In America, traveling full time is something that seems to be by default left for retirement after a career – when life savings, pension and social security can pay for the base expenses. Full Time RVing is a lifestyle that generations ahead of ours have been exploring for sometime, and have thankfully paved many of the practical paths for us.
However, waiting for retirement may not be the solution for all of us. Our callings for wanderlust come stronger and we begin to wonder if we can make travel a lifestyle earlier in life. But not many of us are in a position to quit the workforce and sustain a lifestyle we want financially. And besides, we were also brought up believing that social security shouldn’t be depended on for funding our retirements. I’ve never really even thought about traditional retirement being a part of my plan, as long as I had rewarding work nicely balanced in with my life.
There are many careers that are indeed not apt to a full time traveling lifestyle, and for those on such a career path they’re passionate about that is reason enough to put off travel until that path has been fully explored. Instead, finding ways to integrate in purposeful travel into your vacation time and/or ramping up business related travel may just have to do until such time full time travel becomes more important and feasible in your life.
But if you’re not on a stationary career track that inspires you, and travel is calling you louder, perhaps it’s time to explore job opportunities that would support such a merging. Or, it’s time to consider ways to make your current career path more mobile. And sometimes, you might be able to do it by just slightly adjusting the way you look at your career. Can you take your current skills and background and re-tool them in an other way? Such as publishing books and resources to help others, or moving into location independent consulting?
There are many career paths that are traditionally travel friendly – such as artists, musicians, working at festivals, workamping (exchanging hosting duties at campground for accommodations and/or pay), migrant workers, contract nursing, journalism, photographers, traveling sales/repair, crafters, picking up temp jobs, online professors, conference speaking/training, authors, designers, etc.
And with the advent of wireless broadband, there’s a whole new class of working available, the Digital Nomad and Location Independent Professional – or as we prefer, technomadism. These are folks working in high tech fields who can now take the office with them untethered by ethernet cables and phone lines. We’ve had friends who are IT consultants who took their lives completely mobile and didn’t tell their clients for months of the change. Afterall, who really knows (or cares) where the phone physically rings or where code is written? Programmers, developers, IT managers, bloggers, podcasters, graphic designers, online professors and more can now take their work on the road with them.
AlmostFearless has put together an awesome Digital Nomads Job Board, that aggregates job postings for location independent jobs from sites like Monster, Craigslist, HotJobs, Dice and more. This should come in quite handy for anyone looking for work while being nomadic.
This is the route that Chris and I have taken. For years I was location independent with running my web application development company, VCR. I worked from my home on the beach in Florida since 1994, and slowly integrated in extended personal travel that wasn’t vacation to test the waters to see if it was sustainable for me to work and explore at the same time. When I met Chris in 2006 on one of those trips, it all came together for me totally remove myself from a fixed home and office, and I started my process to shedding my life to become fully nomadic. I keep in touch with my main developer (ahem, my father) and clients via electronic means, and am able to integrate in visits to my clients as we travel.
Chris and I also do various technology and strategy consulting as we travel with our company Two Steps Beyond, mainly on projects that inspire us and are fun! One such project is what kept us in San Francisco for a couple of months – helping launch the iPhone travel app HearPlanet at Macworld. Now that the product is nicely launched, we’ll continue managing some of the online PR and produce audio travel content for HearPlanet as we travel.
And we’re not all that unique – there are many others doing similar things. Check out our growing List of Nomads for further inspiration.
One of the other advantages of integrating your career into full time traveling is that you may not need to work as much or as hard. If you aren’t paying rent or a mortgage, life can be surprisingly cheap. But… that is an excuse to mitigate for a future post.
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My boyfriend and I are seasonal nomads – we travel place to place only settling down to work a season as cooks. Everyone eats, so cooks are needed everywhere. A season is at tops about six months, and then we’re gone again. This way, we’ve seen some beautiful places. Visiting Yellowstone for a week and living there for six months are totally different. Working and traveling are totally doable, you just have to get creative and find the way that works for you.
I noticed the Digital Nomads Job Board is no longer around … do you have any other suggestions for where to look up jobs that enable nomadicity?
Some of the standard outsourcing websites are good places to start:
http://www.elance.com
http://www.odesk.com
http://www.vworker.com
Best wishes!
I am so jealous. My husband and I are ten year veterans of the Burn. Not this year though. Miss all my burner friends.
Wow just reading your website I am so inspired! My husband and I and our 2 children are sooo ready for a change! We already choose to homeschool and go against the crowd, however we want more or less you could say….we want to see and experience things WITH our children, not wait till their grown. The problem for us is that we don’t do much that can be mobile, we can both sing and hubby plays the guitar but as far as making an income not sure what to do. I keep seeing things about working from home etc but its so hard to to find things that are legit and actually pay well. Any advice or thoughts on avenues to try that may pan out for web work (tech work). I have done webdesign but that was 7 years ago and everything is so different. What would be need to be to get paid to give our reviews on things i.e. family friendliness reviews for places even giving reviews or tips on travels to state parks…I don’t know we are desperatly trying to THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX!!! Anyway Best of Luck to guys!
There are so many ways to make a living on the road… put a lot of thought into it and explore your passions. You’ll find something creative that feels right for you. Best wishes!
My partner and I just bought an RV with the intent of going mobile. We both work techy jobs from home and could conceivably do it from anywhere– the real limiting factor is getting consistent, affordable Internet. We researched a few options and came up with things that were either thousands of dollars a month, or very slow and unreliable, or both. What options have you guys come across that are worth checking out?
Congrats on your RV purchase!
For our internet, we use a wireless aircard from Sprint. It only costs us $60/month, and has been pretty darn reliable for the past 3 years. There have been few places we’ve been that didn’t have cell signal. The awesome thing about a mobile lifestyle is that you can just keep on moving until you find signal, or decide to take a digital fast for a bit and enjoy the place you’re in. Many RV parks also offer wifi, and you always have the option of finding wifi hot spots in cafes, hotels, etc.
For those who need ‘everywhere access’ – satellite is an option. But it has its own limitations, costs and annoyances. For us, cellular data has been a great balance between cost, mobility and reliability.
Keep an eye on http://www.evdoforums.com for the latest on the various providers, caps and equipment.
Thanks so much for your quick answer! Aircards look like the right answer, as long as you don’t get too remote. Can you both use the same aircard at the same time, or do you need your own?
We regularly share ours.. either thru our CradlePoint router, or Mac OSX has built in sharing too. You can browse our tech arsenal on our ‘Our Tech‘ page.
Someone asked me the dreaded “so… what do you do?” question a few years back. While I was explaining the combination of no office, no work schedule, and that my business was all conducted online she interrupted. At this point, I was expecting the common “oh… I could never do that.” To my surprise, she said, “Oh! So you’re funemployed!”
Some people just get it.
Congratulations on leaving the “Rat Race” Behind. My husband Dave and I have been traveling extensively over the years, but it is at the end of this year that we are hoping to finally live the way that you are. Been working on our website,submitting articles and photographs to build a portfolio and are hoping to finally live the life as a Digital Nomad as well. Thanks for sharing.
Wishing you guys a fantastic journey ahead, it seems you’re already living a fantastic and exciting life .. we look forward to sharing our experiences with each other.
Me and a friend are students and are soon going to begin our own tech nomad adventure. We’ll try to keep you posted on how it goes. We’re gonna go on probably a season long trip as a test of how we enjoy the lifestyle. We’re gonna be living in a van and trying to keep expenses low. Your guide is appreciated and I would love to read more tips if you write them.
I love the term “technomadism!” Wonderful to see how you are putting together a full-time RV lifestyle. My late husband and I were 47 when we sold everything and began full-time RVing. We worked mostly at national parks as seasonal workers for six months of the year, then visited relatives or boondocked in the desert in the winter. You are right- there are all sorts of ways to earn money on the road. Now I write and do Web work.
It was interesting to see the reaction of friends and relatives when we announced our plans. Our son-in-law said, “What if you are making a mistake?” We saw it as a decision. And, we could always make another decision.
Jaimie Hall Bruzenak
author of Support Your RV Lifestyle! An Insider’s Guide to Working on the Road
My husband came home out of the blue one day and announced he wanted to “chuck it all” to travel the country in a converted bus. I demanded to know, “Why can’t you be like a normal husband in a midlife crisis and have an affair or buy a Corvette?” We’re both psychiatrists, but he’s obviously a better shrink, as we did do the trip.
I had a lot of excuses, but upon our return home, I was the one who suggested that instead of selling the bus, we fix up our house and sell it instead so we can full time, and that’s what we’re in the process of doing.
Fantastic! We did a 7 month ‘trial’ out on the road. And while I had my house up for sale the entire time, I wasn’t putting much effort into getting it sold. But once I made the decision to really full time, it sold instantly! I wish you all the best in getting your home sold so you can get out there! Hopefully our paths will cross. Do you guys carry your practices with you and work as you go?
And don’t forget academic mercenary/cyber prof in your list! I hear this too, and I think you bring up a very important issue: people really are afraid to try new things and to live in new ways. We are so conditioned to consider “success” in very traditional terms (career, children, homeownership,) and we are programmed like machines working 40+ hours a week to achieve these “goals”, even if they don’t make many people very happy. Even the most alternative people I know have struggled with rejecting these terms, even when they are successful. Happiness and adventure are frequently not topping the list of criteria for success and they should be. More people need to write their own stories.
People frequently don’t think it’s practical to live as they want to. It’s probably far more in reach than they think, right? 🙂 And the website looks really great.
I absolutely do need to add cyber professors to the list! How could I forget?
Have you guys thought about writing a guidebook to nomadic living? There’s such a wealth of useful information on this site that I, for one, would love to see more of; it seems like it would be excellent to put it all in a book.
-Mark
It’s a thought that has crossed our mind.. for now, we’re having too much fun actually being nomadic to do much more than keep the website up. We’ll see how it goes.