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YMG's Guide to Hacking Student Loan Debt
If you are graduating soon or have graduated recently with a degree in the humanities from a mediocre school and have 25K or under in debt, try this:
1. Get Teaching Job in Asia.
Get CELTA/TEFL/TESOL certified in
Thailand/Vietnam/Taiwan/Korea
2. Set Up Debt-Hacking Budgeting System
Get a cheap apartment in whatever city you end up in and budget while teaching English abroad so that you can save 1000 USD a month and pay back your student loan debt ASAP
This is easy in second tier Korean cities. It's harder but definitely possible in Taiwan/Thailand/Vietnam.
3. Acquire Digital Nomad Skill Sets
Your regular work hours will be about 20-30 hours per week so you can either do tutoring and make more cash or you can invest in building location independent digital skillsets such as:
-Coding
http://www.codecademy.com
-Wordpress
https://www.udemy.com/building-custom-wo...m-scratch/
-Design
https://www.udemy.com/courses/Design
-SEO
http://moz.com/learn/seo
-Languages
http://www.italki.com http://www.duolingo.com
4. Start Small Entrepreneurial Projects
While you teach and pay off your debt - you can simultaneously acquire these skills then actively apply them in small entrepreneurial projects of your own. Many of them will fail but some of them will start bringing in some cash here and there.
You have a timeline of 27 months to pay off your student loan debt so you have a long, low-risk, and low-pressure timeline to experiment with passion projects and see if you can get them off the ground.
During this time you need to make all of your mistakes and learn. You should see what it's like to have a business partner.
Team up on a small project like exporting a few shipments of local teak furniture back home or to Mexico.
Try creating a mobile app of some sort and work with a Bengali virtual assistant who doesn't get anything you say and the project crashes and burns but you learn important lessons about delegation and managing expectations.
Do not expect to accomplish too much in the first 6-12 months of hacking it at entrepreneurship besides learning a ton about what it is like to create wealth and value out of thing air.
At some point everything will click and you will start to bring in more and more cash. And you'll wonder why you weren't making this sort of money before - it's so obvious and easy - that's what's called unconscious competence.
Persistance trumps intelligence. If you work hard and are attacking a legitimate need in the marketplace you will start making money.
One thing you can always do, of course, is hustle fiverr gigs to businesses in your local area. If you make yourself well-liked in your neighborhood in a second tier Asian city, you can get quite a bit of business doing certain sorts of hustles and fiverr gigs. Not everything has to be the next twitter/linkedin or instagram. Just try to create cash, wealth, and sales out of thin air. You'll start to see business opportunities everywhere.
5. Try Internships
You can also try an internship with a local multinational - but picking up these digital nomad skills are probably better for you in the long run - all depends on what you want to do.
Internships in emerging market countries generally are the first step to being hired full time. Positions are rarely posted for people with a recent-grad type profile - you need to get your foot in the door with connections and then carve out a niche for yourself inside of the company.
6. Conclusion
If you save 1K USD a month to pay off debt and you have the national average of 27,000 USD of debt then it will take you 27 months to pay it off. That is just about two and a half years.
Thus, if you began this plan right when you graduated at 21/22 years old....
...then when you finished it you would be 24/25 years old, debt free, and have acquired various practical skills that make you formidable as a location independent entrepreneur.
Even if you majored in Sociology, Philosophy, Literature (or something equally useless) it is never too late to build practical skill sets for yourself that you can use to make money.
More important than building these skill sets, arguably, is the art of delegation and creating systems within your business so that you can scale.
All of the tools that you can build that will help you build a web-based business are all useful for any company that would want to hire you. Ultimately if you can add more value than you extract and your impact can be measured in dollars added or the retention of potential dollars lost, then you can be valuable to a company.
Ironically, by the time you become good enough at these skills (and 2.5 years is more than enough time) you won't need to get hired anymore.
Thus, this guide I laid out above is for you young bucks with humanities degrees and under 30K USD in student loan debt and working at American Apparel or at Starbucks, wondering when you're going to get your big break.
Don't wait for your big break - you gotta make it happen.
Geoarbitrage is the way.
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