Many people wonder how my wife and I can afford our location independent lifestyle. Savings are part of it, I also do some part-time consulting. However, the key ingredient is that we don’t spend much money. This is a difficult concept for many to grasp: you don’t have to work much if you don’t spend money. My wife and I cut our expenses to about a quarter of what they used to be, now I have the flexibility to only work on projects I care about.

Long-term traveler, Roni Weiss has perfected the art of frugality. By keeping his living expenses extremely low he can maintain a travel lifestyle that is only a dream to most. Roni shares his story in this interview.

Please tell us about your travels.

My first big solo backpacking trip was in 2004, two months in Western and Central Europe. It could have been longer, but I chose not to bring a laptop, something I changed two trips later. Sharing hostel computers is for the birds. Now, I have been to 70+ countries, including every country in Europe, as well as every continent except Antarctica. 40% of the countries in the world.

How many months of the year are you out of the country?

From 2007 until the end of 2010, I spent most of my time outside of the States. This year, I’m writing while on my first trip abroad of the year, Senegal. I’m not sure if I’ll be traversing oceans so much in 2011, but I will definitely be going to Canada and might be going to the Caribbean and parts of Latin America. It’s still in flux. Then again, I could be back in Africa in the next few months. My life isn’t so planned out.

Do you have a home base somewhere?

My home base is technically Everett, Washington. It’s where my driver’s license is, where my credit card bills go, etc. Depending on the situation, my father helps me with stuff back home, but I’ve had other people do that, as necessary. My Washington State health care does not cover me overseas, so I have bought Atlas Travel Health Insurance in the past. I’ve taken to buying the lowest coverage, with no deductible.

Please tell us about your blog, RoniWeiss.com.

I’ve had a website since 1999. My blogging before was more personal stuff, stories of my day. Though I did have movie reviews, as well. In 2008, I moved to Chile to teach business English. Around that time, my then-girlfriend and I broke up and I needed something to fill my mindspace. So I started blogging in a Web 2.0 sort of way and got involved in podcasts. My blog is mostly my travel stories and political commentary, but I go into other subjects as I feel the need. For a while, I was on wordpress.com. Once I started becoming more regular and getting more traffic, I moved over to wordpress.org. I don’t pay for hosting costs as I use my boss’s server in France. I’ve gotten offers to put ads on my site, but none felt particularly right. I had a Google Adsense ad up for a bit, but it wasn’t very prominent, so I wasn’t generating much from that. And now, I never will from them, as they banned me. I’ll probably write a post about that at some point. For now, I’m thinking I’ll stay ad-free until something makes more sense.

How do you earn an income now?

Money is a somewhat abstract concept to me. I try to spend as little as possible whenever possible. I make money through working for my boss in France, creating English language teaching materials. (Un)fortunately, I’ve been so busy with cool, unpaid things that I haven’t had time to sit and do work. I have done a lot of summer jobs in the past, wherein I get room and board paid for, don’t spend any money for months and come out of it with a few thousand dollars in my pocket. That’s served me well in the past.

Do you have many social media clients?

Right now, I’m helping with social media for the Africa Travel Association. We’ll see how much of my time in the future is doing social media and how much is freelance writing. Your guess is as good as mine.

Please tell us about your English teaching experiences?

I’ve taught English in Italy, Taiwan, France and Chile. They were all really different, based on what the jobs themselves were and what my living setup was. I did an interview about my English language teaching here.

What do you estimate your yearly expenses to be?

Wow. Uhhh. Yeah, I just don’t calculate it that way. There are days where I spend no money. There are days where I spend $5-20… And every so often I have to pay car insurance or flights. I’m so bad at this, really. When I’m traveling, I start trying to figure out how much I’m spending, but it feels like my expenditures per day fluctuate so wildly that it’s hard to say. And it depends on where I am in the world, too. If I’m Stateside, I have to pay for gas. In some countries, I ride black on the public transport; in others, I don’t. I’ve hitchhiked, but not all the time and not always successfully.

Generally, I spend nothing on accommodation, which does help. Really, it’s just such a variety. My goal is to always try to minimize expenses. The biggest challenge is trying to not let my nutrition suffer too much because of it.

How do you keep your expenses low?

I try to not spend money if I don’t absolutely have to. I stay with friends, family, people from Couchsurfing and have started doing hotel write-ups. A lot of times, friends and family give you food. They’re nice like that. That helps you save money. Hitchhiking has helped. I just started doing that more frequently at the end of last year. Recently, I’ve been putting up my Iraq hitchhiking posts.

Have you had any major problems on your travels?

I wouldn’t call them major. Getting ripped off by a taxi driver and his compatriots in Chile, which then got me on the biggest investigative journalism show in Chile. I’ve never had my life really threatened, never got beaten up or successfully mugged. In Chile, I stupidly had my money belt in my pocket. That story is here. And then there was the time at the Peru-Ecuador border…

How long do you plan on continuing this lifestyle?

My lifestyle is in flux. I’m moving away from the in-one-place English teaching and moving toward freelance writing and social media management. It’s really unclear if I’ll be spending time in Los Angeles or having enough work on the road that staying in one place doesn’t make sense.

What are your future plans for earning an income?

The hope is to earn more than just free stuff from blogging. Dunno how plausible that is. If I do spend more time in LA, I might make an effort with entertainment, too.

Do you have any advice for aspiring world travelers?

Know what you can handle in terms of creature comforts. Don’t try to drive yourself crazy being on a budget you can’t handle, but if you need to be staying at nice hotels and carrying lots of stuff with you, you’ll probably have to scale down your plans. Or just fall into debt, which I don’t recommend.

Here’s a plug: Travel Talk on Twitter. I help run a weekly Twitter event where we have five questions about a travel topic and anyone can tweet their answers. It’s every Tuesday at 9:30 AM/PM GMT. Great place to share/get ideas. And a lot of people seem to come out of it with potential plans for new places.

Links

RoniWeiss.com
Roni On Location (Roni’s YouTube travel web series.)
Follow Roni on Twitter
Facebook page
Political podcast: dontworry.tv or look for Don’t Worry About The Government (or Roni Weiss) on iTunes

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 our visit, I must admit we had some apprehensions about staying with someone we have never met. Other than the profile everyone writes about themselves on the CouchSurfing.org site and reviews from other travellers, you really don’t know what to expect on arrival.

Will they actually be there? Is it safe? What etiquette is expected? What gifts should we bring? Many things were on our mind prior to our first meeting our host.

The World’s Greatest CouchSurfing Host

It turns out we managed to find the best CouchSurfing host in the world on our very first attempt. The generosity and trust of our host is amazing. He opens his home to couchsurfers constantly. There is a steady flow of new people living in his house. Each surfer gets the keys to the house and full access. Despite his never-ending kindness, for every one person he accepts, he has to turn two away.

My wife and I have had the opportunity to spend several amazing nights with him drinking late into the evening. We feel like we have gotten to know him more than some of our close friends.

CouchSurfing is What Other Social Media Sites Try to Be

I think many social media critics  associate online friends with superficial connections and banal conversation. That may be true in some cases but CouchSurfing is inherently different. The real value of the site comes from facilitating real life meet-ups. There is little chance that these kinds of connections could have been made before the Internet. Some good relationships can be developed online only but they will never reach the level of in person contact.

This to me is the real promise of social media. We are able to connect with like minded people on a global scale. That is huge!

It takes lots of work to build and maintain relationships but it can be so rewarding. I hope we have started the foundation of a life-long friendship with our host. I am certain we will meet again in different parts of the world.

Many people and businesses are using social media platforms as an inexpensive way to advertise. They try to friend or follow as many people as people with the intention of building a potential customer base. While that is part of life, I hope that it  is going to be a very small part of our social media experiences.

CouchSurfing is Not About the Money

With CouchSurfing there is absolutely no financial transaction, the host is generous without expectation of direct reciprocity. Certainly there are long term benefits of being repaid with future couches to surf, but most hosts seem to give a lot more then they will ever receive. The real reason for giving so much is the social interaction.

That to me is a very powerful idea. We are social animals after all, social connections have tremendous value. That value extends far beyond any financial exchange. We have been conditioned to be consumers over the last 150 years or so. It is important to remember that society wasn’t always like this and it doesn’t have to continue this way indefinitely.

Again, it is my hope that this is all part of the economic and social evolution of mankind. We are reaching for the peak of Maslow’s hierarchy. Life is no longer a struggle for food, shelter and clothing. We are looking for meaning and purpose in our lives. That meaning can’t be bought or consumed. Life is measured by the quality of our personal relationships and contribution to other people. CouchSurfing.org is the best example I have found of that so far. The only downside is that we have been having such a great time that I haven’t been able to get any work done. After the fantastic conversations we have had with our host, I am going to put a lot more effort into meeting people around the world.

I would love to hear about other websites that facilitate human interaction like CouchSurfing for a project I am working on. If you have any good examples or experiences please let me know in the comments or by email.