Welcome to Digital Dollar Dude

I’ve been earning money online since 1992

I want to show you how you can do it!

The Internet has been around for about 35 years now (hard to believe!). Quite a few people make a living on the Internet these days, but there are still many people who:

1. Don’t believe it is possible to earn a living online
2. Believe it can be done, but have no idea of how to do it

I started earning money online in 1992. At that time the online community was rather small, whereas today almost everybody is online to one extent or another. Still, today, the number of people who make a fulltime living online is relatively small, although it is growing daily.

I would say that pretty much anybody can make some money online, but fewer people can make a fulltime living online. These days the roadblocks or hurdles are minimal, but 30+ years ago not only were there a lot of roadblocks, there were hardly any “roads” that would take you to an online income. Even supplementing your income on the Internet was a sparsely traveled road back in those days. Today, though, it is relatively easy to make money online. Many people believe it is still a hard thing to do, but it is much easier than most people think.

Today I am launching a new website to help people earn money online.

Welcome to that new website, Digital Dollar Dude.

My Work History

When I was a child I started working odd jobs and earning money at the age of 9 years old. I started out by working in people’s yards, doing odd jobs around people’s yards and such. Pretty typical stuff for a young person, although I started doing this stuff at a younger age than most. When I was 10 or 11 years old I got a more “regular” type of a job.

My first real job

When I was 10 or 11 years old I got a summer job picking strawberries on a farm. I lived in a very small town called Clatskanie, Oregon, and the farm where I worked was in Rainier, Oregon, about 14 miles away. A friend of mine, Greg (he was a couple of years older than me) also worked there. We would have to get up around 3:30 AM and walk about 15 minutes to a place where a bus would pick us up and take us to the farm. On the first day of work the boss told us that we could eat all of the strawberries that we wanted, but we only got paid for the strawberries that we turned in for selling. On the first day of work, not many berries got turned in and a lot of people went home feeling pretty sick from eating so many berries. LoL After that first day, not many strawberries were eaten because of two reasons:

1. We were there to make money
2. The thought of eating another strawberry was sickening

I picked berries, as I recall, for 2 summers, and then I moved on to other kids of after-school/summer work. Mostly I continued to do odd jobs for people, not working for a company until I was 15 years old.

My second real job

By the time I was 15 years old we lived in Louisiana. In Louisiana you could get a driver’s license at the age of 15, in every other state that I am aware of, the driving age is 16. On the day that I got my driver’s license I went with my Mom to the grocery store and we noticed that a new store was getting ready to open in the same strip-center. That store was named T.G.&Y. They had a sign in the window saying that they were looking to hire people, and I went and applied. In just a few days I got a call to come for an interview, and I started working the same day. I was the first employee that the store hired.

It took a few months to get the store all set up and ready to open, and I was kept on as a regular employee of the operational store. That was the beginning of my kind of “regular job” type work, and I went on to work for T.G.&Y. for about 10 years, getting into store management and even some regional management roles. I loved doing retail work, and throughout my life I have been doing similar work, although similar work that was online for the most part. I like the online work better, it’s not as hard. 🙂

My shift to online work

In 1995 or 1996 I discovered the world of selling online and other methods of earning a living on the Internet. I started off selling on eBay, that was when eBay first started operating.

I was working a non-online job for a company called SEH America, we manufactured silicon wafers. I was in a supervisory role there, and every morning I would have to attend a morning meeting with all of the management team. Basically the meeting would kind of kick off the day, we would report any problems in our area, get information on production goals for the day, and supervisory and management would basically touch base to kick off the production day. Usually after gathering for the meeting we would sitting around talking while waiting for everybody to show up. Usually I would be talking with friends about what I had sold on eBay. I within a few months I was making more money on eBay than I made on my “real job”. When I would be talking about my eBay sales before the morning meeting it started out that just me and a few friends would talk about it. After a few months, basically everybody at the meeting would be listening in and asking questions. At that time making a full time living online was unheard of for most people. Some in the meeting would say that I was lying or inflating it. A few people on the team, though, had followed what I was doing and they attested that it was completely true.

Between 1995 and 2000 I continued to do eBay, but I also figured out other ways to make money online. I had dozens of different ways I was making money on the Internet, and I was having a great time doing it.

Big Changes Ahead

In 2000 I quit my job at SEH, and we moved to the Philippines. I had some cash saved up to make the move and to finance our life in the Philippines. Getting a job in the Philippines, as a foreigner, basically was not going to happen. I had money, though, and had skills in earning a living on the Internet, so I thought that there would not be any problem.

In 2001 we opened an Internet Café in the Philippines and it did well. It did well by Philippine standards. The Philippines is a very poor country, and the Internet Café earned Philippine amounts of money. We could live on it, but we could only live frugally on it. By the beginning of 2002 I knew that I needed to earn more money than the Café could provide if we wanted to live more than a frugal life. Although I knew that it would be a challenge to do from the Philippines I started selling on eBay from the Philippines.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in an article that I wrote about selling on eBay from the Philippines. A foreigner (American, I think) living in the Philippines saw that mention, and he asked me how I could sell on eBay from the Philippines. I told him I would write an article or a series of articles about that topic, so watch for that coming soon on this site.

I sold on eBay in the Philippines for about 4 or 5 years, but during that period I found other ways to earn a better living online while in the Philippines so I moved on.

Back to eBay

In 2019 I decided to move back to the USA. I always thought I’d live the rest of my life in the Philippines, but my wife, Feyma, really wanted to return to the States. I had some tough things happen in my personal life between 2016 through 2018, and I told Feyma that if she still wanted to move to the USA I was ready to do it, so we did. We returned to the USA in 2019.

Feyma told me that if we moved back to the States she wanted to get a job herself and work for 10 years so that she would qualify for her own Social Security when she reaches that age. She told me that I could just retire and she would earn the money. I thought that sounded pretty good, but I could never just “retire” because earning a living is part of who I am, and I would be bored just sitting around doing nothing.

To combat the feeling of boredom, I decided to start selling on eBay again. Within 2 weeks of arriving back in the States Feyma had a good job. We have 3 sons, two of them came back to the States a couple of years before we returned, and our oldest son returned with us to the USA in 2019. Chris, the one who returned with us in 2019, also got a job where Feyma works, and was employed within 2 weeks after we landed in the USA. So, a complete reversal… I wasn’t working yet, but everybody else in the family was!

Within 2 months or so I had my eBay operation up and rolling. A lot had changed on eBay in the years I was absent, so I had a bit of a learning curve, but my foundation on eBay was solid, and I picked up the new stuff quickly.

We have lived back in the USA for about 4 1/2 years now, and we are all doing well. Over those years I have moved on from earning money only on eBay to now doing other ways of making money online. Much of making my living online is pretty easy work, but eBay is more physical, not passive like some of my other websites.

So… I have decided to stop doing eBay. I may still do it to a smaller extend, for instance if I find a really good deal that I can purchase and sell on eBay. That, however, will be the exception, and I will mostly make money by writing on the web. I want to help teach others how to earn a living from home with an internet connection and not much else.

Will you join me for the journey?

I hope you will.

See you soon.