“The dissenter is every human at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”
– Archibald MacLeish
It’s funny. When I tell people I travel anywhere from 7-10 weeks a year, they assume I’m independently wealthy.
I plan to be someday in the near future, but I’m not quite there yet.
When people find out I went to Ecuador for a month with my wife and kids, they wonder how we can be away from home for so long. They also wonder what kind of weird jobs we have that would allow us that much time off.
Well, I have a freelance copywriting and training business, and my wife is a mural artist. So we don’t really have “jobs” and we don’t need a lot of money to travel. Really. And when I’m gone, I don’t think about home one bit.
I could write a whole book on how to travel well on a budget. In fact, I am writing a book on that, so you’ll have to wait until that comes out sometime next year probably (I have a few other books I’m writing first.)
Travel and writing secrets revealed
For now, I’m going to write a three-part series.
Part I will just be a list of the 7 things you need to travel and write for less than what you’d spend at home.
Part II will talk about how to develop the steady, ongoing clients you need to make this work.
Part III will be about how to develop passive writing income.
The seven things you need to travel and write cheaper than staying home (to start with):
- A steady base of monthly writing clients.
- Clients who are not new or recent. It’s easier if the front-end consultation stuff is out of the way and all your communication at this point is by email. Not a requirement, but it makes it easier.
- A form of passive writing income. I didn’t have this when I spent a month in Ecuador two years ago, but I’m working on developing it now in preparation for two months abroad next summer.
- A laptop computer. Something with a big enough keyboard to do a lot of typing.
- Wi-Fi connection. Our apartment in Quito had Wi-Fi, as most developed places around the world do nowadays. Even if it hadn’t, there were Internet cafes all over the place. For $0.05/minute, I could have camped out for hours for only a few bucks if I needed to.
- A sense of adventure! Probably the most important criterion.
- Freedom from a regular job. I don’t know too many employers that allow you to take off more than two weeks at a time. If you can take a sabbatical, great.
If I can do this, so can you
There’s some shift in thinking that needs to happen, too, but I won’t go into that now.
So why am I sharing this with you?
Well, I want you to have a taste of what I’ve experienced, or more.
I love traveling. I love offbeat adventures. I love being a contrarian. I love taking as much vacation as I want without asking anyone’s permission.
It’s easier than you think. But, you have to get the basics down first. You have to either develop a steady base of monthly clients, or passive writing income, or both.
That’s a huge reason I’m hosting the Chicago Ultimate Writing Retreat™ June 19-22, 2013 … to help you do this.
It might take a year, or it might only take you a few months, but once you develop this plan, you can travel at will and completely on your terms.
If that sounds like something you’d like to do, you should join us in Chicago. Check it out: https://steveroller.com/chicago/
Hope to see you in Chicago or one of the other upcoming retreats in Asheville, Tybee Island, Santa Fe, or Middlebury, Vermont.
