A key success factor, both personally and in business, is the ability to connect with like minded people.  It is great to virtually interact with and support our peers but nothing compares to real world meet ups. To bring lifestyle design focused entrepreneurs together,  Michael Bodekaer has created Project Getaway, a tropical paradise retreat in Bali, Indonesia. He talks about his lifestyle and businesses in this interview.

Please tell us a little about your background?

I’m a tech-geek, adrenaline junkie and entrepreneur who got tired of 9-5 day-jobs and decided to be my own boss. I love kite-surfing, wakeboarding and world travel, and have managed to start/run a few online businesses that allow me to live life how it is supposed to be lived

While traveling around the world I often missed the community feel and creativity that comes from working with fun, inspirational and like-minded people, but what I didn’t miss were the timesheets, managers and meetings.

So instead of going back into an office, I decided to try to bring inspirational people out of offices and…

It is a common dream to set up a guest house in a foreign country and live in paradise. I certainly have considered it. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a tropical climate and have a profitable business funding your lifestyle? However, running a business, especially one in a foreign country, is not always glamorous and exciting. In this interview, I talk to Mike Henry, who has recently bought a guest house in Bali with his wife. He shares what it is really like to own and run a guest house. (Also, check out this 2009 interview with Mike when he just arrived in Bali.)

Please tell us about your guest house in Bali.

Our guesthouse is located on the north coast of Bali in the village of Anturan and about 6km from Singaraja, Bali’s second largest city. It comprises of just four guestrooms, a restaurant, a pool and our own house.

What is Bali like?

I have lived in Bali for nearly two years. There are many things I like about Bali, the weather, the culture, the easy going nature of the people and the scenery. There is still a very strong…

I am a huge fan of great, simple ideas. When I first heard of the TropicalMBA, I thought it was a brilliant concept with lots of potential. Just the name alone, conveys all the information you need to know. What better way to learn about business, then interning with a successful entrepreneur in an exotic country? In this interview, Dan Andrew talks about how he started the TropicalMBA, how he makes money and gives advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Please tell us about yourself

After studying philosophy in college, I sort of blindly jumped in to business because I assumed that business guys had a lot of freedom in terms of how they spent their time and where they can be located. I didn’t really have a plan, but in retrospect I think I was right about the business thing. Being an entrepreneur allows me a great deal of freedom in how I spend my time and I also get to be creative, which is really important to me.

It took me a little while to figure out how to get the kind of freedom I was looking for. I started my business…

15 Reasons I Love a Location Independent Lifestyle

I recently wrote about 14 reasons why I hate travel, most of it was minor bickering disguising the fact of how lucky my wife and I are to be able to live anywhere we want in the world. Bloggers tend to glamorize travel and online income opportunities in order to sell ebooks so I am trying to offer a little more reality to what it is really like on the road. However, in fairness I should also talk about all the things I love about living abroad. These really are amazing times.

First of all, I should clarify that constant travel is much different than living abroad. Many people talk about ‘location independence’ when they are really living in a foreign country. I love living abroad, it is regularly changing locations that gets too tiring and time consuming.

Here are 15 Reasons I Love to Live a Travel Lifestyle

1. Food

It is great to be able to try authentic international food around the world. Japan has the healthiest, freshest and highest quality ingredients but other countries like Hungary,…

Fishing for Ideas to Improve your Life, Istanbul

Here are a few amazingly comprehensive resources that I have discovered that are important to anyone trying to build a blog or online business. All are completely free and will have a huge impact in your life and business.

Pat Flynn’s Niche Marketing Duel.

Pat is sharing, in incredible detail, exactly all the steps in finding a niche business idea and turning it into a profitable business. He already has a six figure passive income and is proving that his success is replicable.

Follow his progress right from choosing a topic. He shows how he got to the number one listing in Google in less than 3 months. His site made $151 from Google Adsense in November and $62 in October. This is after 4 months of part time effort.  Pat has plans to sell ebooks and other advertising that will definitely deliver much higher earnings. Start from the beginning and check out this series of posts. It really is amazing content that is completely free.

• Niche Site Duel: I’ve Been Challenged, and I Accept!
• Niche Site Duel 002 – Finding a Profitable Niche:

…

We are in Istanbul!

It has been 8 months now that Motoko and I left Japan. We are having a great time with our lives but this is also not an idyllic lifestyle. It is great to be able to see the world and have complete freedom, but we are really starting to miss having a regular routine in our lives. Here is a short summary of our current situation.

We  are in Istanbul

We are currently in Istanbul and loving it here. The hospitality of Turkish people has been amazing. Turkey is very unique in that it is a bridge between European and Middle Eastern cultures.  It is so different then anywhere else we have been but I will write more about the country later.

Our Financial Situation

We haven’t been able to sell our house in Japan because of the terrible real estate market there, so we have been paying bills and a mortgage for an empty house. It would have been nice to get rid of that obligation, but such is life. We are now thinking of spending a few months every year in Japan. Unfortunately, we got rid of all of…

Benny Lewis of Fluentin3Months.com

I had an opportunity to meet up with and interview the charismatic Benny Lewis from Fluentin3Months.com in Budapest recently. Those of you following the location independent and travel blogger crowd will likely already be well acquainted with Benny. His blog and recent language hacking guides have been extremely popular. Currently fluent in 8 languages and proficient in many others, Benny definitely knows what he is talking about. What I admire most about him is the intense focus of his blog and language missions in different countries. Travel, lifestyle design and location independence are all very saturated topics, Benny managed to find an unique angle and he sticks with it. He is the Language Hacker Polyglot.

Here  is a very brief summary of the video.

00:20 Start off by introducing yourself.

(He studied electronic engineering. Has been travelling for 8 years. Started his blog 1.5 years ago with a language focus. Every three months or so travels to a new country to learn the language.)

1:45 Why three months?

(It is not a magic number. It depends on the person. Three months is good for him.)

2:01 What

…

26 year old professional day trader Marcello Arrambide of WanderingTrader.com works a couple of hours a day trading futures while travelling the world. In this interview Marcello explains what day trading is, how he got started and talks about some of his travels.

Interview Summary

01:11 Where are you now?

(Buenos Aires)

01:39 What is day trading?

(Essentially taking profits from the differences in moves in the stock market.)

02:04 What exactly are you trading?

(Indexed futures.)

04:50 Do you make money on every trade?

(No, losing is part of the game. It is all about probability. Make sure you win more than you lose.)

05:18 Do you have negative months or weeks?

(No, negative days. That is about it. When people get consistent enough it is rare to have losing days in a row.)

05:50 Do you have some algorithm or computer program that helps you determine when to buy and sell?

(It is a set of indicators. It is not a red light or green light that tells you when to get in. There is a set of rules you have to follow but within those rules there is some wiggle room for discretion in…

Jet Setter in Montreal

Greetings from my favourite Canadian city, Montreal. This is our second time in the cultural capital of Canada but our first experience couchsurfing.  CouchSurfing has been fantastic so far, not only as a free place to stay and an introduction to an unknown city, but as the quintessential social media site. It’s very essence is about connecting people in real life.

What is CouchSurfing?

For those of you who don’t know, CouchSurfing.org is a network where travellers can connect and find a place to stay  with a local person in cities around the world. There is no cost for the website or for the couch (bed, room or floor) but it is expected that you are going for the social exchange and not just a free place to sleep.

This is how my wife explained it to her mother, “We are going to stay at a stranger’s house. We found the person on the Internet.” (Very rough English translation. )

Prior to…

Biking in Calgary, Canada

I have been back in my home country of Canada for about four months, now I have two more weeks to go before I leave again. It has been great to be back home, but I think I enjoyed it more because I know it is not permanent. My wife and I have not made any roots and have not anchored ourselves to a lifestyle we don’t want. The greatest insight I have discovered is that life is fantastic.

Sometimes it is easy to forget just how good we have it. Several friends and relatives have recently undergone major medical surgeries. I have heard many complaints about how far they had to drive to get to the hospital, how long the waiting lists were to get a hospital bed, how many times their surgeries had been postponed, how late the doctor was, etc.

I understand people under-going life threatening operations are under huge amounts of stress and want to get out the hospital as soon as possible, however I think they may be over-looking how lucky they are to be in a rich developed country with amazing technological advances and medical…