Many people often see traveling as a black hole for money, but that’s not necessarily the case all the time. The key is researching the destinations you want to travel to beforehand. True enough, certain destinations are more expensive than others, but you also have to look at if your travels are long-term or short-term.
If you’re going on a two-week vacation, that’s, of course, short-term travel, and a trip to London with transportation and accommodations can easily run you over $10,000… That wouldn’t be worth it for a short stay. For long-term travel, that’s a more reasonable price simply because it wouldn’t be as much money lost.
How? Because most long-term travelers live the digital nomad lifestyle.
What is a digital nomad?
A digital nomad is someone who travels the world and earns the bulk of their income by working internet-based jobs. As long as you have access to a strong internet connection, you have the ability to work from anywhere.
There are, of course, some considerations to think about in adopting such a different lifestyle… You definitely want to take all necessary safety precautions like researching each destination before you visit and staying connected with friends and family back home.
Nonetheless, traveling is one of the greatest adventures you’ll ever experience, but it does require you to work to maintain the lifestyle. That doesn’t mean that that the work had to be excruciatingly painful… There are indeed ways to live a life of travel and earn income at the same time, and through the digital nomad lifestyle.
Take a look at some of the best ways to fulfill your travel dreams and make money while doing it!
Ways to Earn As a Digital Nomad
Teaching English
To see if you’re an English teacher, you need to perform two steps. First, go in the mirror and ask yourself, “Am I a native English speaker?” Step two is taking two fingers and checking your pulse. Can you feel your heartbeat?
If you answered “yes” to those two questions above then congratulations, you are now qualified to be an English teacher. There are some companies that also require a TEFL, TOEFL, or ESL certificate and college degree but this is not the blanket rule.
There are many countries where you can either teach locally in the school system or academies or simply teach online to children and adults. The majority of these jobs are teaching people in Asia, so you might want to see if your schedule lines up with the time zones.
If you’ve never been a teacher before, you might want to ask some teacher friends or do some research on your own to see how it goes and any tips or suggestions they might have.
Remote Work
According to CNBC, with telecommuting and remote work becoming more and more common, you can start looking in that direction for work.
There are many jobs that can be performed online. Jobs like programming, engineering, writing, marketing, social media, community management, virtual assistance, and more are moving to the online world. You’ll want to make sure you have a solid laptop and a good internet connection, but it doesn’t require much else.
If you don’t feel like you have one of those skills, you can always go about teaching yourself or taking courses online. In a career like writing, for example, you might have to start out small, working for free to build up your online portfolio until you can start landing more stable gigs.
If you do have one of those skills, finding a job might go quicker. Be sure to peruse remote job-specific boards to see if you can find anything up your alley.
Start an Online Business
One of the best aspects of starting your own online business is that it provides you the freedom and flexibility to actually enjoy your travels. That doesn’t mean you’re free to not work at all, of course, but you’ll have a much better work-life balance.
Let’s say you decide to start your own e-commerce business with a blog. Well, running and maintaining a business, as well as a blog can be quite time-consuming. You need the business as your primary source of income, and you need your blog to increase your online visibility with valuable content to drive traffic to your site…
Well, you can have the best of both worlds. What you would do is carve out time to work on your business and for your blog, you can hire experts in Shopify’s marketplace to do all your content creation for you. This is going to free up some of your time whether you choose to spend it relaxing in a hammock or if you choose to spend it going on an adventure looking for Costa Rican frogs!
Local Work
Depending on where you are, working abroad could be the most difficult to break into. It all depends on the country where you’re currently traveling to or working in. Some countries have super tight working and immigration laws while others tend to be a bit more relaxed about it.
There are plenty of countries that experience a swarm of tourists during the year but don’t have enough local manpower to keep up with the tourist boom. Many of these jobs are adventurous and require physical labor, like being a tour guide, working at a surf shop, or giving people ATV travel guides. It all depends on the region you’re in.
Another popular option is working in a hostel or hotel. If you’re still an English speaker (refer to the first section for guidelines), hostel owners and managers will often offer you work. The positive is your work comes with a free, or cheap, place to stay. The downside is you won’t be getting paid very well.
