Karin Boutall: An Author is Born

Karin Boutall: An Author is Born

Where have we been? What happened?? Well, alot happened. After our last blog post, Karin's father passed away. This had a great affect on the both of us. This happened while we were parked and visiting with my parents. So, after arrangements were made, we stayed in Edenton, NC for awhile. While we were there, we decided to sell our camper.

      Why? We did have a wonderful time on the road, met many people that we keep in touch with today and visited beautiful places. But we both felt a need to have an anchor. A place that we could call our own and head back to at a moment's notice. So we canceled....no....postponed our world tour for the time being. 

      To make a long story short, a friend that we met while working at Amazon.com told us that we should check out the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. While in NC, we took a few days to cruise down south to check it out. We enjoyed our stay in the city of Gulfport. It wasn't until we left and drove along Beach Blvd on the Mississippi Sound that we pulled into a small town called Ocean Springs. We didn't stay long, but fell in love with it instantly. We said that we would be back, and six months later we returned to live here.

      We rented a small place upon our return, got jobs and started to branch out into the community. It is beautiful here. We looked for a house to be that 'anchor' that we needed and we eventually found it. A cute geodesic dome located across the street from Simmons Bayou. So that is where we are. Craig has a nice job and Karin began to write. That leads us to the title of this blog.

      Karin Boutall is Karin's pen name. She has just finished her first book call "Community Gardens". The genre is cozy mystery. The story along with the characters are fictional, but the locale is loosely based on the likes of our community.

      We thank each and every one of you for your support and understanding. For those that we lost contact with, we would love to hear from you again. We do plan to get back on the road in the future. But right now, we are enjoying life! If any of you are ever passing thru Mississippi on I-10, shoot us an email. We have a little room for you :)

Click here to visit the Karin Boutall Facebook page.


Click here to see the book "Community Gardens" at Amazon.com.

Thinking Outside the Box

"We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible."  Vince Lombardi

"Think outside of the box" is a common and somewhat overused statement in today's world. What about something like "use all of the tools in your toolbox"? We have given you some "tools" for your "toolbox" in the previous blogs. Now let's add some more tools.

When you think of working on the road, one term that comes to mind is "Workamping". So the first tool that many of you know about is the website that provides us with opportunities to work while being on the road.
Workamper.com   is a wonderful site that provides you with work opportunities across the country for a small annual fee. Most of the jobs that are listed there are seasonal and directly associated with campgrounds. It is a wonderful place to start, but don't limit yourself to just one site. There are many other jobs out there.

Here are some other websites to take a look at for work:

CoolWorks.com
RatRaceRebellion.com
CraigsList.org  (no relation)

Yes, think outside of the box. Use more tools in the toolbox. Would you like to go to an area, but you cannot find a job there through any of the above listed websites? Try monster.com or jobs.com for that specific area. Also, you can google a business search for that area. Then, pick a business and locate its website. See what jobs they have posted and you may find something that will work for you. Some large companies offer seasonal work. Lowes (lowes.com)offers seasonal jobs in lawn and garden. The grocery chain Publix (publix.com) offers seasonal cashier jobs.

These are just a couple of examples that we have personally seen, yet we are sure that there are many other opportunities lurking out there.









Real Estate

Real estate is a broad term that can relate to home buyers, investors and even us travelers. Let us look at some ways to save money, or make money when it comes to real estate.

If you are traveling in an RV, then your real estate is cruising with you down the road. But sooner or later, you have to park it. We save money various ways by planning our travels and mapping them out. We use a few websites that help us along the way.

One is FreeCampgrounds.com. We have used this site extensively during our travels. It provides a list of places to boondock, as well as having some spots with full hookups! We stayed in a small park with 20 or so spaces in Dumas, TX. They had electric, water and a dump station! We've also used this site to find spots in Indiana, West Virginia and several places along many highways. So check it out...it's free!

Do you like casinos? Try this website: CasinoCampers.com. Boondock in a secure casino parking lot. Or find great deals at some casinos that have full hookups. We have stayed at casinos in Oklahoma, Iowa, South Dakota and Indiana. This is another way to save money. We even received credits to gamble with when we signed up for the casino club card.

Would you prefer to stay at a campground at 50% off the regular price? Then try Passport America. We joined nearly a year ago and have used this membership so many times! The membership paid for itself within the first 2 times that we used it! We have used Passport America 16 times within the last year and have saved several hundred dollars!

How about a way to check out real estate markets in various places before you get there? What's going on with the real estate market in Honolulu?  Do you prefer the east coast, maybe Myrtle Beach? Or maybe somewhere out west, like Portland? You can find out what's going on at these locations, and so many more, by checking out the website ADailyShot.com.

ADailyShot.com gives you an up-to-date look at the current status of real estate markets across the country. There are current and archived reports, blogs and various editorial contributors to be found here. Take a look at your area...or better yet, that place of the country that you really want to live!

Thanks to all of our new and loyal readers for stopping by. we hope that maybe just one of our tips will personally help you! Good luck....another article coming soon!

Make Money and Save Money

Make Money
We love to sell books! Have you ever tried Cash4Books.net? It's very simple. Click on Cash4Books.net, enter the ISBN number from the book (the site shows you what number and how). See if it's a book that they will buy from you. If so, you ship it to them....and they pay for the shipping! And, most important, you get paid!
We will go to thrift stores and yard sales. We can write down titles that we think Cash4Books.net will buy. Hopefully we are not too far from the camper, or we have brought along our laptop to check right on the website to see if they will purchase it from us, preferably at a profit :)
We just sent 5 books in that we picked up at a local thrift store for about $8.00. We received just over $34.00 from Cash4Books.net via paypal. It was a nice profit of $26.00. Make sure you read the website and understand the condition that the books must be in. We have used them for over a year and have never had a problem with them. They have a list of books that they have recently purchased from people. This list will give you a better understanding as to what they are looking for.
But here's a quick tip between us and you: they love financial books and textbooks.

Save Money 
Do you like to use coupons? Then you have to see Coupons.com!
Get the coupons right from your printer. It's that easy.
Do you like to eat out? Well then, you just cannot beat the deals at Restaurant.com! Get super cheap deals, again, right from your printer.

Make and Save Money
We have two places that we purchase and sell gift cards.
Have you ever received a gift card that you didn't use...or maybe you would just prefer cash. OR, how about a place that you can buy a gift card for less than it's value?
Try these two places:
PlasticJungle.com
and
CardPool.com

Each of these sites have discount deals going on for various cards....so check them both out when deciding to purchase and/or sell gift cards!

Questions and Answers

Thank you for all of the positive responses! We have received many emails from people that support our blog and what we are trying to pass along. We have so much more to share with you! We were only going to write the blog once a week, but as you can see, we are now writing a few times each week.

Several questions have also been sent to us, and we are going to respond to some of those questions here.

1. Are you two really utilizing the ways to make money that you post in your blog? Absolutely. There are many ways to earn a secondary income. We are only sharing with you what we are personally involved with. We even include the income figures and time involved to help you decide if it is something you'd like to be a part of.

2. Why do something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk that only averages $2 to $3 per hour? We just look at it as part of the income stream. It is so easy to kick back in our camper, shoes off, tunes playing and do some very simple online projects and get paid for it.

3. Why don't you add a "donation" button to your blog?  We support those that have donation buttons on their blogs or websites. We just choose to do it in a different fashion. Look around as you read both of our blogs. First, we have Google ads. Not a big moneymaker, only about $4.00 in the past year. We do place ads of products and services that either we personally use, or they have been recommended by friends. Let us give you some examples. We found our health insurance through eHealthInsurance. We now have dental plans that we found through DentalPlans.com. We signed up to receive surveys through the various companies that we've listed on our blogsite.

On our other blog, Workamping World Tour 2011, we show other ads. We have friends that use VacationRentals.com to rent out their home while on the road. They love it, and make a nice income from that. We spoke about going to New York when other friends of ours told us to get the New York Pass. We have also used FindLegalForms.com to download some documents that we needed.

We have an Amazon.com ad that shows some of our favorite books, and also some items that we've purchased for the camper. The folding shower rod is wonderful. The tankless water heater is priceless! The only item that we do not have that is listed there is the Frugillionaire book, and that was highly recommended to us by some other fellow workampers. We recently met another workamper that is an avid golfer. He keeps his costs down with
The Golf Card. We are not golfers, but he stated that it pays for itself within a couple of rounds.

So, if you see an ad that is of interest to you, then by all means, check it out. Will we make a few pennies? Yes. Is it a mentionable source of our secondary income? Not at all.

4. Do you participate in any charity work? Yes we do. We have volunteered for various soup kitchens, rescue missions and conservation groups. We are animal lovers, so the charity that we give to is the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA). We have personally seen them in action, and have friends dedicated to the work that they do. We have donation buttons for the WSPA on both of our blogs.

5. Why? This is a very broad, yet easy question to answer. One of our favorite movies is "Pay It Forward". This is our way of sharing ideas with others that they may not have known about. Pay it forward....what a wonderful concept!

Make Money Writing

In our last blog, we told you that we have some "heavy hitter" ways of making money. Here is our first one. Writing articles for money. Don't get scared yet! Craig never wrote a single article until about a year ago! So follow along, look at our examples and decide if it's something that you would like to try.

We both began writing for eHow.com just over a year ago. At that time, you could just pick a subject, write about it, submit it and you were done. As people read our articles, the pennies would start showing up. After a few months, our articles would move up on the pages of various search engines, resulting in more people reading our articles. The pennies turned into dollars. We only completed a few articles each that were directly published onto eHow. Take a look at those articles and you'll see that it is just not that hard to write. Here are eHow.com articles by Craig  and eHow.com articles by Karin.

Now, for the good news and bad news. The bad news is you cannot submit articles through eHow.com directly anymore. The website was purchased last year by a company called Demand Media Studios. So now you have to sign up and apply to be a writer with Demand Media Studios. The good news? Once approved as a writer, you can get paid for articles immediately once the article is approved by an editor. Here is the really good news: you can start off making $15 per article! AND, Demand Media Studios pays out twice a week!

If you decide to sign up and write for Demand Media Studios, then make sure you read ALL of the rules. They can be picky. At first it would take us three or four hours to put together an article. We got the hang of it, so now we can knock out an article in about an hour. We each write 3 articles a week. That comes out to be $360 per month between the two of us! Not too bad.

Here's another, actually easier way to make money writing. Have you ever heard of Blogsvertise? If you have a blog, then this may work for you. Here's how it works: sign up with Blogsvertise and they will send you offers via email to write about products within your blog. You can accept or decline each product. Once you accept a product, you only need to place a paragraph in your blog with 3 links to that product. The paragraph should review or talk about the product. Even negative or critical reviews are allowed. It is rather  easy to research the product on the internet. Depending on the age of your blog, you'll get from $5 up to $25 per product article. Once that article is on you blog for 30 days, then you'll receive payment. So sign up for Blogsvertise today.

We hope that these blogs are showing you that there are many ways to make some decent secondary income. We have many other ways that we will continue to share with you in the near future. We are also going to address other things that come into play when you live and travel on minimum wage. Health insurance and various travel expenses are hot topics. We'll share how we personally deal with these issues. Thanks for reading along with us!

Mechanical Turk

Are you ready for that next source of seconday income? We'll share that with you in just a moment. The objective is to get together many reliable sources that can each produce a small amount of money. Once you do that, you will find how easy it is to generate some additional income.

Have you ever heard of Mechanical Turk? This is a website operated by Amazon.com that lets you perform various tasks for money. These tasks are known as "HITS" (Human Intelligence Tasks). There are many HITS that you can perform. The HITS may include doing research, URL verification, search engine tests, writing an essay, or completing a survey. These HITS will pay you anywhere from one penny up to thirty dollars. But, be careful....and be selective. We'll explain why as we go.

Here is the process of how Mechanical Turk works. Sign up for an account at
Amazon Mechanical Turk. Next, you choose a HIT that you would like to complete. Once approved, the amount that the HIT was worth is deposited into your Amazon.com account. You can then purchase Amazon.com items directly from that account, or have it deposited into your personal bank account. It's that simple. But here are a few tips before you begin.

We personally stick with HITS in the .25 to $1.00 range. We are very careful at completing any HITS that are worth more than $1.00. Some are legitimate, and others are questionable. Some will offer you $25, but you (in our opinion) have to give way too much personal information, like cell phone numbers, addresses, etc. There are many college research labs that place various surveys on this site. Those are our favorites. Five or ten minutes spent to make .50 to $1.00. Each hour spent on the site usually earns about $2.50. Yes, way below minimum wage. But, we look at it this way. We perform HITS for 1 hour, about 3 times a week. That's 3 hours a week times $2.50, which equals $7.50 a week, or $30 per month. Wait, there's two of us, so we've generated $60 a month. Not bad.

Remember, take the small amounts that we can generate each month through various methods, and add them up. Hey, we will even keep a running tally for you as we share our secondary income methods. Mechanical Turk generates $60 a month for us. The other surveys that we spoke about in our last blog, between cash, dinner gift cards and other items, produce about $30 a month for us. So we are at $90 of secondary monthly income so far, for (honestly) doing very little. 

We have many other ways to generate income. We have some "big hitters" coming soon. We tried to start with the smaller income providers and work our way up. Stay posted...there's more coming soon!