Quote: (04-07-2018 08:12 AM)hipster Wrote:
Quote: (04-02-2018 09:33 PM)Suits Wrote:
Quote: (04-02-2018 09:22 PM)Fortis Wrote:
You're better off finding private students since teaching private classes until 10 kids in the privacy of your home is not illegal.
Source?
It is probably the best option. English schools typically can't pay much and so there are not many native English speakers in those schools but there are a lot of individuals and parents willing to pay high to learn in a private class with native speakers born and grown in USA, UK, Canada...You can also work in schools half time and half time your own thing. Source: my surroundings.
Sure, so your hourly income might not be bad $50USD per hour, but it's actually relatively difficult to squeeze even two 90 minute classes into an evening (and no one has time to study in the daytime, Monday to Friday). So that works out to $150 a day, which isn't bad, except if you live in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen or Guangzhou, where it's not that great of an income for a day of work. Keep in mind that teaching is far more tiring than most other types of work, so it's not like you can work a 40 teaching hours a week and not suffer from the sort of mental exhaustion that a 80 corporate work week would give you.
Of course, you'd be lucky to get a 40 hour work week doing privates. Most of your hours are going to be on the weekend. You'll only be able to squeeze in one class in the morning, because the identical drones of China will all insist that their children need 3 hours off from lunch (from 11 AM to 2 PM). That class will be from 9:30-11:00 if you are lucky. Then you'll squeeze in three more lessons in the afternoon and evening, maybe four if you are really efficient. That's 2250 RMB per day or $346USD! Not bad, right?
All told, two weekend days, plus three week days will earn you $1140 USD per week or $4900 USD per month. A $59K USD annual salary!!! Except that type of money is barely a living in a city like Beijing where unless you enjoy having three roommates and living so far from the city center that you might as well be in a third tier city, you'll be paying over $1000 a month for housing. And that's for a tiny studio.
But let's not forget that if you include holidays, exam prep time and illness, most classes probably have a 25% cancellation rate. So, now your income is actually $44K.
Then, unless you work out some dirty deal for a visa that leaves you beholden to someone who will use it to their advantage, you'll spend a minimum of $3000 doing visa runs every year, so let's knock down that income to $41K per year.
For those keeping track at home, that's $3,400US per month. Rent costs $1000 (minimum), if you have minimum payments of $50K in student debt from college, that's another $600, so now you've got $1800 to play with per month. That's $60 per day.
Not poverty, but definitely not baller. And this math assumes that you're always able to maintain a 14 lesson a week schedule.
Of course, if you are a very good teacher and great at marketing yourself, this can be improve upon a little by eventually finding some reliable daytime gigs, charging more than the going rate for lessons and instituting some system to minimize cancellations, but that's not going to happen in your first year of doing this and I wonder how many people really want to spend more than a year of their life living with the uncertainty of doing visa runs every 2 months with no real guarantees.
Quote: (04-07-2018 11:18 PM)ShanghaiPlayer Wrote:
It’s relatively hard to build up a list of private students. You can’t really start from scratch, I’ve found you’ll really need to rely on the help of a local to introduce you to clients at first. This can take a while. It can take as long as 6 months to a year to have a pool of reliable, sustainable private students to make a significant income off of. And even those can disappear on you without notice.
That's been my experience. It takes about 6 months to build a decent schedule with decent clients.
It's not hard to find a few students to teach if you're a full-time student yourself and just want some beer money or to supplement your income from a day job.
Making a living from it is tough. The first couple students come easy, but as you start to fill up your schedule, it becomes harder. Many people have limited free time themselves and only a couple time slots will work for them. Most people also work day jobs or have school during the day, which means that they only have time in the evenings and on the weekends. Also, no one wants to study between 11AM-2PM on the weekend or at dinner time.
Most people think that they are too good to teach children, so they focus on adult clients, which seems like a great plan until you realize that adult clients are horribly unreliable (cancelling 50% of their classes is not uncommon), rarely continue to study with you for longer than 3-5 months and are too busy/lazy to do homework, so they never really make any progress, because two hours of language study a week doesn't do anyone much good.
Sure, you could try requiring them to pay up front for 6 months and have a no-cancellation policy, but good luck with that.
Kids are a real gift in this business because parents are willing to pay far more money for their children's education than an adult student is willing to pay for their own. "Classes" with adult students if being taught by an inexperienced teacher usually devolve into "conversational progress," which rarely results in definable results. At least with kids, you can teach them a ton of vocabulary and it's not unusual for their parents to actually practice with them in between classes, so they do make steady progress, at least in that regard, even if the teacher in question has no fucking clue how to teach.
Kids also attend class far more regularly (because their parents force them to). By kids, I mean 12 and younger. High school students are also horribly unreliable, because studying for exams always takes priority and these teenagers in China always have exams.
Keep in mind that living costs (especially in housing) often go up 25% every year (or more), so the fees you were willing to settle for when you were just getting into the game are not going to cut it even a year after you go started.
If most of your income comes from these private lessons, you're going to have a fair amount of stress wondering if enough money is going to come in to pay rent some months, unless you live in a third tier hole, where your income may considerably outpace your expenses, which means living in a city that will bore you out of your mind if you stay for longer than six months to a year.
Of course, you won't have much to show for it in the end, because just because you have more money left over, doesn't mean that the dollar value of the fees you earn from teaching in a third tier city will add up to much savings if you were to ever move back to somewhere that people actual want to live.
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