About Tutoring

I have been thinking a lot on how to monetise my freetime during weekends recently.

Yesterday, I had a chat with my NUS junior in a coffee shop and I had mixed feeling after the gathering. He shared with me Robert Kiyosaki's Cashflow quadrant and that one must go through the process from becoming employee, to self-employed, then to business owner and lastly to become investor in order to be rich and escape rat race. To me, I dislike being self-employed because it simply takes too much work just to set up my company and maintain business for years, not accounting the risk that new business will fail 90% of the time within the first 5 years. I prefer to invest directly without going through Robert's Cashflow quadrant process. It can't help that I am a "lazy" and "carefree" person and yet I need extra money to grow my investment portfolio. So, at least a part time job is still needed.

Few months ago, I was introduced to tutoring by a friend of mine who is seeking early retirement by 35 in Singapore. He told me currently he is having a 12-hour shift on Saturday as he is agreesively taking on additional tuition jobs.

Fast forward, I started my first tuition job on 30-Jun-2018 and I will be taking another secondary school student on 15-Jul-2018. Assuming if I am taking 2 students right now, the pay rate from them are SGD 30/hr and SGD 35/hr respectively and I teach 6 hours per month for each student. It means SGD 65/hr x 6hr = SGD 390 per month which is not too bad. SGD 390 per month is equivalent to SGD 4680 per year, more than my AWS. If I think the current workload is manageable, I will want to take 2 more students.

You may ask why I decided to become part-time tutor. I choose tuition as my side gigs because it doesn't require capital to start your business except that you need to be familiar with MOE syllabus of the subjects you want to teach, the pay rate is scalable to the amount of effort I put in (ie, I earn more by take more tuition assignment jobs) and I want to get some tutoring experience now so that after my early retirement I still can leverage on it to earn extra income and kill boredom.