How I plan to digital nomad.

Back in 2021..

One Wednesday morning as I got up, I received a phone call from one of my mentors. We did some back-and-forth communication previously before this day of possibly meeting up with each other.

I remember vividly how my mentor would message me weeks before meeting up with him“ don’t forget to save some room for brunch young man “because I guess he was going to take me out with his wife to Denny’s to chat and get to know each other more personably.

It would’ve seemed that things were looking up for me that year so far: I invested $1400 in my Coinbase account and earned an estimated 5000 from various crypto reserves. I was still receiving pandemic unemployment assistance around $400 a week, earning more money with unemployment than ever at an actual job. I’ve made some new friends online and developed a long distance relationship with a girl from California. Everything that seemed right in my life, was going right in my life. I felt invincible and that there was a drastic shift from the last five years that I had to endure pre-pandemic. To add icing on the cake, I was finally about to physically meet my mentor who I’ve known and has introduced me to an affiliate marketing program that I was involved with at the time, and couldn’t wait to learn some new conventional wisdom from this gentleman.

I got the call

I woke up early that morning only to receive a call shortly after 8:30 AM. Why it must be my mentor as he was waiting outside of the parking lot of the building I was residing in. So I hurried up, got dressed, brushed my teeth and hair and went downstairs to look for a huge pick up truck 4 x 4 outside of the front parking lot of my building. At last, I stumbled upon a black 4 x 4 GMC truck that was huge in size and structure. A fragile old man open the drivers side door of the truck to come outside and give me a firm hug.

“I’m so happy to finally meet you “my mentor said happily. His wife also came out of the passenger side and gave me a hug as well as opened up the back passenger door of the truck so that I could ride along.

They then drove an hour away to a Dennys where we ate and caught up with life.

“Wait until you see this RV unit we have, you’d think it was a miracle the way we got it “my mentor bragged. Of course at the time, I wasn’t sure what to expect once we finally got to the trailer park exactly what my mentor meant by that but once we arrived, and I saw the unit, something sparked inside of me.

I guess you could say that as I looked at their huge RV that somehow was lugged along the back of the pick up truck, transport it from coast to coast and everywhere else in between, something started to click in my head. I knew that whatever my mentor had done in order to get to this point in his life is exactly what I now desired. If only I could go anywhere domestically and internationally while working from home doing things that I only enjoy for a living without leaving the house, I do so in a heartbeat. Back then, I had a little bit of money where I was able to be in that position if I played my cards right.

Freedom means different things to everyone

To my mentor, freedom meant having an RV tugged around by your 4 x 4. I sat down in the living room component of my mentors RV as he was explaining to me what freedom meant to him and how it correlated with his life thus far. As I sat there and watched him talk and turned my head to briefly Sia pet Chihuahua bark directly at me, became very clear that a taste of freedom is really what you make of it in the moment that you receive it.

For some people, freedom simply means having a lot of money well not being tied down to a 9 to 5 working situation. Before my mentor, you weren’t truly free and less you were able to freely roam around from state to state or globally without being tied to a single location.

The stumbling blocks

To maintain a life where one lives in an RV, you need the right type of equipment, surge guards, buckets for human waste, a central map of RV parks in every province/state in the country,a truck that could haul a home on wheels which would be last but not least, an RV.

I guess at the time, my mentors way of digitally nomading simply involved living off the grid at RV parks. You already had a successful affiliate marketing business yet knew that cryptocurrency was the next big stake with his various streams of income. Not to mention, this guy had connections and personally knew the folks who operated this affiliate marketing program(who recently sold the company for millions) So those two things were double edge swords in terms of their freelancing/work from home opportunity being stable enough to support such a lifestyle on the road.

2022 came and here I was…

Sobering truth about 2021 was it wasn’t perfect. Immediately after me meeting up with my mentor, things went from bad to worse for me. I finally decided to meet my now ex girlfriend, in California but things didn’t work out. You can read about that prequel here. My unemployment expired in September 2021 so I was more determined to find other streams of income and to finally meet my goal towards being a digital nomad permanently.

A week after I received an email from Pennsylvania that my benefits would end, I went to the local gas station to grab a snack when I bumped into one of my old coworkers from a previous job I’ve done two years before the pandemic. I could tell he was highly intoxicated and probably on a strong medication. But as he stumbled to sit down at the café area and gave me a tool that would help aid my journey towards becoming a digital nomad. They say that help comes from the likeliness of places. Who I thought the guy that flipped burgers next to me McDonald’s over a year later would help me discover a new way to work with real flexibility on my side?

A new whatever it is that my former co-worked was showing me would shift the way I get paid. But I didn’t know where else it might take me.

Work at a flexible temp agency

I finally found way to have a more flexible work in life situation where I can work on my own accord. I opened up an app and I had a list of different jobs I could do whenever it was convenient for me. I decided to choose a gig at Sams club. It’s one way I plan on implementing my bigger objective towards digital nomading. You can’t digital nomad unless you’re able to work where you want when you want without a set schedule. This app here has been a godsend and helped me with the process of true freedom.

In order for me to digitally nomad, I need work available nationwide where I can choose my schedule or when I need off. If you’re trying to be a digital nomad like myself, it’s probably one of the best tools to start off with.

Might do ride sharing for extra cash

But if you have a car, then Uber or Lyft allows you even more freedom to earn on your time. If you’re single, don’t have any children or aren’t married, then using Uber as leverage to earn you money to support your digital nomad lifestyle might be one of the most clever of options available to you. Choose your own schedule and decide when and where you like to taxi people around. This method will definitely help you earn money truly be a digital nomad.

Of course, Uber or Lyft are ridesharing money generators you could do anywhere.

Create NFT art

If I was going to do anything in the world while jumping from place to place, at least let it be something I would have my heart into. Fortunately around September after a recent trip to New York, I realize how popular cryptocurrency was becoming in our world. Unfortunately, I missed the opportunity to make it big and strike wealth with bitcoin a decade earlier. But a new form of digital commodity was bumbling that I knew I had to get my hands on.

I’m an artist at heart. Been drawing various cartoon characters since I was five years old. Although my dream of being an animator never came to fruition, creating an NFT that I could sell as commission will be one hell of a way to earn enough money as a freelance artist. All I would need is enough you Eutherium In order to mint an NFT properly so that I can commission my art digitally.

I’ve already bought 13 NFT art collectibles via a start-up that specializes in Lifestyle, sports and music related NFT art. So I partnered up with oneof.com and started purchasing NFT art during initial drops. I guess NF tees are one of those things that a lot of people haven’t caught on to yet but will soon start to make more and more sense as the years go by like with crypto in the 2010s. I wanted to dabble into this digital art form before it became lexicon in our vocabulary of digital assets and things. It was certainly a start but definitely not the end goal. What I would really like is to create my own NFT art that I can sell for reasonable prices. I’m currently working on a special collection that will drop as soon as I have the available amount of crypto to mint an NFT and solidify my art’s authenticity.

Metaverse Money

There’s so much opportunity happening in the world today specially digitally. One of my more considerable projects will ultimately be in the metaverse itself. With millions of possibilities for digital real estate, and ownership of metaverse property that could make someone wealthy in real life as well as in the digital, this would possibly be another avenue to look into for those who wish to truly live off the grid and take work with them.

I haven’t done any initial research yet, but buying property on the metaverse will probably be lucrative as well as financially sustainable for a digital nomad lifestyle. Although in its inception, in the next 20 years from now, the metaverse will be just as much of an Intercal part of our lives as the smartphone has after the invention of an iPhone in 2007. And just like the world of apps, the matter verse will have opportunity to be anything you want that you aren’t in real life. I could simply take a vantage of the concept fine a second life generated me income to sustain my real one.

Affiliate marketing and referral based money

A couple years ago I was knee-deep into our affiliate marketing works. Essentially, being an affiliate is someone who gets paid a certain percentage to share a existing product or service on a blog, Vlog, website or video review. Whenever clients decide to look into and purchase a product, you get a percentage in the back in. This has made people thousands of dollars over the last two decades.

Affiliate marketing still exist in some form or another today. It’s one of the things I’ve been doing for the last 12 years as I figured out how to earn a living online without the constraints of a 9 to 5 job. The only drawback with affiliate marketing is that you’ll have to spend money to make money. Especially considering the fact that you’ll need to know about SEO and non competitive keywords to index your blog on popular search engines.

If you can manage the technicality of keyword competitiveness and ranking your blog on the first page of Google or Bing, then you can do pretty well with earning money passively online. Although not for everyone, affiliate marketing has a unique advantage that can produce you plenty of passive income overtime.

I feel that affiliate marketing will definitely be one component to funding my digital nomad lifestyle. Over the years I have learned how to maintain a consistent click through rate or CTR percentage through the power of SEO and short cutting to less expensive routes of exposure such as purchasing solo ads to build a list of buyers through e-mail marketing.

This won’t always be easy but…

I know for a fact that living independently without a 9-5 job and hopping from place to place as a digital nomad is no easy task. Some people learn faster than others where only a few got a chance within months or a year, to fully engage in any of these activities and take leaps of faith towards digital nomading around the world. It’s an art that indeed takes practice and time. And although no one is going to be able to do all of the options listed on this article, I encourage you to find a niche of your liking that will most likely produce the results you want for an independent source of income or incomes.

As my mentor are used to tell me” home is where the heart is” and not in no specific place. That’s how I see all of this myself. I know I’m able to realistically achieve a digital nomad lifestyle. That’s why I use all my pre-requisite skills like writing and visual art, as creative forms of earning money on the side. I’d like Vocal to be among some of the ways for me to generate some income too. So as I write this, I do so in the most creative way possible. Trying too hard to earn money can become quite obvious. But writing your heart out as if it was a personal journal and then publishing it for the world to see it’s quite rewarding in and of itself.

Not going to lie to you,I don’t have all the answers but I’d like to help somehow, individuals who are thinking about possibly becoming a digital nomad. I feel as though roaming around the country and seeing new things and experiences outweighs any of the difficult and challenging components that come with the budgeting side of digital nomading. I don’t know where you are in your life right now who’s ever reading this, but if you are further than I am, and you’re serious about living free from the grid of a 9 to 5 lifestyle, and this should be your blueprint.

All I ask in return is if this blueprint worked for you in practice as you applied it to your intentions to becoming a digital nomad that you would share this piece with people and pass on the wisdom. Helped spark the minds of those ready to take a journey of self discovery and a deeper meaning of life. To me home is where the heart is in the heart is wherever you might be going.