Location Free Lifestyle

More and more people are realising that any work you can do on a computer, you can do anywhere in the world.  Plus it can be a lot cheaper to live somewhere sunny and warm than back “at home.”

I know because luckily I’ve been living this lifestyle for the past decade, deciding where I want to live from Italy to Japan, in the mountains or by the beach, and how I choose to work.  I make my living online through websites, Youtube, writing magazine articles on various topics via email as well doing workshops and lectures all over the world.  You don’t have to be a millionaire, far from it,  it’s something anyone, or maybe even everyone, should do.

I figured in the spirit of give and take I’d write up this blog with some of the experiences and places I visit, along with some of the ideas and techniques you can use to fund your new Location Free Lifestyle.  Hopefully it will give you a few ideas and hopefully will inspire a few more of you to share your knowledge and experience. This is still all very new.  I know that I’m still making it all up as I go along.  I’m always wanting to know the best places to go, the bargains that are out there and the ideas that will make funding it much easier.

We’re fortunate enough to live in a time where it’s possible to make even a modest living online, which can then allow you to travel and live in almost any country you could desire. It’s about breaking free from the 9-5, the long commutes and boring jobs.  It’s about waking up in the morning in a beautiful location actually wanting to work on something that contributes and makes you happy.

I’ll try to update the site as often as I can, and judging by my schedule for the next year there should be quite a lot to come!

Please make comments on the posts and feel free to ask me any questions!

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One big disadvantage of being location free is that you tend to view the world through the filter of the internet.  Needless to say the internet is not the real world.  With all the pseudo anonymity people have a much bigger tendency to moan and complain.  Couple this with online news sources that feed on fear then it can get you down.

Conversely real life is usually really fun.  It just amazes me how happy most people really are. In all my travels I’ve met thousands of people and just about all of them are fun loving, interesting and positive people.  You just can’t see their smiles on the internet!

So I’ve been working on a new project to bring some positivity back.  I call it Genki Relax.  Have a look at the video below!

You can find more details on the GenkiRelax.com website, or buy the product here!

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Here’s the set up I use for recording on the road!

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Travel around the World making (and being paid!) to make videos for Youtube?  Well, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 5 months.

If you’ve ever made, or I guess even watched, a video on Youtube there is now a huge opportunity for you to make money online with Youtube.

You don’t need 10 million views on your main channel like I do, all you need is a video camera, know how to set up a Youtube account and an idea of how videos come across on Youtube.

Then it’s really simple:

Just offer to make videos for local companies, hotels, restaurants etc.

That’s it.  It’s really simple!

How it works…

The key is that most business owners are far too busy to even know what Youtube does, let along know how to set up a channel and upload videos.  If you have that knowledge it can be invaluable for them. And anything that makes them money they will be happy to pay for! Customers love video and really seeing a product or service before they buy.  Plus Youtube is now the second biggest search engine in the world.   All this makes it something that every business needs, but not everyone knows how to do.  Until you come along that is!

How I started…

Although “local internet marketing” has become a bit of a boom, I only started this by accident.  Last year I was staying at a friend’s resort in Thailand.   And I wanted to put up a video on my Youtube channel to show my blog readers where I was staying.  Here it is: Samui Accommodation.

But it had an unintended side effect.  When I went back this year they were saying how many more customers they’d had because people had seen the video on Youtube when deciding where to stay.  It brought them trust and showed the customers exactly what they were getting.  They were very happy.  So was I.

Hmmm… so I had another go with another friend’s hotel (as you can tell I pretty much live in hotels), this time setting up a whole new channel for them: New Zealand Accommodation.

And I’ve also set up channels and made videos for lots of other places.

Youtube is still young, so this probably won’t work in a few years time, so get your skates on now!

Things to be careful of…..

These are some of the hints and tips I’ve learnt (usually the hard way!)

1. Brevity: Keep the videos short. People switch off after a minute or so.

2. Honesty: Do it in one cut.  It makes editing easier and shows the real thing, you didn’t just cut out any bad things as you can see everything!

3. Be authentic:  If it’s a commercial channel for a business, that’s cool.  But don’t put ads on a personal channel.  I found this out the hard, and ironic, way as one of the videos I wasn’t paid to do was for New Zealand Wine. As we weren’t doing it as a commercial project I thought it would be a cool video just to put on my personal channel (New Zealand wine is great!), but everyone thought it was an ad and hated it!  Don’t mix business and pleasure I guess!

3. Fun:  Smile and have fun with it!

There are also plenty of other tips and “secret sauces” to making this work well, but I think I’ll keep those to myself for the moment! ; )

But if you have a camera, can get people to smile and talk well then have a go, it’s a great way to get paid and you also end up with lots of fringe benefits, we got given free T-shirts, Bungy Jumps, Jet Boat rides and all sorts of other things if we filmed them and let them use the clips on Youtube!

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It’s all very well people like me saying you can have your dream lifestyle if you just have the right attitude and work smart. But many people have no idea what they would like to do in life. Hopefully this video, taken from my motivation course for universities, will give you an idea!

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With Windows 7 out I figure it’s about to time to get a new laptop.   For the last 3 years I’ve been very happy with my amazing Panasonic Y5.   It’s a “toughbook”, has a great screen and battery and it’s the only laptop that’s lasted more than a year for me!

But with insane dust in Cambodia and India it’s getting really slow now, probably just all bunged up with muck inside, and although I’ve upgraded the hard drive to 320 Gig that’s about as far as it will go.  I really want something faster, and that means an SSD hard drive.

Now I would love to upgrade this to the latest version, but the new version is the Panasonic F series, which is horrible!  It’s got this handle thing on the front, which doesn’t look cool, but the main problem is the screen resolution has gone down, which is a dealbreaker.

So I’ve spent far too much time reading reviews and trying to find the best new laptop to buy.  I need something super powerful that’s also easy to carry around.  The two that I’m thinking of..

Sony Vaio Z

This is super fast!  With an i7 and best of all it’s available with a 500 GB SSD!  It is so fast.  The screen has huge resolution but only 13.3 inch size which is a bit small.  But it blows all the other machines out of the water with the specs.  The only problem?  It’s sold out till November – and then I’m on my European tour!

So….

MacBook Pro 15 inch

I’ve been looking at macs for ages, all that hype does get to you, but don’t believe a word of it. Macs do not simple “just work”.  They crash like crazy!  Twice this year I’ve walked into a Mac store cash in hand and played around on Logic and it’s crashed.   I guess I was building the Macs up to be as good as the iphone, which is amazing.  But they’re just normal PCs with all the same hassles and problems.

The thing is that they might be the best PC out there.  Having Logic and Final Cut at such bargain prices also takes any competition away from Windows machines.  It is much cheaper to buy a mac at the moment.  But there are still hassles, especially with moving old emails across and some older fonts.   The main thing is the hard disks, no 512Gig SSD means I’ll be stuck with a slow hard drive again!

Anyway, I’m still deciding, if you find an amazing notebook out there for me, let me know…

UPDATE: I bought a Mac!!  But… it kept crashing and was horrible. : (    So I took it back and just bought the new Panasonic F9.  It’s not very fast (terrible for video editing, but still better than the Mac for AVCHD) but it is great still having a toughbook that I can throw around and not worry about.  Plus it is so light, even though it feels like a tank!

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Whenever I tell people about the Location Free Lifestyle, invariably if they are working they’ll say “I have no time to travel.”

I have no time

My answers to that is….  ”Really?  I have 24 hours in a day, do you have less than me? ”

Wellm we all have the same amount of time each day, it’s how we choose to use it.  What do you choose, the 2 hour commute and 8 hours behind a city desk each day?  Or spend the 8 hours working by the beach with zero communute time – that you can then use to go swimming in the sea?

As we’ve seen in the other posts it does take time to set these things up.  But your time is your own, and you’ve only got a century or so left so make the most of it!

So why work?

And at the same time when I talkt to people who spend all their time travelling they always say “why work at all?”

Many, many people spend almost their entire time travelling around the world.  They work a bit, save some money then head off.   They’re not just beach bum hippies, but all sorts of people including ex accountants bankers and lawyers.  They often say, why not just travel instead of working in different places?

The anwers to this is “purpose”.  Yes I love being by the beach, seeing amazing things and meeting amazing people.  But at the same time you have to a have a purpose in life.  What do you leave behind and how can you help other people?  Without that it can become tedious and meaningless to just travel around, especially when that’s all you can talk about with people!

Yesterday was great for me to just spend the whole day slobbing around the pool.  But at 3 this morning I woke up wanting to do more, so started work.  If you love your work, and you spend the time finding something that really makes a difference in the world then you really want to do it!

And if you’re going to do that you might as well do it online, with wonderful friends in beautiful and more often than not cheaper, places all around the world!

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This month I’m lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks in Sydney and  up north in the tropical paradise of Queensland.  Mind you it’s July down here which equals winter, which means Sydney is cold but the north is very comfortable.

Travelling to Australia does feel a little different, it’s certainly different to the UK or the US, it has its own laid back character.  As it’s a developed country you don’t have to worry about shopping, great coffee or buying anything, everything is available.

The flip side of this is that it is expensive, it’s probably better value than Europe, but accommodation can be very expensive even in backpacker hostels.

Where’s the net access?

The biggest downside to Australia, and this is probably going to be the breaking point for anyone who is Location Free is the horrendous internet access!  You’d think it would be up there with the rest of the world, but it is incredibly slow – slower than many developing countries – and incredibly expensive.   At the moment I’m in an internet cafe, with gorgeous $4 coffees, but the net is $5 an hour and keeps cutting out.  Uploading to Youtube is virtually impossible. Last week I was in a 5 star hotel in Sydney, and they not only charged $20 per night for net access, they capped the limit at 300 MB!   Unfortunately Windows decided to update that night and used up all my allowance.

So although Australia is beautiful and laid back, the lack of net access is a very big hindrance to anyone wanting to seriously work online here.  Plus having everyone speak English just makes it far too easy, I think I’d rather go somewhere with more of a challenge – that’s also a little cheaper!

There are some really cool things to do on your day off though!

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Reason to have a location free lifestyle no. 4:  You can also choose when, not just where you work.

For example last night was the Michael Jackson memorial.  I happened to be in Japan, which meant it would start at 2AM.   All my friends with regular jobs were having to rush around trying to beg their bosses for the next morning off.  For everyone that was location free, we just worked till midnight (I finished up recording my latest CD – yeah!) then headed off to the bars at 2 o’clock till dawn.   We still do the same amount of work, well maybe a lot more, but if something unmissable crops up, you have the flexibility to be there.

So where do we start making money online?

This is the question I get asked more than anything!  Have a look through the previous posts on this site, especially the ones marked “Make money online”

And one really, really excellent free course I can recommend is the one by Shoemoney.  It’s heavy going, not for the feint hearted, but it has real ideas that do work.   Why is he giving it away for free if it’s so good?  I think it’s so you’ll think about signing up for his website tools when you do start, which is a pretty good deal, you get all the info for free and then get a choice if you want to pay for it later! Sign up here.

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