How To Work For Yourself as an Expat

It’s the best of times and it’s the worst of times.

It’s the best of times because you can live a life that was impossible even 20 years ago. With enough luck, hard work and intelligence, you can live better than any king.

It’s the worst of times however because there is no path anymore. Boomers had it easy in this regard. Work a boring job, pay your bills, get married, buy a house and raise a family and maybe travel 2 weeks a year to the beach.

Then retire when you’re 60. That path does not exist for anyone and you’re a fool to seek it or to buy into it.

Become a digital nomad

If you’re young and penniless you have by far the best chance of anyone else to become a happy and successful digital nomad. As a young person you have no obligations to anyone or anything other than yourself and becoming the competent individual society as a whole wants and needs you to be.

It only gets more difficult as you get older and more established, so it is best to get started before you get too deep into a career path, a relationship and life purchases that tie you down (like a 1 year lease on an apartment or an expensive car you bought 2 years ago).

What is a Digital Nomad?

A digital nomad from my perspective is someone who works online and lives abroad as a self employed person. Typically the goal is to arbitrage your currency by living in place with a lower cost of living to increase your buying power and quality of life so you can travel more and have great experiences.

Getting a job in a foreign country does not count as being a digital nomad in my opinion.

Sure you can work at a bar or hostel, teach English, work on a yacht or become a travel guide but you’re not really a digital nomad. You can’t just pickup and decide that you’re going to go live somewhere new for example.

Which is the nomad part of “digital nomad.”

Active Income and Passive Income

To become a digital nomad goal #1 is to figure out a way to trade your hours for dollars that does not involve you having to be in any particular place at any particular time.

I know everyone likes to talk about passive income, but passive income comes after learning a skill and how to provide solutions to peoples problems first.

Passive income is really business income and it’s what you do after you are serving a market and have figured out what problem to solve. The real work comes with first with developing a skill.

As I said, you have to sacrifice for what you want so that mean you’re going to have to give things up. The main things being video games, weekends out with friends drinking beer and social media.

Picking a Skill to learn

You need a skill. No way around it. Yea yea, I know there are stories of this person starting a blog who then began traveling or that person doing Amazon FBA. It can work, don’t get me wrong. But for most people your best bet would be to develop a skill where you can work remotely.

What I do is SEO audits, user testing, creating websites and I teach English online too. This forms my “reliable” income. The income I can count on each and every month. My passive income is higher and I can live off it now, but it’s still weird for me to rely 100% on affiliate marketing and ad revenue. I still enjoy the the security that client work provides.

What skills can you do remotely as a nomad?

You should jump on Upwork and Fiverr and take a look at what is selling. Whatever is selling means that’s where the money is. In general, your skill is going to be doing some sort of service that business needs and is willing to pay for:

• Blog and YouTube
• Marketing Agency
• Content Writer
• Translating text
• Creating Websites
• SEO for Clients
• Facebook Advertising
• Freelance Travel Writer
• Graphic Designer
• Programmer
• Virtual Assistant
• Teach English Online

Blog and YouTube

I'll lead of with how I personally make my living. I run blogs and a profitable YouTube channel based around creating tutorials and how-to content for people.

Yes I blog here and I have a travel vlog (the edge of david channel), but those two things are a hobby and creative outlet and don't provide me with enough revenue to live off of. However my blogs and tutorial videos do.

I make money primarily through having a lot of content that ranks for various keyword phrases that people are looking for. I make a good reliable income from ad revenue, affiliate marketing and sales of my own product.

Building these two assets took years, it was not quick and not overnight. I started out like you, having to work a job to make money and work on everything on the side. Then as my income grew I was able to quit my job and replace it with freelance work.

I continue to do freelance work on Fiverr to this day. Freelance was my secret weapon for that transition to self employment as I had more control over scaling it up and down to free up my time or to help me make money to pay rent.