Getting Started as a Digital Nomad
One of the greatest obstacles for most ‘would be’ Digital Nomads comes down to one simple consideration: money. While the idea of calculating your runway in an unknown location and for an undetermined duration of time may initially seem overwhelming, breaking your budget down into its smaller components will show you a navigable path to making your first steps.
Financing your long term travel can be broken into three phases:
1. Raising the base amount of money necessary to get started on this new journey. This is the ‘Startup Capital’ that you’ll need, simply to get the ball rolling and thing that should be considered while still stateside. To name a few:
Storage or Sale coordination of belongings back home
2. Debt or Obligation Payment Plans (Think; mortgage, student loans, etc)
3. Initial flight to first destination
4. Visas & Vaccines (if necessary)
5. First Month of accommodations
6. Emergency/reserve financing
2. Building a system that allows you to maximize profit by reducing expenses, generating consistent income, or creating passive income to help you maintain your travels. Once you have adequately invested in building out foundational infrastructure to meet your base needs, you want to begin thinking about ways to OPTIMIZE your Digital Nomad P & L management. Just because you’re earning in Dollars and spending in Pesos, mindless addition of new and unnecessary expenses with the justification of ‘Well, it’s cheaper than home!” is a dangerous and slippery slope. Remember: A system is an entity that maintains its existence and functions as a whole through the interactions of its parts. Once you determine the system that works for you in your Nomad life, honor it! As you grow and acquire new data or priorities, you can always adapt; just remember that a change in one part of your system will likely impact other interconnected pieces.
A Systems Thinking approach to your finances as a Nomad will help you see beyond the pieces and find the deeper patterns and connections.
3. Growing your existing systems to eventually get to the point where you’re not simply ‘surviving’ but thriving and accumulating wealth while you travel. This is phase where things really start to get fun. The ‘liabilities’ of not having tethers X,Y, and Z back home are now the very assets that allow you to buy a plot of Colombian farm land and starting your own Fazenda or having the locational freedom to follow that new job opportunity to Denmark after a happenchance conversation with a stranger in an airport lounge. You may be thinking ‘what do these things have to do with a third phase of financing?’ Well this is phase where you get to turn your different lifestyle choice into your competitive advantage. For the Long-Term Nomad, this is the beginning of the end goal
How Can I Afford Life as a Digital Nomad?
Now, if you’ve been doing research into the various opportunities that exist for making money as a Digital Nomad, you’ve probably seen hundreds of suggestions, from opening a Shopify store to working as a virtual assistant.
But I’m here to offer what I believe to be the most important and fundamental step before you even began to create your list for potential sources of income while traveling and it begins with one simple question: What are you passionate about?
What are Passions?
Passions, simply defined, are what you love to do.
There’s a common misconception that our work and our passions must exist independent of each other; that we shouldn’t expect to enjoy what we do, but instead, think of it a means to an end, aka, the way finance the things in life that actually bring us joy.
Why Passions are Important as a Nomad?
As a nomad, I’ve found that this level of cognitive dissonance is not sustainable and you WILL eventually burn out. Travel accelerates personal growth in a way unlike any experience I’ve discovered to date and beginning to question your life path is inevitable. A great book that dives deeper into what you can expect to mentally happen in the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.
The trick? Start with getting clear on your values and your passions. The combination of these two things will help you in taking the first step for curating a list of income earning opportunities that are customized to what matters to you as a person, and that line up with what you love to do.
If you missed the earlier piece on How to Determine and Understand your Values, check that blog post out first then pop back over here!
When it comes to creating a sustainable source of income, working in a space that you’re passionate about allows you be INTRINSICALLY motivated* to continually work on cultivating, maintaining, and growing your business. When you wake up each morning and the first thought in your mind is “Fuck Yeah, Let’s get Back to it!”, you’re onto something.
7 Questions to Help Identify Your Passions
What type of projects or tasks do you never get tired of?
What are you most passionately curious about, and fascinated by? What do you love to study and research, write about, blog about, investigate and try to understand?
If you find out you have an entire day to yourself with absolutely no obligations or commitments, what's the first thing you would do?
If you were granted one superpower, what would it be?
Name some meta-motivation some value or vision that much of your work and your passions are geared toward achieving (or that you’d like them to be geared toward achieving). Providing clean water to communities, helping empower people, inspiring lifelong learning, strengthening communities, etc
What did you love doing as a child?
If money were NOT a factor, what would you be doing everyday?
If you could use a bit more help unlocking your passions, check out the Holland RIASEC Model
Once you find clarity around your passions, you’re on your way and one step closer to identifying the relevant areas of focus when investigating potential secondary income producing activities while traveling.
Now remember, figuring out your path to Digital Nomad life isn’t something that you should expect to master in a day. Be patient, be kind, and show yourself Grace! Taking these steps to invest in a strong foundation before you take that leap and honoring your systems once established will save you so much time, energy, and stress in the long run; but don’t worry. You got this!
As always; don’t forget to Love the Process.
In Growth & Freedom,
Taylor
*Intrinsic Motivation: behavior that is driven by internal rewards. In other words, the motivation to engage in a behavior arises from within the individual because it is naturally satisfying to you.