HOW TO BE A DIGITAL NOMAD - THE FRAMEWORK

There is no 'one way' to becoming a digital nomad but there are some things you're going to need to become one. In this video, I provide the framework for finding your own path to location independence.

Courtesy: Chris the Freelancer

Hey guys, Chris here at Puns Pace in Chiang Mai Thailand. I'm here doing this video at Puns Pace because I thought this would be the most appropriate place to do it, as this co-working space is one of the biggest hotspots for digital nomads in the world basically.

So, today I'm going to be answering a question from a viewer that I got on Twitter actually. So this viewer asked, “I'm definitely inspired by your YouTube channel. I'm currently exploring all my options on becoming a digital nomad. Where to start?”, and look that's a huge question and there's literally so many paths you can take to sort of living this lifestyle.

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But I thought how to answer this question is I'm going to provide a framework for you guys a bit of a roadmap and but you can choose your path within it. So, I'm going to lay out all the options and you guys can choose, you know, what makes sense for you.

So, throughout this video I'm going to be following the four steps that I talked about in my free guide to location independence that you can find here. And basically the guide gives you four steps to achieving location independence but I guess this video we're going to go a little bit deeper into the money-making stuff and take a more visual approach to showing you guys the process.

So, first things first we need to define the term digital nomad and sort of break it up. So, in digital nomad to me it's got two components you've got the digital side and you've got the nomadic side right?

Digital means you work in some sort of digital field, you're making money online basically. And the nomadic side means that you're living somewhere outside your country.

You're not in a fixed location for a long period of time. You might be traveling, you might be living six months in a different country and then six months in another country. But you're living a somewhat nomadic life. So that actually goes quite well into the four steps.

So, if we take a look at the diagram I've broken it up in the two sections the digital part make money on and the second part is the nomadic part.

So, the first step to being a digital nomad is you're going to need some sort of skills. You might have these skills already but you might be starting from scratch. Either way is fine but there's kind of two ways you can go about this.

You can find free resources or maybe pay a little bit of money online to somebody to teach you this through the internet basically. And then the second option is to get a formal education. So, let's go through the options for finding a course online.

What I did was I went to lynda.com which is this online training library. It's got everything from web design to photography to, you know, app Development, business stuff as well. I highly recommend it. It's what I use to learn how to code basically and if you want to know more about learning how to code definitely check out my previous video on how I learnt to code.

There's also Udemy unlike Lynda where the authors are hired by Lynda to do the the courses and build the library. Udemy is a course marketplace.

So, if you or I want to do a course or anyone we can make one we put it on Udemy and Udemy and the course creators for the profits basically so what that means for you guys is that you have to make sure you're choosing a good udemy course and you can generally find this by looking at the star rating in the comments and the number of enrolled users to see if it's a legit course or it's just some guy who thinks he knows a thing or two and throws it online.

Linda and Udemy are probably two of the biggest options but there are hundreds of other places. I know specifically with the code learning code stuff there's freecodecamp.com, codeacademy.com

Those are both free but if you want to pay a little bit extra you can get really cheap memberships to sites like codeschool.com and teamtreehouse.com for the other stuff just do a search on google. Try and find courses on, you know, if you want to do copywriting, if you want to do digital marketing, you can find a course for pretty much anything digital online.

The second stream of options is is to get a formal and I do not recommend this at all. Basically, universities weren't set up to sort of facilitate people to take this lifestyle to live this lifestyle, to work online, travel be remote. So, if that's your plan you're probably not going to find the best education and the other thing about it is it's going to take lots of time and lots of money and by the end of a three-year degree half the course material is probably going to be out of date anyway because this digital world is moving so fast.

Yeah, I highly recommend going with a course online and kind of teaching yourself.

Alright step two you've built some skills but now you've got to get paid for those skills so how do you do it? For me there's three options.

Number one, you've got a remote job and the easiest most reliable way of, you know, getting a remote job to me is getting hired with a local third firm with the option of going remote and this is what my friend Dillon did. I've got an interview with Dillon here on the blog and also I'm getting together with Dillon to do a Q & A answering you guys questions on web development. So if you have any questions about that definitely comment below send me a message.

But basically what he did was he found a firm in his hometown of Melbourne Australia. This firm had remote teams like they hide remotely. So he worked for them for like three months and then went remote and he still does that to this day. The other option of getting a remote job is applying just for any remote job so anywhere in the world. The upside to that is that there's more jobs available obviously because it's anywhere in the world. But the downside is you're going to be competing against everyone in the world and when you start competing on price that's when you're gonna, you know, really earn less, especially if you're from, you know, Western country like Australia, UK, Canada, America, New Zealand.

If you're competing with offshore workers that are, you know, from the Philippines or India that work generally under ten US dollars an hour then, you know, you might not be getting enough money to even make it worth your while. That being said if you were an expert in your field you can probably get a remote pretty easy because there's plenty of remote jobs out there for highly experienced people because, you know, talent is hard to come by in the digital world. So they're willing to hire remotely if you're highly talented.

The third option with the remote job stuff is to negotiate with your current employer a remote work agreement and that's going to be for most people the hardest thing because some employers aren't going to budge especially like the culture in Australia is definitely not one where people are used to the idea of hiring remotely.

So, you're probably not going to be likely to achieve that but if you can negotiate with your work or or you do something, you know, that can go remote and you think your boss might be open to it I recommend checking out the 4-hour work week this book is the Bible when it comes to being a digital nomad.

You need to read it and read the section on how you can negotiate a remote work position with your current employer.

The second stream of options is freelancing. And a lot of people take this option. And one of the biggest reasons is that there's a new way of doing it there's these online freelancing platforms like upwork.com, peopleperhour.com guru.com and basically you can either, you know, bid for jobs send in your price, send in your proposal and apply for jobs that somebody else has posted.

Or perhaps you can get contacted directly based of your profile from the employers themselves and invited to apply basically.

The other method of freelancing is more suited to people that have built up, you know, skills experience reputation and that's, you know, running your own sort of freelance business and the reason why you'd want to have a network, an existing network and reputation, is because this is kind of a model where people find you and want to hire you specifically.

That's great if you can do that but as somebody starting out that's going to be pretty hard unless you're really awesome at what you do because you need to build this brand where people are going to hire you specifically, not just hire on the best price available, or just anyone that can do the job.

The third stream of course is starting an online business and this is the most risky choice you can make but also the highest reward. So if you want to achieve location independence in the most reliable fashion possible you probably want to go for a remote job but if you want to really be successful and you don't mind like maybe failing a few times and you're okay with say maybe failing a bunch of times before you actually achieve that success and you only want to travel with good income then online business might be for you it probably is for you actually.

So, I've got a few examples here. One that's really popular around here at pun space is dropshipping. And dropshipping is the idea that you sell a physical product but instead of managing the inventory yourself, you get the supplier to ship it direct to the customer. So as you can imagine you just focus on the client facing the customer facing aspect of the business and you just need your laptop and then you forward the order the supplier supplier takes care of it.

You don't have to handle anything physically which is perfect for this kind of lifestyle which is why a lot of people do it. Another idea is selling info products. Info products like ebooks, courses, anything where you have these knowledge or skills or could teach people something or have something valuable to share.

You can put that into a product and people can download it and you don't need to ship any physical products or anything like that. With the online business stuff there's obviously countless other ways those are just two ideas but if you want to know more about the online business stuff I can definitely get some like experts on the channel and we can, you know, answer specific questions with that. So, let me know.

The alternative method which we won't be discussing is investing if you're planning on investing you probably should listen to investment advice not me because I'm not an investor but if you've got some income coming in from investments definitely listen to this second part which is being nomadic. So I've got it down two steps three and four.

Step three is eliminate the barriers to freedom. So I've got four most common ones here you've got financial commitments, relationship commitments over reliance on physical possessions and fear.

So, the financial commitments it might be you have mortgage or you have a lease on a property or you've got some kind of contract where you need to pay off, you need to pay the bills basically.

The best way to do it is to fulfill those obligations first and then go nomadic basically. The second one is relationship commitments and this is one that I haven't really struggled with. I had a serious girlfriend when I left and still do and the great thing about my girlfriend is that she wanted to live this lifestyle as well. So it I didn't have to make the choice between my girlfriend and this lifestyle.

I'm lucky in that regard I found since I've been here but you might have to make a choice between your relationship and going, you know, in taking this lifestyle. I'm not here to tell you what to do but if you want something bad enough you will take the necessary steps to achieve it.

So, you might have to make a choice between a relationship and this lifestyle. But if you can have both definitely have both. The one over reliance on physical possessions. Now I've had a few people that have been like oh yes the digital nomad lifestyle definitely want to live that yet, you know, their apartment is full of stuff that they rely on daily, they can't live without their, you know, 44 inch flat screen TV or however big it is. And they, you know, need like a special room with like recording equipment. Maybe they're a musician let's say there are musician or they do some kind of DIY stuff and, you know, they need their garage to work on stuff, you know, nearly everyday.

Well that's going to be hard to maintain while you're traveling or even if you move somewhere else, you know, like having that specific room making sure you have all those creature comforts is going to be a lot harder but the good thing about this lifestyle is it's good opportunity to practice something called minimalism which is focusing on only having things that you actually need not the things that you think you need but you don't really need.

So, it's actually a good exercise in minimalism to go travelling. Take what you need and as over time you'll see that you actually don't need a lot of those things that you think you need.

Finally fear this is a big one and it's such a simple thing but it holds so many people back. And especially like if you're older person and, you know, society doesn't really support you, you know, packing up and leaving or being nomadic, you know, people might, you know, turn up their nose at you or something you just got to get past that really. I mean if it's something that you want, you know, it shouldn't matter what other people think like if you want to live this lifestyle, go after it.

You know if feel the fear and do it anyway usually at the end of on the other side of fear is, you know, achievement and growth.

Alright so step four and this is the one I think is the most fun is choosing your locations. And here's only really two criteria that your locations need to be and the rest is up to personal preference.

So, number one you want your location to be affordable. So there's the reason why so many people are in Chiangmai is for anyone on a Western salary or, you know, even half of Western salary Chiangmai is very affordable. We're choosing a location becomes a problem is if you say I want to live in London and, you know, London is like one of the most expensive cities in the world and you've got to make sure that you have enough income to sustain yourself living there.

So, it might actually be a painful process for your choosing your locations if you feel like you have to compromise on the places you want to go. Maybe you want to go everywhere in Western Europe but you can only really afford Southeast Asia.

I actually like Southeast Asia and want to be here so for me it's not just cost of living which is great it's just a bonus but for you, you might have to live in it a less expensive place for the time being and just compromise on that sort of start at the bottom in terms of cost of living and work your way up.

The other thing that you're definitely going to need is a stable internet connection. You're going to need to, you know, do meetings and calls. You're going to need this also to like depending on what kind of job you're doing. If you're a web developer you're going to need to push code to the cloud and download it. If you're a video editor like me you're going to need some, you know, be able to upload and download video.

And for the other options it's up to you basically. You can choose to live in an exotic location: a big city, a small city, it's really up to you. And I know a few people that always want to work on an island or from the beach. They can do that I know some people who like the big city vibe, they can do that as well. So as long as it's affordable and it's got stable internet, you can basically, you know, choose anywhere.

So, reviewing the steps. Step one you've got to build the skills in order to, you know, charge people for your services or build a business. Step two you're going to get paid for those skills or you're going to get paid for a service or products you're providing. Step three you're going to eliminate those barriers to freedom. And step four you've got to choose your locations. And I guess step five is just to do it just go! Like that's I didn't mention that one but you just got at some point.

Book your flight and and go! And that's a good point to remember is to if you, you know, struggling to make the jump, just booked your flight in advance because once you've booked that flight, you know, you've got a date, you've got a goal and once you get to that date unless you just give up the flight you're going. So that's a good way to just hold yourself accountable.

Alright, guys thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video and if you're interested in the topics I discussed but need some extra guidance I'm going to be opening up my coaching program you can find that at christhefreelancer.com/coaching

And basically what I'll do is I'll provide tailored advice on all the aspects I just talked about. I can also talk about anything that we discuss on this channel like co-working, you know, destination advice anything like that if you feel that you need some guidance you definitely go to that page and send me a message.

The other thing I'm going to be doing is launching a podcast. I've met so many people on my journey that I just wanna, you know, have a conversation with and share it with you guys.

So that's going to be coming out in the next few weeks hopefully. So keep an eye out on that. That'll be a christhefreelancer.com/podcast and as always I appreciate your feedback and your comments and your questions.

So please send me questions. Tell me if you like this video or not. Click like, subscribe to the channel for more videos and, you know, if you ask a good question I maybe make a whole video dedicated to it like I did with this one or I might add it to another Q& & A type video.

And yeah, thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next video.