Transcript
WEBVTT
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Hey nomads, welcome to Digital Nomad Stories, the podcast.
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My name is Anne Klaassen and, together with my co-host, kendra Hasse, we interview digital nomads.
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Why?
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Because we want to share stories of how they did it.
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We talk about remote work, online business, location independency, freelancing, travel and, of course, the digital nomad lifestyle.
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Do you want to know more about us and access all previous episodes?
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Visit digitalnomadstoriesco.
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All right, let's go into today's episode.
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Hey nomads, welcome to a new episode.
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Today I'm here with Alex Lusso, and he has been nomading for about four years already.
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So, and he has been nomading for about four years already.
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Before that, he has been in the military and now he makes money through real estate and e-commerce.
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So he has a few different businesses, very, very interesting and, of course, I'm sure he has a lot of different travel stories to share with us today.
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So I'm really excited to have you here, alex, welcome.
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Hey Ane, Very excited to be here as well.
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Yeah.
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Can you tell us a little bit more about where you are, like literally where you are now?
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Sure, I'm sitting in Dubai right now.
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Oh, wow.
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My wife and I moved here about three weeks ago and we're thinking that this is going to be one of our new bases for the foreseeable future.
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Cool.
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Wow, so have you been to Dubai before, like before you moved three weeks ago and like kind of scoped it out.
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Yeah, yeah, we've been a couple different times before.
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We were here back in 2020, right after COVID got going, I think it was like November 2020, because it was one of the few places that was completely open.
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They had no restrictions whatsoever.
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So we were here for a month, and then we were here last year for a little bit, kind of doing some more investigation, if we wanted to try and start a new business out here, which we ended up deciding to do.
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So that's why we're here now.
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Awesome.
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So you mentioned one of your bases.
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Does that mean that you have a few different bases around the world?
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So at the moment no, I mentioned earlier already so we've been traveling for almost four years now, pretty much nonstop the States.
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Originally my wife is British and we've kind of been all over the place.
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We have a 14-month-old baby now, my son Leonardo, and so we're hitting a point where instead of kind of being full nomadic lifestyle which we've been with backpacks on, changing places every few nights kind of thing we're now going to be slowing down and we're thinking we want to do maybe about three months a year in each place, because at about the three month mark that's when we kind of start getting the itch to go somewhere else.
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You know, ready for a big change.
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Yeah, yeah, I recognize that the itchy feet for sure.
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That's really cool.
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So for those four years it's always been fast travel a few nights in a place and then moving on, and then just continuously, or did you also do like a month here and there?
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Yeah, yeah.
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Yeah.
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So I say that we, we were moving often, but we would kind of go through phases where we would be hardcore, traveling for a while like proper every two, three days, like okay, we're going to spend a month in Turkey and we want to see as much as we possibly can, and we would do probably about three months at a time, and then we'd get tired and we'd want to slow down.
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So then we'd hang out, we'd actually we'd head back to the UK, we'd spend some time in London, we'd swing through the States I grew up in Texas so we'd head back to Texas for a little while, stay there for a month or a few weeks or whatever, before we head off.
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So it'd be kind of about just whatever we were feeling whatever we were feeling.
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Cool, Very cool.
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So I'm also wondering what do you do exactly for work?
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I mentioned real estate and e-commerce, but can you tell us a little bit more about what that looks like?
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Sure, I think it'd be the easiest for me just to kind of go all the way back and I can kind of give you my background, which kind of helps explain where we are today.
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And I do think I probably have a bit of a unique background that I don't know if many of your other listeners have heard before.
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But so, like I said, I was in the military, so I was in the military 12 years.
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I'm a pilot, so I flew jets, this plane called the F-15C.
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I had a really great time, enjoyed my time in the military.
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I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to make it a career.
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Most people in the military, if you're going to stay in long term, you need to do 20 years, and this is the American military specifically.
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If you do 20 years, then you can walk away with a pension where they'll write you a check for the rest of your life, and it's a great situation.
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All your medical is taken care of, all this stuff.
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But from quite early on I knew I didn't want to have my entire life in the military.
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So to be a pilot, though, you have to do a minimum of 10 years.
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You sign a contract where they're going to spend millions of dollars teaching you how to fly, but then after that you need to spend 10 years with them.
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So as I was kind of getting near the end of my 10-year commitment, I knew that I needed to figure out a way to start making some money on the outside, and so I was doing a bunch of research trying to figure out a way to start making some money on the outside.
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And so I was doing a bunch of research trying to figure out OK, what can I do?
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Don't want to get into stock investing.
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I did write a few books on that.
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It didn't really jive with me, Started reading about real estate and went, huh, OK, I get this.
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This makes sense to me.
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Plus, as a US military person, you have access to these incredible loans to buy property and you put 0% down and you can buy a property.
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It's set up for you to buy and use as your own personal residence.
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But there's kind of like not like a loophole, but in the actual rule.
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In the rule itself it states you can buy a property with up to four units, and in the United States there's a lot of properties that are on the same tax law but there's multiple doors, so there'll be a duplex, a triplex or a quadplex.
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So I did some research and, like a serious deep dive into it, got as much knowledge as I could, joined a bunch of forums, read a bunch of books and then ended up buying a fourplex right off the bat.
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So I wrote no check, no money out of my pocket, pretty much whatsoever and I was given.
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I purchased a four unit property.
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I moved into one of the units, rented out the other three, so right away it was cashflow positive from day one.
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I'm making money.
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Then, according to this rule, then you have to live in that property for at least one year.
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So I lived in the property for one year and then I did it again.
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So I bought another one.
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So then I had eight units and I moved into one of them and I had another three in that one that were all making me money.
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So then I had one I was living in and seven that were cashflow.
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And then I took the money that I saved and earned from all that over the next couple of years and then I bought a six unit property.
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So it's just pretty much from spending zero money out of my own pocket, I ended up with 14 units that were cash flowing for me.
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That was all before I got out of the military.
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Now then I was getting close to the end of my career, getting really close and realized like okay, so this is nice, like passive income from real estate is great, but it's kind of the get rich slowly game plan and I needed to generate significantly more cash flow to kind of replace the income that I'd been earning, because as a pilot in the Air Force you do all right, you have an all right paycheck.
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So I started researching what can I do when I get out?
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And my number one criteria, my absolute number one requirement, was I had to be location independent.
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I could run this business from anywhere in the world.
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And number two is I didn't have to trade my time for money.
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So I was setting things up such that then, when I wasn't working on it, the business was still making money without me.
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So I did a bunch of research once again and I ended up stumbling across an.
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Instagram course from some guru about how to make money online through e-commerce, dropshipping, all that stuff and I signed up for it on a whim, took the course and the guy was kind of a joke, but what he helped me out with was setting up a framework for how to build an e-commerce company.
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So then I took that and I improved upon it and I've actually been able to make money doing it.
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And I don't know if you want to ask any other questions here, but I can keep going with my story and how I got to this point right now.
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Yeah, no.
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Tell me more about the real estate investing, though.
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Point right now.
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Or, yeah, no, tell me more about the real estate investing though, because I mean it's obviously.
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It's a very unique situation that you were in that you could get that loan that you had to put zero percent down, but like, was there any risk involved?
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You know, I also want to make sure that we paint a really realistic picture for for our listeners as well like was there any risk, or like did you have to do a lot of research to find these units, or can you tell a little bit more about that?
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Just, you know, to provide a little bit more context, Sure.
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So first of all, what I want to mention, though, is although this is a very specific thing for being in the military in the United States in the United States as well for any of your listeners that are American and that aren't in the military you can get a very similar loan where you only have to put down three and a half percent, and you can do the exact same thing.
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You can buy a four-unit property with only three and a half percent down.
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You have to move into one of the units but then the other three can be occupied making you money from day one.
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Once again, though, just because you're not putting any money down doesn't mean there's no risk at all.
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Absolutely there's risk.
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So you have to do your research, you have to do your homework.
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Anybody out there that's telling you that real estate is easy, or you can just jump in and do something without like doing the research and learning, is wrong.
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Yeah, exactly, I think it's really important to just yeah, mention that and because it sounds so easy right when you say it and it works so well for you.
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So I and I think that's awesome, Like it's so good to hear that there's such a huge opportunity there.
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But, yeah, it sounds like you definitely did your research and that you educated yourself before doing that and learned a lot about it.
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This may sound nerdy, but at the time I was living across the street from, like, the public library in the little town where I was living, so I would actually walk over and I know people don't do this anymore but I would go to the library and just like check out all the different real estate books and I'd read them and I'd walk back across the street and I'd turn the book back in and I'd grab the next real estate book and walk back across the street and read it in my apartment.
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Yeah, cool.
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So I spent months.
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I spent months first, before I did it.
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Yeah, exactly, and what I also hear you know from the e-commerce stuff.
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You took a course or a program and it wasn't all great, but you took away from it where, like how to get started, and then just run with that and improved it, ran with that and improved it, work with it, took your time to learn more about it, probably.
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And then eventually made it work.
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What was the e-commerce store that you started?
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So I launched an Amazon FBA company, so Fulfilled by Amazon, which is stuff you see people talking about all the time.
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It wasn't actually a dropshipping model, if anybody understands the difference.
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It wasn't dropshipping, it was a private label, inventory-based model where you actually source a product from China a white label product, it's called which is just a basic generic product, and then you slapped your grand on it and then you import it and you sell it.
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So that's all.
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So the very first product I launched was an alcohol breathalyzer, which is like before know, like before you get in a car to drive and if you've been out at the bars or drinking, you want to check to make sure you're within the legal limit.
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That's the first product that I launched and, to clarify, I have no like I don't know much about breathalyzers.
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I'm not passionate about breathalyzers, I'm not very into breathalyzers.
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Like, what you need to do if you're going to launch stuff online in this kind of business model is you don't think about the product specifically.
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It's just a widget, it's just a generic product.
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Every week there's a new thing you can launch.
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So there's software out there that analyzes these big marketplaces like Amazon to tell you and show you niches that are performing well and that you can break into.
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So at the time, there was a high demand for breathalyzers.
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There weren't that many breathalyzers being sold on Amazon, and the ones that were being sold had terrible reviews.
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So all I had to do was go in and source a quality product, do some good branding for it and then bring it in and then just put it out there.
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And it started selling quite well and then from that then I was able to expand into other stuff Very cool.
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It sounds like with the Amazon FBA, but also with the real estate business, you really saw the opportunities and what opportunities you had and how you could leverage that.
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That's so cool, so cool to hear.
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And then now right see, years later, how that worked out for you.
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At what point did you start traveling?
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Was that right when you stopped working in the military, or was there an in-between time where you had to really work hard on your e-commerce store?
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Or what did that look like for you?
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Sure, yeah, no-transcript, and it's a whole long story.
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But the girl that I'd been talking to at the time, who's now my wife, we'd been keeping things casual.
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I decided I didn't want anything serious.
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I was living in the UK at the time I left.
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I was gone, and I was gone for 48 hours and decided I actually wanted to make things work with this girl, so flew all the way back from Thailand after 48 hours back to London and stayed there with her.
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It took me about three months to convince her to quit her job she was working in finance at the time in London and then from there we turned right back around and we flew to Thailand again, and we were in Thailand in February 2020, right as COVID kicked off Me too.
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I was also in Thailand then, really.
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Oh, okay.
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Yeah, interesting time.
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Oh nice, yeah, we were in Koh Lanta too as well.
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No way, right at the very end, yeah, end of February 2020.
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That's exactly where we were, yeah.
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Well, same here.
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I decided to fly to Bali on the very last day that it was possible and then got stuck on Bali for the first five months of the pandemic.
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Yeah, so that's so interesting.
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There's worse places to be stuck.
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Yeah, exactly, it wasn't too bad.
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What did you do when the border started closing and you were in Thailand?
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Well, so unrelated.
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We had some family stuff where we needed to go back to the States and we had just started hearing about things were getting weird, related to COVID.
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I think we have a picture at an airport in Thailand and every single flight from China was canceled.
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It was just canceled, canceled, canceled, canceled, canceled.
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And so we were back in Texas for this family thing and we actually had flights booked to go back to Thailand and the morning that we woke up to get on the plane to fly back they shut the border into Thailand.
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They said nobody else can get in.
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So we were then stuck in the States, but my wife then a girlfriend as a British national, she could only stay three months in the States.
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So we ended up staying there three months and then we had to get out.
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So we looked around and went okay, where else in the world is open right now?
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Because Texas shut down for a little while and then pretty much never shut down again.
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So it wasn't a bad life there and at the time the Balkans were completely wide open.
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So we booked a plane ticket to Belgrade, serbia, and we flew out there and we spent the next couple of months traveling around the Balkans, which was completely open as well.
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At that time, some places shut.
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So then it was great I tell people this during COVID all the time and I feel really bad because I know some people had a really, really tough time with lockdowns and everything but we would, tactically, we'd go places that were open and then if we started hearing things were shutting down, we'd go somewhere else.
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So we were in Serbia for a while.
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Serbia shut.
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We were in Kosovo.
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From Kosovo we went to Croatia, Croatia, we went to Turkey and then kind of all over the place.
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Yeah, that's very cool.
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Yeah, I mean having that flexibility to move around and to pick your next location very easily and just pack up your stuff and leave.
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It's a luxury.
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Honestly, how did everything go with your businesses in that time?
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Did everything just take off from the start or was there any ups and downs?
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Did COVID have a positive or negative effect on your businesses?
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Yeah, so COVID actually definitely had a positive impact on my business, specifically because, I mean, e-commerce exploded during COVID because nobody was shopping in stores anymore, so it was a really good time to jump into it.
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I wouldn't say it really took off until about not quite a year ago, and I could get more into this if you'd like, but for the first three years working on the business it was just me.
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We were doing the very kind of cliche digital nomad thing where I was trying to do the Tim Ferriss four-hour work week as optimized as possible, just very efficient, do an hour or two a day and that's it.
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And the business was growing a little bit, but not that much.
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The best thing that I ever did for my e-commerce stuff was hiring people that are smarter than I am, bringing in other people that are better at what I'm trying to do.
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So a little over a year ago I hired my first full-time employee in the Philippines and she was awesome.
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She took charge and ran things from the start.
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From there we hired somebody else.
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That person has helped me build out a whole team.
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I pretty much have one phone call a week with these guys.
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A long answer for a quick question.
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No, it wasn't easy.
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It didn't just jump straight off.
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There were ups and downs and things were challenging and, like any business, any business trying to get off the ground was challenging.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Did you also at any point pick certain locations because they were affordable and then you could spend more time or maybe invest more in your business?
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Did you use that kind of like to your arbitrage advantage?
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absolutely 100.
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If you're going to be earning, if you're trying to bootstrap, start a business, or if you're earning money in dollars or euros or pounds or whatever.
00:18:22.530 --> 00:18:27.582
If you want to have a better lifestyle, it doesn't matter if you're making a ton of money or just a little bit of money like.
00:18:27.582 --> 00:18:31.751
If you want to have better quality of life, go somewhere where the cost of living is less.
00:18:31.751 --> 00:18:34.866
Go spend your money in pesos or baht or whatever else.
00:18:34.866 --> 00:18:43.481
So we would specifically I mean at the time, especially as the business was growing and we didn't have that much cash flow we were hanging out in the Balkans is reasonable.
00:18:43.481 --> 00:18:56.366
So much of the world I'm sure you know this and lots of your listeners do, if they are already travelers that the majority of the planet is lovely and it's much cheaper than where I grew up, in the States, and where you are in the Netherlands, I assume.
00:18:56.626 --> 00:18:56.907
Yeah.
00:18:57.489 --> 00:18:59.843
It's safe and wonderful and the food's better sometimes.
00:19:00.644 --> 00:19:02.289
And the weather is surely better than the Netherlands.
00:19:02.289 --> 00:19:02.971
I can tell you that.
00:19:05.361 --> 00:19:05.821
I believe it.
00:19:06.383 --> 00:19:07.705
Yeah, awesome, perfect.
00:19:07.705 --> 00:19:10.553
What were some things that happened on your travels?
00:19:10.553 --> 00:19:18.301
Like was, do you feel like the traveling lifestyle was that easy to combine with work or was it challenging for you?
00:19:18.301 --> 00:19:20.748
Like you mentioned, you try to be really efficient.
00:19:20.748 --> 00:19:22.311
How did that work for you?
00:19:22.311 --> 00:19:40.976
Like I know, I speak to some people and I'm like, oh, I get so creative when I, when I travel, and so efficient and so productive, and then other people they really struggle with it and to get any work done because it's also exciting, right, and there's so many other things to do and not looking at a computer screen, you know, is also very exciting.
00:19:40.976 --> 00:19:42.560
How was that?
00:19:44.185 --> 00:20:05.948
for you I mean for me in particular very challenging, I'd say, also just because of my background going from a regimented military lifestyle where I had routine and discipline and I knew exactly what I needed to do every single day, going from that to just a completely open-ended lifestyle is actually tougher than you would think.
00:20:05.948 --> 00:20:14.712
It's like if you don't even know which direction to go in your day, if you don't know which thing you need to work on, which new idea you're going to pursue.
00:20:14.712 --> 00:20:21.383
It's kind of challenging and I think a lot of people that want to get into this life they don't think about that.
00:20:21.383 --> 00:20:37.169
Even just the little bit of routine and structure that you have at either a nine to five, or even if you don't have a nine to five, let's say you already have an online business or something where you could be location, independent, you already have the structure of your life.
00:20:37.169 --> 00:20:51.724
You have your house, you have your friends, you have your family, the people that you see every day, your grocery stores, you go to your hobbies, whatever else, and then as soon as you get out of that, it's yeah, it can be really challenging.
00:20:51.724 --> 00:20:54.338
It's great and it's amazing for the first couple of months and just oh, I'm free and I can do whatever I want.
00:20:54.358 --> 00:21:02.327
And then, as that kind of wears off and you're trying to actually build something and and specifically related to business it's hard to to structure things.
00:21:02.327 --> 00:21:10.413
So for me I know a lot of people were are pretty good at they can just switch on and switch off and work for a couple hours and then go do something and then come back and work for a couple hours.
00:21:10.413 --> 00:21:21.327
The way that I ended up working that was always the best for me is I had to just have set sections of my day where I was going to do one thing or another thing and it had to be a minimum of a half day.
00:21:21.327 --> 00:21:29.388
So it was either a half day adventuring, exploring, jumping off waterfalls, whatever else, and then the second half of the day working, or vice versa.
00:21:29.388 --> 00:21:37.750
Or I had to do a full one day on of like all work this day and then the other days no work yeah, exactly that definitely makes sense.
00:21:38.373 --> 00:21:42.823
What else did you learn from traveling and working at the same time for over four years?
00:21:46.106 --> 00:22:00.634
I mean, I think you meet a lot of people that are out there traveling and working as well and you can connect on that level of being a digital nomad and being location independent.
00:22:00.634 --> 00:22:07.529
I've thought a lot about this because we've been doing this for so long, and I think there's different genres of people traveling out there.
00:22:07.529 --> 00:22:16.564
Obviously, on one end of the spectrum, you have backpackers, who are generally younger not always, but they can be older as well traveling on a shoestring.
00:22:16.564 --> 00:22:24.510
They basically have no money, usually all the time in the world to do whatever they want, but they're happy sleeping in hostels and dorm rooms and everything like that.
00:22:24.510 --> 00:22:40.693
You then have the digital nomad, slash, remote worker person who is earning money generally from their job and they've just set up a situation where they can be overseas or down in Costa Rica instead of sitting in their apartment in Ohio or whatever.
00:22:42.000 --> 00:22:54.230
And then every now and again kind of more rare you meet the entrepreneur traveler, who's the person that's really trying to not just kind of survive, traveling or making a little money while they're doing it.
00:22:54.230 --> 00:23:00.210
It's someone who's trying to actually build something while they're doing this lifestyle at the same time.
00:23:00.210 --> 00:23:03.758
And that's hard.
00:23:03.758 --> 00:23:18.832
That's really hard is what I would say, because if you want to do it, anybody sitting at home can work your nine to five and you sign off at five o'clock and then you go hang out, so you can do the exact same thing when you're sitting in Mexico or sitting in Koh Lanta or whatever else.
00:23:18.832 --> 00:23:33.546
But finding the right balance between trying to create something and grow your own business while trying to experience the new place where you are is just really hard yeah, yeah, building a business, it takes up a lot of headspace.
00:23:34.027 --> 00:23:35.048
I definitely agree with that.
00:23:35.048 --> 00:23:54.137
It, uh, I also have my own business right, so I totally hear you and it has not been easy, especially the first few years, and then now being in the kind of stage of business where I'm at now, where people like I've literally stayed at a co-living here in Valencia, where I am now as well.
