would be so much easier now if I had. I could have been working as a translator back when I was first working and could have kept my hand in while raising my son. When I found myself single in 2008, I would have been employed all the way through and could have gotten work right away. So, I’m going to fix that oversight. I’m saving up to get a graduate degree (because there’s no point in getting another undergraduate degree) in modern languages. Which language? I’m not sure. I’m going to study all of my languages and see (a) which ones I’m more comfortable with, (b) which ones I can get the most work in**, and (c) which are available at whatever public university they have in whatever city I’m living in at that time. Hopefully, the same language will be in all three columns and that will make my decision there.

I’m almost done with Rosetta Stone Vietnamese and am going to apply for Rosetta Stone Italian and see if I can build on the Italian I learned before our 2014 trip.

*Why didn’t I major in modern languages? Thomas and I were in a long-distance relationship. We only saw each other every three weeks and phone conversations were sporadic at best. To get that degree, or even just to be competitive once I graduated, I would have to have studied overseas at some point. I didn’t want to be in a completely different country from him for 16 whole weeks, so I chose to major in something that basically everyone else in my family has done. Turns out that was a bad fit, so I ended up becoming a paralegal.

**I’m not just going to study to make this money. My plan is to see if I can get an actual part-time job as a foreign language tutor at one or more of the local colleges or universities for mornings or weekends or whatever I can work out around my day job. I was my junior college’s Spanish and German tutor back in the day, so I have experience and that was part time as well, so there’s that. And once I’ve been doing that for a while, I may venture out as an independent contractor and see if I can make a bit more that way. Eventually I want to hang my shingle up as a translator. If all goes well, I’ll be able to do that for enough money to make a living wage even if I do stay as a retail pharmacy technician for the long haul. Half of my part-time job income and one-quarter of my independent-contractor income will also go into my graduate school fund. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to get that degree before I reach retirement age.

Making Money

Now, I want to make money from my travel writing somehow. I’ve actually made a tiny bit ($15 or so, I think) from writing on different for-pay sites over the years, but I really want to get somewhere with this. So I’ve got some ideas:

  1. I’m actually breaking ground on a travel book. I really need a public-domain map that I can modify for this purpose, though. What I want to do is break the city up into manageable slices and do something a little more than a pamphlet but a little less than a book on each and then eventually join them up into larger regional guides (like having a downtown guide, a Missions-area guide, etc.) and then, if I ever finish the whole city, have one larger guide for everything. I have pictures taken of two of these sections of downtown and (as I write this on August 31) hope to get downtown to take pictures for the third soon. I’m planning to hit my friends up for personal experiences in/near/with these places to include. My dream is to include nearby towns like Boerne, New Braunfels, etc. in this guide eventually.
  2. Kinda/sorta sell photographs. My idea isn’t to actually sell them, like setting up a booth or anything, but to take requests for photos to post in my blogs. If someone, for example, wants to see if the Alamo is really in the middle of downtown (it is, but it’s not really downtown as someone from, like, Chicago or New York would understand the term), they could pay me a relatively small amount and I’d go downtown when things aren’t so crowded (an early Sunday morning in January, say) and take a panoramic shot, which I then would post in my blog for the requester and anyone else who cares to look at it. There would be a sort of mileage scale to this, so 0 to 20 miles from downtown would be X and 20.1 to 40 miles from downtown would be 2X, and so on. And I would reserve the right to reject offers that I consider to be trespassing, like you can’t take photos inside the Alamo, and so a request for a picture inside the Alamo would be trespassing and I would refuse. I like this plan, and may make this an actual thing down the line. And if there’s a fee to take professional photographs in an area, and getting paid $X counts as “professional” for the owner of that area’s purposes, then the requester of the photograph should probably foot the bill for that fee.*
  3. Start a Patreon. This is what all the cool kids are doing and I’d like to get into this, but I don’t have enough traffic to make it worthwhile and even if I did, I’m not sure how to give bonuses for people who subscribe. Maybe I could modify point 2 above to be $X into the Patreon will get you a picture posted on the blog, $X+Y will give you a photograph emailed to you a week before posting on the blog, $X+Y+Z gets you a photograph that no one but you will ever see? I’ll have to mull that over for a while.

*The fee for the Cibolo Nature Center is $20 and the Cibolo Nature Center is 31 miles from downtown, so assuming that the Cibolo Nature Center people consider getting paid $2X for the picture counts as “professional,” I’d ask the requester to pay $2X+20.