I’m an American, but I live in China, teaching English. I teach about 10 to 15 hours a day, and although the salary is extremely low by American standards, I live fairly comfortably in my medium sized Chinese town. I’m happy here, studying Chinese and eating amazing Chinese food, but I do have a lot of spare time. Plus, I still have a few monthly expenses that require US dollar payments, like a student loan I’m still paying off. To avoid completely draining my US bank account, I use my Mechanical Turk earnings to replace the money going out. I also sometimes use the money I earn here to buy things online, since I can’t do that with my Chinese bank card. I buy things like subscriptions to Chinese study websites, MLB gameday audio so I can listen to my Cubs play live (in the middle of the night here) and Skype credit so I can call friends and family in the US. I make about $50 US dollars a month, which doesn’t really keep up with the bills or everything I want to buy online, but I don’t want to spend all my free time Turking! Chinese is a really difficult language, and I’ve got to study hard! Plus, why sit here in front of the computer all day when there is an amazing country out there waiting to be explored? I did a few Chinese to English translation tasks a few weeks ago, it was the very first time I’ve been paid for translation work. It felt good. I hope I will see more and more of these types of tasks!