HILO SIDE

By the time I had arrived in Hilo, Zack had already had his own dubious encounter, bought a potentially deadly car and found us a room to rent–and all initiated through his Blackberry as the plane touched down (with three days of no sleep). But since I wasn’t there, I’ll let him describe it.

Enter me: January 15, 2010. Zack came to pick me up from my dizzying, frustrating and fascinating island-hopping across the Pacific to get to Hilo. The taxi took us from the airport and up to Chong Street. This was to be our launch pad. Zack showed me the beach and the sights the next day.

But by Day 2 of my arrival, we were walking the narrow side of the road down from Chong Street to the main area of Hilo. We walked into different schools asking if they needed any substitute teachers or teachers at all. They all told us that we had to call a program to become a substitute teacher. When we called the program, they said that we couldn’t enter unless we were sponsored by a school.

No car, and no more schools left to enquire into, we went to McDonald’s, Wal-mart, IHOP, Blockbuster…anywhere, to put in applications. In more than one place, we were told don’t even bother applying. Some days we would cover 17 miles, walking everywhere. I only had sandals that were presentable so that’s what I would walk in. One day, my feet hurt so badly, doing that last 3 mile trek up Wainuenue up to Chong street that Zack had to squeeze his feet into them, and I sloshed around his too-big sneakers. But the relief to the tops of my feet was tremendous!

We started hearing whispers from others that Hilo wasn’t the place to be if you were a Haouli. (“Ha” means ‘spirit’ or ‘breath’ and ‘ouli’ means ‘without’. This references the ancient Hawaiian tradition of greeting each other nose to nose and inhaling the others breath. When the white man came, he shook hands, meaning that he didn’t exchange breath, so he was one without. This term was passed down the line and, as far as I’m aware, it doesn’t have a general negative conotation to it. Of course people can apply it to other as such, but we have been known to call ourselves Haoulis without being denigrating.) You needed to go to Kona side. I had been in Hilo for 6 days and we were starting to discover just how insular a little island town can be. (I understand, I would give jobs to my family too and try to protect their work from being taken over by outsiders, but, as the outsiders, it was disheartening.)

View Larger Map

We needed to get a car. And a cheap car at that. How does one decide what comes first? A car so you can get a job? Or a job so you can get a car? Well, we’d been Craigslisting it for a while and finally found what would prove to become a member of our family. She wasn’t much to look at. When we first got in her, rust rained down on us from the bars supporting the windshield. She cost $600 but was worth much more. She was a 1986 Isuzu Hatchback.

We made the deal to meet up at the Hilo McDonald’s. I have to say that the pictures of her posted on Craigslist made her look much better. The gentleman came with his wife who was holding the papers for the car. As we went on our test ride, the man explained that he didn’t want his 80-year old father to be driving this car anymore. And we could see why. I can’t imagine anyone who would want anyone they cared about into that car. It seemed like a deathtrap. I asked him why the car was shaking so badly, and he said that it was a simple matter of adjusting the throttle. The shaking was making the car rain rust. By the time we got out of the car, we were covered by it. I asked him if he thought this car would take us over to Kona side, and he said that the car had only really been used by his father within Hilo to run errands.

Well, it was as good a shot as any. We still had about $3,800 ($3,100 after we bought our dear Scrapper) saved from our last stint in South Korea. We were beginning to feel the realities of our optimism and excitement on the mainland: “Hawai’i! How exciting! I’ve never been there! It’s paradise, you know! They’re in need of teachers, too!” What would we do if we couldn’t find a job? At what point would we need to pull out of Hawaiian adventure and book it back where to start working at what job?

As a side note, I just want to mention that I am thankful that today is the ‘rebirth’ of the sun in our hemisphere and we can start looking forward to longer days. I’m also excited that by this time next ‘rebirth-of-the-sun’ we should have less than 180 days on our countdown.

Okay, enough of my hopeful glance into the future. I’m writing about how important it was for us to take steps backwards so that we could bound ahead.

Pele seemed to have orchastrated our experience on the Big Island with this specific intention in mind. The locals say that Pele either accepts you or doesn’t. People usually last a month or 10 years when they move to the island, or such is the popular belief. She had a specific course for us. One that I will start to outline in detail, as it has every bearing on this countdown and where we’re hoping to go.

We tended to do things in fives or multiples thereof. We moved five times. We bought five cars. We had 10 jobs. And all in under 18 months. Zack and I joke abou tthe fact that we learned a lifetime’s worth there. We have Hawai’i to thank for our start in passive income earning via the internet.

Tickets in hand, we confidently boarded the plane to Sydney, Australia en route to Gisbourne, New Zealand. We had a blast in Sydney for the short three days that we were there.

We saw the botanical gardens and took loads of photos. I couldn’t get enough of the different types of trees that we saw everywhere. We saw the Sydney Opera House and took multiple photos there because of how weird the stairs were turning out in them. What do you think this is about?

  We saw all kinds of flowers and trees that we would later recognize in Hawai’i. It’s so interesting to see how flora have spanned the oceans and to imagine how they must have travelled from island to island on boats or in people’s clothes. I just love how beautiful and colorful this flower is. Its shape is so unique too! Love it.

Then we boarded a flight to Auckland and had to provide the actual, physical confirmation that proved that we had tickets to leave the country within the 90 day time period Americans can stay for without requesting some other type of visa. We actually were looking into obtaining a working holiday visa but it was too complicated and, in the end, we thought that we might be able to change it over to one while we were in the country.

We stayed at a hostel where the guy at the front desk told us that we were “really quiet for Americans” when he asked where we came from and upon insisting that our nationality was American. I can only imagine what he must have seen from our American “predecessors” to warrant such a comment. We slept in a room with four other guys and left at the crack of dawn to get on our eight-hour bus ride down to Te Karaka.

It was such a windy and slow progression that both Zack and I felt bus sick through and through by the time we hopped off. There was also a pomegranate that was rolling back and forth down the aisle as the bus curved around and around. After some time of this, we asked the people around us if it was theirs and the woman next to us picked it up and said she’d keep it if no one wanted it. Well, about thirty minutes later, another woman is pacing up and down the aisle demanding to know who stole her juice? Zack and I looked at each other, presuming that by ‘juice’ she was referring to her pomegranate and kept our mouths shut. It was an eventful last leg of the trip.

My friend met up with us at the bus stop with a box of Cody’s (a premixed alcoholic drink) and so we started our brief experience of country Kiwi life. She took us to her lovely house and we sat on the porch catching up and, in the case of our significant others, meeting each other.

Within a few days, we were working on a nearby farm, on the ‘flats’. We weeded and hoed and hoed and weeded for the first part of our stay and got to see the tiny watermelons grow fatter and fatter. The rows were about 50 meters long each and there was row after row of melons. A team of between 5 and 10 of us would hoe down both edges and carefully weed around the watermelon plant itself. We would do this in blocks, and by the time we got finished with the last block, it was time to hoe the first one again. Needless to say, there were some sore backs and blistered palms!

Our day generally started at around 7am and then we’d have a break, called Smok-O–due to the number of people who would have a smoke during it–then lunch, then another break, and then off home. It was a nine hour work day, give or take. Here is Zack, resting in the shade during a Smok-O break on the mule.

I had never really tried my hand at ‘gardening’ before, in a very serious sense (only some fooling around with plants in the backyard), so I learned a tremendous amount.  We also did some work thinning pears so that their fellow remaining pears could grow larger. We did the same thing with the peaches. We staked the apple trees.

So far, I’ve sketched what we want to achieve and I’ve briefly outlined how we hope to achieve it. Now I’ll go into the why.

The first post was called the Middle of the Beginning. This one will go back just over three years to the “Beginning of the Beginning”. And I’ll be eagerly writing the “Ending of the Beginning” in 561 days!

I graduated with a major in French back in May 2008. I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time. During the five months of 2008 I worked as a cocktail server and a bartender at a bar in ‘well-to-do’ Albuquerque. Being a bartender/therapist, I heard endless tales of financial woe from my patrons. Needless to say, they could afford their beer but couldn’t splurge on the tips. Eventually, the tipping became so bad, I had to quit and I found work at a small, chic French restaurant. Tips were good, but business was by and large slow. So slow that they had to close the restaurant down, so we all found ourselves out of work.

After I graduated, I realised that I had gotten a “worthless” degree and that there was no way that I’d get a job that’d pay me decently enough to start paying back my student loans in the short four months (at that point) in which the ‘grace period’ was going to expire. I did some quick research, found that being an English teacher in Korea would be the best paying job I could attain with my qualifications and got on a plane in September. (My first two months will be a post at a later date)

Meanwhile, Zack graduated with a degree in Philosophy from an Ivy League school (read hefty price tag) in May of 2008. A degree equally useless and an economic depression equally disheartening. And so, he found himself boarding a plane to Seoul and was assigned to Gwangju, South Korea, in our little neighbourhood: “Sheen Shang Dong”.

We met in November, a week into his arrival, and were absolutely inseparable from the first. Everything in Korea that transpired is quite a story in and of itself and I will tell this story because I want other debt-ridden students to be aware of the perils and benefits, but that’s off-topic, so it’ll have to be later.

I had told my best friend, a Kiwi, that as soon as I finished my contract in Korea, I’d give her a visit in New Zealand. Then I met Zack and so he came along too. We first went to the States for a bit so I could meet his parents and he could meet mine. We also had to figure out where we were going to live as I wasn’t inclined to live in D.C. and he didn’t fancy a move to Albuquerque. Furthermore, you can’t enter New Zealand without an outbound ticket.

Our logic was sound and our research thorough, however, we were to embark upon a potentially huge disaster. This is what our thinking was: we were both teaching English, so why not become a licensed teacher, in the state that pays the most, and gives their teachers the most time off–not to mention being beautiful and tropical? Hawai’i! They were apparently really in need of teachers and Hawai’i was the closest place to New Zealand–making the airfare cheaper. We ultimately decided upon buying a ticket to Big Island (a.k.a Hawai’i) on Hilo side since the rent was much cheaper than on Oahu.

So, as I mentioned yesterday, in order to free ourselves from the daily strictures imposed by having to go to a job with a physical location, we are embracing the world wide web and the implications that go with its “world wide-ness”.

Zack writes a lot on a site called Infobarrel.com and through that we have heard some major success stories. Some people were only able to make it online by being “pushed” into it. Many lost their jobs–they were either fired or laid off–and it was the best thing that ever happened to them. I’ve also heard about how sometimes in life, you just need to take the plunge. Better to have plunged and lost than to never have plunged at all.

We find ourselves in probably the safest situation. Our employer pays for our accommodation and plane tickets, so that’s a major financial burden relieved. Zack has been waking up before work and working afterwards on the internet, and we have seen an impressive and continuous increase in his online revenue over the past year and a half. This has been when he’s only been able to go at it parttime. So, we’ve decided that the only thing that makes sense is for him to do it fulltime. I will continue to work, so that we have the smallest outflow possible–we only pay for our food and utilities–and so we can remain in South Korea on a work visa with him as my dependent. Not to mention making a salary where we can save money.

So, essentially, there are two countdowns, and The 562 Day Countdown really depends on what happens after 181 days have passed and Zack can start to do what he does so well, fulltime. If his estimations are correct, then he should be able to make around $2,000 a month by June of 2013 (a.k.a the end of The 562 Day Countdown to Freedom).

Now, of course, there are benefits to working for someone when, hopefully, you have a guaranteed salary and can rely on a certain amount per month. The problem/beauty with online earnings is that there is no certainty. This is why a nest egg is really crucial to feeling secure in embarking on this endeavor. For example, there was a Google algorithm change where huge websites and solo writers alike were taken to their knees. It is called Google Panda. Websites like Hubpages and Squidoo had to essentially change everything so that they wouldn’t be punished by Google Panda in the search results. Some solo writers saw their income shot down by 75 percent.

It’s true that some people wouldn’t feel comfortable with the uncertainty and ultimately would opt for working for someone, but for us, the rewards far outweigh the risks. We are also tackling this issue by diversifying our portfolio. One hundred percent of revenue should never come from one stream. So we’re involved with the Amazon store, Chitika, Infolinks, Adsense, various affiliates and selling eBooks. Some days we make the most off our Adsense, other days the most comes for selling our eBook: The Storage Auction Master’s Handbook, and still others from our affiliates. The thing that’s the most important is that we don’t rely on any one stream to support us. And right now we’re keeping an even more diverse portfolio by double-incoming as English teachers.

The aforementioned ‘beauty’ side of the online income coin is that there is no cap. You can continue to make more and more and more as your heart desires. Our hearts desire a modest amount so that we can have time to pursue our other interests. (I will do another post later on about all the things that I would love to do. I’ve found some wonderful DIY projects on a site called Pinterest.com.) The other beautiful thing is that you can stop putting effort in and continue to increase your profit due to various factors, not the least of which is the age of your domain. This is yet another reason why online income is so exciting to us.

And by our estimations, not including the nest egg we should have saved by the time the end of my second year rolls around, we should be able to live nicely off of $2,000 a month. We’ve done some preliminary research as to where we should live so that we don’t have to touch our nest egg and live off this $2,000 a month. And we’ve narrowed it down quite a bit. But that’s still 562 days away and a lot can change. We’re keeping our fingers crossed!

So what is this dream of ours exactly? It’s very simple and can be narrowed down to a single word: Time.

The time to learn new languages. The time to take long meandering walks to nowhere and back. The time to travel and see the beautiful and amazing things this world has to offer. The time to learn about and keep abreast of what we’re learning about our solar system. The time to casually talk to strangers without feeling the increasing pressure of “How much more of my free time am I going to talk to this person for!” The time to watch old movies and to shoot our own. The time to grow an intricate and variegated garden; and the time to watch the plants grow. The time to learn new crafts and to perfect old ones. The time to read all the old classics and try new genres. The time to take care of our bodies and pay attention to what we’re putting into them–as with our minds. The time to reuse as much as possible and compost or recycle everything else. The time to play with our four-legged family members and the time to talk with old friends all night long without worrying about what time it is. The time to build things instead of buy them. The time to help people who need and want it. And the time to think of things that we’ve never thought of before!

So how do we get this time? Typically (as In Time with Justin Timberlake expressly implicates) we barter our time for money–although some people get more money for their time than others do. We need money to buy the necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter, and anything else that we deem vital.

The first step is finding an income source that doesn’t tether you to a work place and their hours of operation. And what if we can provide the majority of this stuff for ourselves? That would eliminate a large amount of the outflow of money and minimize the need for the inflow. It would take a lot of work and a lot of time, but at the end of the day, the house that we build would be tailored specifically to us and we would know exactly what minerals and chemicals the vegetables that we grow have come in contact with.

Well, I have to get ready to go to work but now I have myself all jazzed up and excited about our impending freedom from the shackles around our time.