I have some prebuilt niche sites that I bought earlier this year that we will finish setting up and start promoting. I’m sure that we’ll learn a lot, and hopefully even make a buck or two.

I challenged the kids to predict what they expect to happen in this project. Here’s what they said.

Ro:

How long until we get moneys: I think about half a month to a full month. it just seems reasonable.

How much moneys we will get: I’m estimating that not many people will buy our stuff, so we get around 100-1000 dollars.

What I think we’ll learn: I think we’ll learn how to make niche sites, of course. Maybe also how to advertise.

Cha:

How long till money happens: full to full and a half if a month more moneys is gonna be a thingy here.

How much money will we get in a matter of that time: 100 to 500 that is enough for fifteen weeks

What will we learn: how to make money and how to make ads and stuff.

As for my predictions, well, here’s what I’m thinking. I expect we’ll have a typical power law distribution. One will do well, one will see a little bit of progress, and one just won’t get going. I’d like to get to $100/month by September, but even if we only get to $20 or $30 that’s a start.

We are very concerned for Marissa’s aunts, sisters and younger brother that live in Ilocos Sur.  They are on the northwest coast near the South China Sea, which hopefully wasn’t damaged as much as the Pacific coast on the east.  But it’s quite likely that they faced 160-180kph (100-110mph) winds.  Marissa has not heard from them as of yet.  I am hoping that we will get confirmation that everybody is OK later today.

I strongly encourage you to donate to relief efforts, as many people will have lost their homes and their livelihood.  We plan to give to Marissa’s family directly to help with building damage and crop loss as well as donating to general relief efforts.

We had a rude surprise as we checked in for our flight from Portland to Honolulu and Manila.  Hawaiian Airlines charged us extra baggage fees for our Portland to Honolulu leg.  This is the first time we have ever been charged extra for luggage on an international itinerary.  Thankfully I was able to add the additional charges to my expense report.  But I’ll definitely have to keep that in mind for future trips.  Other than that I liked Hawaiian well enough. 

We arrived in Honolulu as expected, but made the mistake of walking to baggage claim rather than riding the shuttle bus.  We got there just fine but it was a bit of a trek. 

We found out that we couldn’t check our bags through to Manila from Portland, so we had to get our overstuffed bags out of baggage claim, drag them to the Hertz shuttle bus, and keep them with us overnight. 

That proved to be a problem as we had reserved an intermediate car.  There was no way that three big rolling duffels, a large suitcase, a smaller suitcase and 3 carryons were going in the trunk of a Nissan Altima.  Thankfully Hertz was able to upgrade me to a Ford Flex on the spot.  Everything fit into the Flex just fine.  I have been wanting to try the Flex, as I’ve heard a lot of good things about it.  I found that it compared very favorably to our Explorer.

One great thing about being married to a Filipina is that she has friends all over the world.  Due to the lack of opportunity in the Philippines, many Filipinos emigrate to elsewhere in the world in search of better employment or business opportunities.  Marissa has friends in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, Israel, Italy, Spain, the UK, most states of the US, Canada, and more.  It’s truly a global community.  For our stopover in Hawaii she tracked down college classmate Joelle Anne.  Joelle Anne totally hooked us up with a hotel room right on Waikiki Beach at an employee discount rate.  We spent some time hanging out on the beach, let the kids play in the surf, and caught up with old friends.

Later on we went out to dinner.  The funny thing was that we ended up going to Todai, a seafood buffet restaurant that also has a location in Portland.  It had been a long time since we went to the Portland Todai, so it was nice to have an opportunity to go there again. 

On Sunday morning I got up early and enjoyed some quiet time on the beach watching the waves and the surfers.  I even saw a couple practicing tandem surfing.  It looks hard enough doing lifts on a dance floor or ice rink.  I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to do acrobatics on a surfboard while riding a wave.

All too soon it was time to head back to the airport for the next leg of our journey.  For the most part the flight was long but uneventful.  We were definitely thankful for Nintendo DS.  My seatmate for the long flight was very congenial. He was headed to the Philippines for both business and personal reasons.  I suspect that the personal side of his trip will work out, but there was more uncertainty around the business side.  But my guess is that he will do well.

• Committed to a new job based on a few phone interviews.
• Left my job at Intel after 12 great years.
• Sold or gave away a huge portion of our stuff including our cars.
• Packed everything we decided to keep into a 3000lb sea cargo shipment and what we could take as airline checked baggage.
• Said goodbye to friends and family.
• Got on a plane, flew halfway around the world.
• Started the new job knowing nearly nothing about what I was getting into.

In my previous post about the move I discussed the considerations and decision process behind choosing my new job. Once we made the decision and worked out the timeline, the next step was figuring out when to leave and what to take with us. I was prepared to be all minimalist – sell everything that wouldn’t fit into checked bags and start over. But my new employer included a full relocation in the package that they offered me. I asked if they would give me additional cash instead of paying to move my stuff, but they would not. Too bad, I would have rather had the money. In the end we decided to move a selected subset of our furniture in hopes that we would be able to save money by renting an unfurnished place.

Once we decided to go forward with the sea cargo shipment it occurred to us that we should go to Costco and stock up on items that are hard to find or expensive in the Philippines. $800 later we had a big stack of goodies in the family room when the movers showed up.

It really started to sink in that everything was changing after we sold our beds and the movers picked up the sea cargo shipment. We ended up essentially camping in an empty house for our last week.

Our last week was a whirlwind of last minute preparations and saying goodbye to family and friends. It’s one of life’s ironies that after you’ve made the decision to move away that you renew and refresh friendships with people you haven’t seen for a while. I was really reminded of what a great group of friends we have around the Portland area. Thankfully social media lets us stay in touch virtually, but of course it’s not the same.

I’ve come to realize that this story is very long, so I’ll leave off here and pick up next time with the details of the flight itself and our stopover in Hawaii.

By now you may be wondering OK, what’s the big deal anyway?  It’s this: I have been interested in living and working in another country for a number of years now.  I always thought that it was unlikely that it would actually happen.  But it did, and what’s more, I was actually offered two very different positions in two very different places.

The first position was a systems engineering and information security job in Kuwait working as a civilian contractor at a US military base.  The second position was a data modeler and reporting lead for a large investment bank in the Philippines.  I was offered the Kuwait position first.  The money was really good, so I accepted.  Then a few days later the Philippines offer came through.  It was for less money, so at first I thought I’d stick with the Kuwait job. But then I started really looking at the numbers and realized that I wasn’t taking cost of living and travel costs into account.  When I factored that in, everything came out pretty close, and both positions penciled out significantly ahead of my current situation. 

In the end, I chose the Philippines, because the Kuwait position required a 60 hour per week schedule, and I felt that the weather and the culture would be less amenable to my family.  My wife is from the Philippines, so I already have a fair idea what to expect there.  Yes, there are some some things that aren’t as nice as in the US, but it will be a good experience for us and our kids, at least for a while.  And we should be able to save some money too.

The other advantage to going to the Philippines is that I have long had an interest in building outsource businesses.  The Philippines has become a significant outsourcing destination over the last few years.  I definitely have a lot of great ideas for startups that I should really be able to kick into gear after I get there. 

We are scheduled to leave Portland on August 28.  So it’s coming right at us.  We definitely have a TON of things to get done before we leave.  The big moving sale is planned for next weekend (August 14 and 15), and there will be lots of stuff going on craigslist. 

There’s a lot more of this story to be told, but I’ll save those thoughts for future posts.  Stay tuned…