UPDATED 17/12/2018
If you are reading this you are probably thinking if it’s possible to quit your day job and travel the world. It’s a big ass world out there and you will only get a chance to see a glimpse of it during your life – especially if you spend most of your adult life rotting in a cubicle in some mindless nine to five job.
I found myself asking how to quit my job and travel far too often and decided to do something about it.
I made a lot of research on the subject and today I will share with you my own plan and a few other ideas for financing your life abroad.
Because that’s what it boils down to doesn’t it? Money.
Every body knows how to resign or how to book a trip, it’s making the ends meet that’s the hard part.
You have essentially three options when it comes to quitting your current job and start traveling the world.
Option 1: Work abroad
The first one is to work abroad at whatever country you are currently staying in.
Finding work abroad has never been as easy because of the internet and there are many sites dedicated to working away.
The problem is that the jobs usually pay just for food and accommodation and if you have any bills back home this can be an obvious problem.
Finding “real” work abroad requires your normal recruiting process and can be really hit-and-miss depending on your profession, expertise and language skills obviously.
Usually there are also permits required to work in another country, especially if it’s on a different continent.
On the other hand work force can move pretty freely within the EU and there are probably similar agreements between Canada and the US, so working in another country can be pretty easy if you stay in your own “neighborhood”.
The point is, it’s up to you to make sure you have all the necessary paperwork done if you plan to work in another country.
And job is always a job, you get to change the scenery but most of your waking hours will be spent at the workplace.
Option 2: Achieve financial independence
The second option is the hardest, yet the one many thrive for or at least fantasize about. Make enough money to achieve financial independence – as in you have enough money in the bank to never need to work again.
There are two ways to go about this. The first one requires decent income, minimal expenditure and diligent low risk investment. This way you can achieve enough capital to be able to quit your job before 45 or so if you are willing to keep your expenditure minimal your whole life. It takes a certain type of character to be able to pull this off though.
The other way requires business sense, some education, and a crap ton of hard work and luck. I’m talking about becoming rich by succeeding in business. Be it selling a gaming company, writing few best-seller novels or even succeeding with a band.
The options are endless yet the likelihood of catching a break like this is as small as winning in the lottery – which we might as well include in this category.
Oh, and you can always marry someone rich or inherit a hefty fortune 😉
Option 3: Work online
The third option is the one I’m using myself and anyone capable of reading and comprehending this post can use it too. I’m talking about working online.
You’d be surprised at the options you have these days for online work. If you know how to code you can easily find work coding for big companies remotely.
If you are very good at writing you can find freelance writing jobs and content creation. If you are good with graphics you can do graphics design or sell your artwork and photography
The examples of online jobs that can pay over $ 100 daily in the above video are:
Virtual Book keeper
Just like the name describes, you can do book keeping for other people online from anywhere in the world.
The great thing about digitalization is that many traditional professions can now be done completely online.
Youtuber
If you feel comfortable in front of a camera and have some interesting stuff to share with the world, YouTube is a possible source of income. It’s easier to rank videos in YouTube than it is to rank websites in Google.
Just beware that you have to push content out fresh content constantly or you will drop out of the radar. The competition is fierce on many niches and the demand for production quality is high. Grainy videos with bad audio just won’t cut it in 2019 anymore.
Transcriber
You listen to audio and transcribe it. If you can do it decently fast you can earn a decent living with this, and it doesn’t require any special skills besides writing skills and knowledge of grammar.
The fact that you can do this in other languages than English is a big plus to many people.
Chat Customer Service
Like you know, almost every company has an online chat customer service these days. There’s always a person on the other side of that chat, that is getting paid for answering customers. You can be that person.
https://www.apple.com/jobs/us/aha.html
Home stylist Â
Good with fashion and clothing? There are people looking for your services and companies that will pay you to advice them.
https://www.stitchfix.com/careers
Online Course Creator
Know some valuable information? Think you can put up a interesting online course on the subject? You can easily earn a good income this way. Beware the competition and demand for quality is high unless you have a very specific niche with low competition.
Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistant do just what the name suggests. They assist people in doing stuff. The stuff can be pretty much anything from coding to organizing notes.
All these of course require some prior expertise and constant work. I really don’t have any expertise on those fields, but I know so I decided to get in to affiliate marketing. In my case it means creating content on my own website.
How affiliate marketing works
Affiliate marketing essentially means offering products to people looking for a solution to a problem.
If they find the product appropriate and decide to make a purchase you receive an affiliate commission for referring the customer.
There are affiliate programs for pretty much everything – from apples to zebras.
Well I’m not sure about real Zebras but if there are plastic ones in Amazon, then yes, Zebras.
I’m writing this post sitting in a hotel bar in Spain (I’m from Finland BTW) and since IHateWorking.net is a new site no one will find this post for a few months which it takes for new sites to climb the google ranks.
The system I use requires my post to rank on google on certain keywords for me to be able to gain traffic to offer my affiliate products to.
If you stumbled upon here, in all likelihood you wrote one of my keywords in to Google.
If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, check out my Wealthy Affiliate review.
Why I chose affiliate marketing over other online work?
Affiliate marketing is an awesome way to make a living. All I need with me while traveling is a cheap compact laptop and a place with WiFi to do my work.
The thing about online affiliate marketing through content creation and SEO (search engine optimization), is that all the work you put in is cumulative.
Once you have a site that is ranking in google and has good offers for the customers with affiliate links in place, the site will do the work for you on automation 24/7.
So instead of getting paid once every time you do a “task” (e.g..write a post) the income will be cumulative.
It takes work, especially at the beginning but I bet you can see the silver lining – complete freedom to work from anywhere in the world and eventually an automated system that you just have to cultivate to keep it running smoothly and increase your income.
It’s essentially like writing a book. You invest your time without expecting an instant gratification like a monthly salary.
Instead you work diligently to create something you love. If everything goes well you will get rewarded ten-fold and possibly for the rest of your life.
The difference with online marketing is that you will have much better odds at creating a successful website instead of a successful book if you do your research right.
It also requires some maintenance to keep things up and running but the main point is that in the online world success is cumulative.
Once you start seeing results they start piling up fast and things like website traffic will usually remain fairly stable on and established site even if you leave it for a few months.
Conclusion
So if you want to quit your job and travel and my recommendations caught your attention and intrigued your thirst for knowledge stay tuned.
This site is dedicated to helping people find options to the conventional working life and I will be adding a lot of useful stuff for you to read. If you have any questions don’t be afraid to ask in the comment section below!
Oh and if you got interested in affiliate marketing I can recommend it from the bottom of my heart.
I’ve been at it for few months now and I’m just starting to see results and I’ve learned a ton about how things truly work in the online world.
If you truly want to quit your job and travel the time to take action is now – the faster you get started the faster you will reach your goal!
12 replies on “How to quit my job and travel?”
Hey, great post it really resonated with me! I need to open up my mind more to all of the alternative methods there are out there for making an income online! It’s awesome to read that you are following your dream as well being able to work remotely from a bar whilst in spain! Is there any program you recommend for learning about the different methods you documented here? Thanks!
I’m actually using a “program” called Wealthy Affiliate. It’s actually more like a community where you can get help on any problems with your online bussiness. There’s a complete up-to-date step-by-step training that teaches you how to build a site, get traffic and monetize that traffic. It’s essentially about helping people out by offering solutions to their problems. You just have to find the problems people are looking solutions for.
WA is also a hosting platform and has everything you need to run your site or sites, you don’t need external hosting services. It also comes equipped with an EXCELLENT keyword research tool called Jaaxy which is very important for getting traffic. The commonity is so activ and helpful that I’m actually stunned such a service and community can even exist. I can recommend the service from the bottom of my heart!
Hi. Thanks for spelling out these options. I’ve always wanted to travel and see more of the world and I really want to do it without having to pick fruit or veg and I’d like a nice comfy bed at the end of the day – just getting old I think. 🙂 I really like the idea of using the third option to achieve financial freedom. I also have 2 children so not just so easy to up sticks and leave the country on a whim. Although believe me, sometimes I’m tempted! 🙂 Just one question: how long does it take and how much time do you need?
I get what you mean about the getting old part and wanting a comfy bed at the end of the day Gail :D. The time it takes to make a decent income through affiliate marketing is different for everyone. The more time you can spare in to your business the faster you will see results, but from what I understand you shouldn’t expect results for at least 6 months. If you succeed before that, great, but don’t be disappointed if you don’t. There’s a snowball effect in this business. Once the traffic starts rolling in and your site is ranking in Google it gets easier to get more content ranked. I have around 15 to 25 hours a week to spare to this if that info helps you.
I was wondering where the reference was. WA seems like a decent place to get started. Thank you for the information.
I will update the post with a reference link Mike! Thanks for pointing that out.
I think affiliate marketing is a great opportunity who want to travel and work. However how can I determine the potential of a topic? Do you have any recommendation?
Thanks for the comment Furkan! If I understood you question correctly, you are asking how to determine if a niche is viable. There are many ways to do this and this is a complicated question to answer shortly here. It all boils down to research. You have to find out how many people are looking for information on the niche, if there are products and an established market. Then there is competition to consider. Niches like fitness, fat loss and online marketing are so called ever-green niches with huge potential, but the competition is tough. It’s still possible to see success in these niches if you create enough content on low competition keywords. Once you start ranking those you can try a bit more high competition keywords which means more potential traffic.
I’m not going to lie to you though, it takes time in the high competition niches these days even if you do everything correctly.
Hi Jukka, great post here. You include a lot of informative stuff on creating an online business and including many different ways to make money online. A lot of people will get a lot out of this. Thanks!
Thanks Evan!
Hi Jukka,
Great post. I really like the practical recommendations you provided for making money while abroad. It’s definitely something I would love to do. I think for me and many others the best option is to work online. You can work anytime from anywhere as long as there’s an internet connection. Makes it a lot easier for many people. Thank you for writing this!
Thanks Dan! I think you’re right. There’s just something awesome working for yourself from anywhere in the world.