Over the week I was interested in finding an activity partner to do some martial arts before I get rusty from not practicing. Now normally the first thing that comes to mind is to join a club or school and pay some kind of monthly membership fee. Instead, I went looking at some free classified ad listings online within my area to see if anyone was looking for a person to train with too.

Fortunately, I was able to find someone and it was great that he was willing to teach me an art that I was actually interested in before too as he mentioned he needed someone to practice with and so money wasn’t really a factor.

At the same time, I was just looking at other listings for other topics and it’s amazing how many service/skill exchange requests are out there. For example, the most common ones were language exchanges which in many ways can make more sense than say spending money for a casual one month course. As well, there were also professional service exchanges such as photographers looking for film editors and vice versa.

I guess the main drawback to this is that you can risk meeting some crackpot, but I guess that is true even in a commercial style setting and so due diligence is needed. Pretty decent and fair way to save money though.

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