Shadowing Practice: How I Make a Living as a Minimalist without a 9 to 5 job - Learn English Speaking with Video

What does it mean to be financially independent?

Having the resources to deal with life's ups and downs?

To have passive income to sustain our current lifestyles?

To have enough to pay for our expenses without working a full-time job?

It's common advice to save a percentage of our income and to invest for our future to reach financial independence,

but I felt like I was blindly following this advice without actually having a goal in mind

or even considering the path I wanted to take to get to this specific goal.

If this was what I was working towards, I really wanted to paint a picture of what financial independence looked like for me and my husband.

To tell you a little bit about myself, I'm 30 years old, married, and we live in one of the most expensive places in the U.S.

We just paid off our student loans and have no other consumer debt except for our two mortgages.

We don't have kids, at least not yet, but we both agree to take care of our parents as soon as they retire.

About two years ago, I made a decision that not only changed my life,

but put me closer to that financial path I wanted to take.

Here is my story.

One of the questions I get asked the most is what I do for a living

or what do I do for work?

I know that this is going to be a little bit different than my normal videos, but I thought it was important to share this part of my life that's not always shown on camera

and hopefully it will give you a more complete picture.

And please remember that this is just my perspective, my story, my journey, and if you're on a similar path then hopefully this will be helpful for you.

But if not then hopefully it will just give you an insight to how I'm able to afford this house, this life on Maui, without working a traditional 9-to-5 job.

So before we get started, a little background story.

So I moved to Hawaii about six years ago from San Diego, and I only had about a couple of thousand dollars to my name for my previous teaching job.

I really had no idea what to expect.

I had never visited Hawaii before, I had never researched into the job market,

but this was my new home because this is where my husband was.

So I was busy looking for any kind of job that I thought I could qualify for.

During this time I was working for an art gallery just to kind of sustain myself

but I was going through many different interviews to find a job

that was right for me and I think it was about a month

or two after I landed a job at a non-profit agency.

This was kind of a dream job for me because I had a chance to directly work with the community

and for a cause that I felt really passionate about.

And through this job, I made a lot of really important connections, which is very important here on Maui.

I had many roles in this job,

but my primary role was to develop a curriculum to teach personal finance and real estate to low-income families.

So I partner with different non-profit agencies

but also teach a curriculum to our youth and I absolutely fell in love with this job.

Fast forward to today, I am filled with the company

but about two years ago I decided to reduce my hours and go part-time.

Now there's a lot of different reasons for why this happened

but my boss was really supportive and really encouraging

and she was able to allow me to be a contractor for the company and also work remotely.

Mind you, this all happened before 2020 and I'm so glad that I decided to take everything,

all my curriculum online and teach virtually.

Because of the steady income and the long employment history, it really helped us to qualify for our mortgages.

I mean my husband still works full-time

but having the rental supplementary income really made me feel like

it was okay for me to step down to part-time job

so let's talk about my rental income we first bought this condo in 2018

and we saved about 15 to put down as a down

payment for this condo a lot of it was from my

husband's 401k retirement savings some of it was from just our monthly savings

and at the time we were getting married

and we specifically requested from our friends and family

if they were willing and

if they could to contribute money instead of giving gifts for

our wedding it took us no time to find this place

i absolutely loved it it was one of the first open houses that that we went to, but I loved that it was so bohemian.

I loved that I could walk and bike everywhere from this location, but still it was a fixer-upper and there was a lot of work to do.

We were really excited to kind of make the place our own and see what we could do with it.

During this time, my husband and I really wanted to understand real estate better,

And so we've read so much about real estate investing and how to house hack, how to build equity.

And almost immediately, we decided that we're going to buy another property.

So we reduced all of our expenses.

We stopped eating out, traveling, miscellaneous expenses from our budgets were cut off so

that we could put that money towards paying down our principal balance on the condo.

so within a year of owning

that condo we really built up equity we had paid years worth of mortgage just within

that one year

so we decided to pull equity from this condo to use as a down payment for the current house

that we live in now during this house search we were

a little bit more savvy we wanted to look for a house with a cottage on the property

so that we could eventually house hack or have some rental income coming from it.

So we signed up for every single alert.

We talked to agents.

We went to open houses.

And I think on page eight or page 10 on Zillow, we found a house that really needed a lot of work,

but had the perfect layout for what we wanted to do.

For those of you who are not familiar with house hacking, it's basically when you live in one of your multiple units of your investment

and have renters and the other units to help you pay for the housing expenses.

So we live upstairs in our three-bedroom house and we rent out the downstairs.

We also have a cottage in the back that we rent out and of course our initial condo as well.

To save money, we did all of the renovations ourselves with the exception of cutting down a huge pine tree in the

and also a plumbing job that needed to be done downstairs.

I manage the properties.

If there are any problems with the neighbors, the appliances, the plumbing, electrical, whatever the problem is, I am their first point of contact.

Also, if there is a vacancy, I am the cleaning person.

I list it, stage it, sign the lease, and everything else in between.

Hopefully there is not a lot of high turnovers

because we absolutely love our tenants right now and we're so thankful for them.

As you guys might know, my third source of income is from YouTube.

And YouTube is in itself has multiple streams of income.

From AdSense, you have sponsorships, you have affiliate links and different programs, you can do merchandising.

There are so many different opportunities with this route.

However, I didn't know how long it would take me to reach that stage or if this was going to be sustainable.

There's a lot of uncertainty going down this path,

but I'm so happy that I took a chance and now this has become one of my primary source of income.

What I really love about YouTube is that I can be flexible with my time from beginning to end.

Making a video, it takes me about 40 hours on average,

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but I love that I have the flexibility of doing it whenever I want to.

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For example, you guys know that I am a night owl, I like to work in the evenings, and it is such a luxury.

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And of course, this isn't possible without you guys, so this is why I am always so thankful and grateful for you guys watching my videos,

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liking them, commenting and sharing.

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I really am thankful for you guys to allow me to create more videos.

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I just want to acknowledge that where I am now, this didn't just happen because of minimalism or just having the right mindset.

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While that might help, it's a lot of different things like the right timing, opportunities, support, just pure luck,

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and also willing to work hard.

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It's just a combination of these factors and I am just so grateful that I'm able to live this lifestyle.

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I hope you guys enjoyed today's video.

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I hope

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that it gave you some insight as to how i'm able to afford living here on maoli i hope

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that i was transparent enough

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if you have any other questions i would love to answer in the comments below as always

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and until next video take care guys and i'll talk to you very soon bye

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: How I Make a Living as a Minimalist without a 9 to 5 job - Learn English Speaking with Video

Context & Background

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What is the Shadowing Technique?