5 Ways to Start Sooner on your Digital Nomad Life
How Do You Survive While Building Your Remote Job Online?
Are you restless? Want to head out now? But your budget feels tight.
Many feel they need a decent amount of funds before they leave, find a digital job, and start being a digital nomad. This is entirely a personal choice. For myself, impatience always over-rides. I invariably decide that my 2-year savings plan has had enough of a headstart after 6 months. I buy my ticket and head out, then find a job. Only now am I diversifying into digital jobs so that I am no longer location based.
I work out my emergency fund, my baseline, similar to my original travel budget. How much do I need to get home again? Not just airfare, but funds until I can get myself monied again. In my case, I included a cheap second hand car since I know I can get a job meter reading again, and that is essential to being able to do the job. Basically the same sums you need to do before leaving. You need enough to survive to that money coming into your pocket.
My first steps doing this were decades before digital was a part of our lives. Nomading is not a new concept. I came across the trail in Europe where the English especially would follow the seasonal farming demands – oranges in Spain, apples in France, olives in Italy, greenhouses in Greece… being a golf caddy in Japan, jackeroo in Australia, scuba dive instructor in the Philippines or Egypt…
I had an awesome time doing winter work in greenhouses in Crete in early 1985.
Location-based options can be a good way of making your funds go further while you get your business plan building to self-sustainable levels. They are also a way to get a much greater insight into a particular country and its culture.
For me as a slomad, and having started long before digital, I love these ways and will use them just as happily as the more mobile options of remote jobs.
They stretch your budget further. They let you head out sooner. They even allow you time to build up your new online business.
So how might this be done today?
Ways to stretch the digital nomad budget might include:
· Working holiday visas
· Workaways
· Pet and Housesitting
· Yacht and ship crews with and without experience
· Teaching, nursing, cheffing, waitering and other short term casual labour jobs.
What your options are will depend on your passport, your visa, age, your languages, and some other factors.
1 Working Holiday Visas
If you are young enough, this is a great way of getting extended stay, and being legally allowed to work in any field you can find a job. Most countries will fix the age limit to 30 or 35, and a stay of 12 months. But there are often ways of extending these visas. And this is a great way especially of getting to countries which have shorter visa option times.
Working holiday visas are usually reciprocal arrangements with certain countries. Applications and the details will be available through the respective embassy or consulate of the country you’re interested in.
This is the way I got into teaching, on a working holiday visa to Japan in 1988, right at the beginning of the fad and before it was even a big thing in China. I spent 18 months on a working holiday visa, and then got a work visa through my job.
2 Workaway
But don’t fret if you’ve already passed by the working holiday visa age option. Workaway has no age limit. This is an eco-volunteer program. Most will be for a maximum of 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. For this you should get a bed and all food. That takes care of all of your biggest daily costs. Many hosts actively welcome digital nomads and remote workers.
This leaves plenty of time to spend developing your online business and/or exploring the nearby areas. I used it to work on the edits of my novels.
Since you are usually staying with a family, you are instantly connected with some locals which may help the loneliness some DNs feel. If instead you are working at a hostel – you are still surrounded by people.
There are options all over the world, with timeframes ranging from a week to several months. Most are house and child care, garden and farm help, DIY and hostel, hotel or Airbnb work (one was for a tree house hotel).
There is no end of variety. I have seen child care for the early mornings for a balloon pilot in France, donkey trails in Greece, animal rescues for cats, dogs and donkeys, teaching and language exchange, building off-grid projects, organizing data and social media…
I spent a month at a D-Day beach in Normandy, France, as a help for a lady with a sick elderly mother.
I spent 2 months in southern Italy in a walled monastery mountaintop village helping a pregnant lady with her English school.
I spent a month (and would have stayed much longer if my visa had permitted) getting my Crazy Cat Lady Licence at a cat rescue on a small Greek island with 65 cats and a 5 minute walk to the beach.
I spent 2 weeks in Montenegro writing pirate stories for a menu for a hotel that used to be a pirate den.
There are a huge variety of options. Many hosts welcome digital nomads, and older people, as well as couples. Check the feedback, and be respectful. Remember that you are a visitor within someone’s family, except in a few situations like hostel work.
Volunteering options include Asia, Africa, and South America, as well as Australia and the US. It is worldwide. Most hosts will have short term options of just a week or 2, and may not be willing to take people long term. Others prefer longer term stays for greater stability.
The program is a mere $50 a year to have complete access. Even without that, you can still browse and save up to 10 hosts. But you won’t be able to contact them until you become a member. I browsed while planning, then joined when I was ready to leave. When my year was up, they were offering 15 months membership special deal on renewal.
There is a similar program called WOOOF which you could also look into.
3 House and Pet Sitting:
If you can get into this caper, you are set. You will usually get a very nice place to stay as well as the furry company. Time frames are often just a week or two while the owner is away for a holiday, but some are extended stays of 3 to 6 months while the owners are on sabbatical, or people who are away regularly and keen to have the same person return.
With house-sits, besides care of the house, the pets, and maybe garden, your time is free to spend developing your online business or exploring the area.
You need some references, but most of your time is free for you to focus on your remote job project. I had a good friend who moved from one to the next house-pet sitting option, generally aiming for the longer-term ones. I met her when she had a house on the beach on the small Greek island where I was doing the Workaway at the cat rescue. Her next was a hilltop house overlooking a ghost town and a magnificent beach in southern Turkey.
The recommended platform recommended every single time is housesitters.com. They also have a facebook page, independent of the site, but a useful forum for information and personal experiences.
4 Yacht Crew and Cruise Ships
This is an avenue I have yet to try. Although I know nothing about boats, I am keen to have a go. Experience is not always required. One I met sometimes just needed an extra body on the boat for legal requirements to cross from the UK to the US.
The jobs are typically summer time, and can go all over Europe. The biggest issue may be that internet coverage may not be a constant. Personal space on a yacht is also at a minimum and can be very cramped, so make sure to take this into account.
There are a number of sites advertising jobs. I first came across it when I met a chef who worked on yachts. This varied from providing lunch for day long scuba tours, to cooking for the rich and famous on a larger yacht.
Also, don’t overlook that cruise ships are an ever-increasing business, and they have a huge range of jobs, all needing people. One of the niches here is if you have entertainment skills such as music, magic or shows. But they still need someone to make beds and clean rooms, sort garbage, chop vegetables in the kitchen… you name it. They are complete microcosms.
6 Location-Based Jobs
This may seem to fly in the face of the current buzz concept of “digital nomading”, but in truth, these are the roots, and the way nomading was done, before the digital started giving us so many more options. Traveling while working is not a new concept. It wasn’t even new when I first started in 1985.
Remember, digital nomading is a lifestyle. It is something we do because we want to travel, the urge to travel is stronger than the urge for stability. And if we can work, we can travel for longer. That’s all it is. It’s about having no home base, about living out of a bag or backpack, and being ready to move at any time.
So, while your aim may be to be completely mobile, how quickly you move on is a personal choice. I call myself a slomad. I go somewhere, and I stay til I’m ready to leave. This can be anywhere from a few days to a few years.
Some DNs seem to stay only a couple of days in each place and then move. Since they are working full time, I don’t personally understand this, since they can have no time to explore or get to know a place. This may also explain the many comments I see about feeling burnt out, about loneliness and not being able to find a relationship.
To me, travel is about experiencing different ways to further understand people and the world.
The way I see it, the longer I stay, the more I get to know a place. And I get to know it on deeper levels, and to see through the layers. Throwing in languages, friends, intimate relationships, cultural experiences, and getting involved gives a much better understanding of the rhythms and what-fors of a place and how it works.
Most of us come from rich western countries. But most of the world functions in very different ways to those we take as fundamental.
So, if you are like me and just want to be in another culture and the timeframe is loose, there are a number of location-based jobs you can do to fund yourself. In Crete, work at the greenhouses was picked up by the day. As a teacher, contracts can be 1 or 2 years. Casual jobs usually have no timeframe – you can make them what you want.
So, what sort of location-based jobs are options?
· Teaching (ESL is the easiest, but international schools have FT jobs for all subjects)
· Nursing – limited only by languages, but one of those universal options
· Waitering and cheffing – jobs which seem to translate across countries
· Casual labour on farms, in kitchens, as nannies, gardeners…
· Live dealers who move around to different casinos with big events
· Movie extra work, making up crowd scenes etc
· Events organisers
This is by no means a finite list of options.
Technically, all of these require work visas. Generally, a full-time contract will come with an appropriate visa. Having a visa which is appropriate is something you need to check by country.
As a nurse, there are not only the jobs in the health industry, but there are also volunteer jobs which may include accommodation. For example, there are the Mercy ships, and other organisations.
There are also refugee camps which need doctors, nurses and teachers. Sometimes they will give free or very cheap accommodation.
I have done most of these things over time. Where I haven’t, I have talked to people who have. My nomading job over the years has been teaching. If you are interested in teaching overseas, I have written information specific to teaching overseas in another blog. This includes the hacks and tricks for all levels of teaching, from the professionally qualified, all the way down to those who have no qualifications – exactly as I started out.
Even without using one of the above options, you can still make a huge difference by your chosen locations. I have another article coming on ways you can make your budget stretch further aside from the above, and hacks on how to minimise your living costs.
The main thing to take from this, is that there are an endless number of options. Becoming a DN does not mean getting an entry level job and rising through the ranks. It isn’t a company. It’s a lifestyle. And just like normal sedentary life at home, there are no end of variations on the possibilities.