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A few months ago, Amanda and I quit our corporate jobs and moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand. We’ll be living here for 3 months before moving on to Taiwan. Ever since we made the decision to move abroad and become location independent, we always seem to get one question: what do you do for money?!
The answer is that, while we spent the year before we left building our own business ( that’s another story for another post), the majority of our income at the moment comes from teaching English to Chinese students online with VIPKID. Teaching part-time allows us to continue living remotely and still have time (and money) to build our business. Now that we’ve been teaching with VIPKID for a little over 2 months, here’s our VIPKID review up to this point.
VIPKID is an online education platform where students in China learn English with an instructor via webcam. The students on VIPKID range from 4-12 years old. Students generally attend class in the evening, after going to their regular school. So, for teachers in North America, this means your teaching will be done in the early morning hours during the week. The weekends are a little more spread out when some students instead sign up for a morning class. This means that if you’re in North America and your student books you for their Sunday morning class, you’ll be teaching on Saturday night.
VIPKID pays on a per-class basis and offers several incentives as a way to make more money. These incentives can be based on things like performance or even just showing up to class on time. VIPKID’s base pay varies from person to person and ranges from $7-$9 per 25 minute class. This is dependant on things like experience and your mock interview results. Most people we’ve spoken to seem to have started at $8 per class. Add in things like bonuses for things like completing a certain number of classes or being on time and that jumps to $10 per class. So, VIPKID pay ranges from $18-$22 USD/hr. Amanda and I personally make $20/hr.
There are 5 steps in the application process.
TIP: This page will ask you to list your teaching experience in years. This includes any experience working with/teaching children. Again, we were not teachers. I used my experience coaching youth football for a few years. I’ve also heard of women who used their nannying/child care experience.
Sounds easy enough right? You can get started HERE.
Up to this point, we’ve really enjoyed our time teaching with VIPKID. It has come with a few moments of frustration and confusion, but is a definitely a net positive overall. We work part time and have enough money to live comfortably here in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The extra time we get by only working part time allows us to focus on our other business ventures as well. If are interested in signing up to teach for VIPKID, you can reach out to us or sign up HERE.
We are a couple that travels the world full time while running our own online businesses. We want to be your one stop shop for a location independent lifestyle full of travel inspiration and useful tools and knowledge to grow your own online business.
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