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,…
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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…
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.)
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…
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. )
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…
On a recent post on Untemplater.com, I wrote about how I think talent is created, not born. I called the post, You are a Monkey so Stop Thinking You are so Special. I learned a couple of things from the comments, apparently people don’t like being called monkeys and some people place a lot of emphasis on the genetic side of the debate.
Of course genes are important in many circumstances. It is difficult to be a professional basketball player if you are short. It helps to have big hands and feet if you want to be a world class swimmer. Good eyesight is necessary to be a pilot. So yes, genes do shape our future to a degree, but how often does genetic makeup really limit what we can accomplish?
The purpose of the monkey post was to show that since humans have 99.9% of the same genes as chimpanzees, maybe we shouldn’t put too much emphasis on our genetic makeup. The worst part of an over-reliance on nature over nurture is that it…
Making the decision to move to another country is difficult and scary. It is even harder if you have a family to support and educate. Brandon Pearce, his wife and two daughters made that choice and moved to Costa Rica at the start of the year and are loving their new life outside of the US. Brandon is also proving that the idea of the low hour work week (he works 5 hours per week) is definitely possible if you put in the effort. Brandon offers some great details into his business and his lifestyle in Costa Rica in this interview.
Please tell us a little about your background.
I just turned 30 years old, and was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. As a child, I fell in love with both music and computers. I learned to play the piano and sing – a passion probably inherited from my parents who are both musicians – and when I was 12, I began teaching myself to program in QBasic. I always dreamed that one day I would either be a music teacher like my dad, or have my own…
I love watching people succeed through hard work and talent. I often say that we live in amazing times, because anyone with focus and dedication and rise to the top. Corbett Barr is one of those people that I have admired since his blogging beginnings just over a year ago. He has managed to build two popular blogs, start several other business ventures and live location independent in Mexico for a good portion of the year. Corbett has the talent and dedication to accomplish big things. If you want to track the progress of a rising Internet celebrity, than I recommend watching and learning from everything he does.
Please tell us a little about your background
I’m a 30-something former careerist who traded salary and perks for doing what I love and living anywhere.
After growing up in typical American suburbia, I jumped on the career hamster wheel and ended up as a management consultant working for Fortune 500 clients. I traveled across the country and worked on projects that helped giant corporations make more money or become more efficient. It paid well and everyone I worked with was whip-smart,…
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