This report is about finding a purpose-filled life in retirement.
My name is Dan and I left the United States 14 years ago. I don’t buy round-trip tickets. I keep moving forward. I have visited or lived in 67 countries so far. My purpose is to share information that helps people retire cheap in paradise. I have over 80 retire cheap in paradise reports at VagabondBuddha.com.
I will share videos of my world travels as I discuss finding a purpose-filled life in retirement. But don’t take notes as you listen. I will provide a written copy along with links to everything I discuss at the end.
Many retired people struggle with what to do with all of their free time in retirement. The first few months or years, they are often busy just doing all the fun stuff they dreamed about. But one day, many wake up and realize they want something more in their life.
One subscriber explained it this way,
Just Existing Here Not Really Living/Finding a purpose-filled life after retirement is a challenge.: Hola, I watch a lot of your videos. I retired four years ago. I bought land 2 weeks into my visit because I was so enamored. I got my Permanent Residency prior to leaving the states. I feel as if I have just been existing here and not really living life. [At first,] I was doing construction on my land and traveling. Now I am going to pack up and move to another city in Mexico where I have an option to work, not so much for the money, it’s more about finding a reason to get up other than just to feed the cats. Finding a purpose-filled life after retirement is a challenge. Here in Mexico, I have found peace but a piece is missing.
Many people spend their working years doing jobs that they are not entirely excited about. But they bite the bullet and drag themselves back to work each day because they have to take care of themselves and their families. They need the money.
As a young man, I wanted to be a rock star. But society told me that very few people ever make it as rock stars. So I gave up youthful dreams and pursued something more reasonable. At age 15, I gave up my dreams for the sure thing.
If you are like me, retirement might be your final chance to do something that you are excited about. Can you spend the final few decades of your life doing something that is meaningful to you? Something that excites you? Something that makes a difference?
You spent your whole life learning. Looking back now, you can see the moments of your life that mattered most. Time has given you knowledge that you may not have understood completely when you were young. But you are a store of knowledge now.
And when you finally seem to know what matters, society wants you to go quietly out to pasture and leave the world’s problems to others with much less experience. After age 50, western society will generally not value your knowledge. People over 50 are typically passed over in the corporate world.
Luckily older people are finding a place where their knowledge is honored on social media. Social media, for many years, was only a place for the young and beautiful, or the loud, angry, and controversial. But wisdom is slowly growing there without all the fanfare.
Silently in the background, behind the noise, haste, flashes of money, anger, and power–the search engines have slowly begun to honor anyone that knows how to solve real-life problems. The search engines have started to recognize the wisdom gained over a lifetime of experience. And that knowledge is the currency of this information age.
Finding a purpose-filled life in retirement
So as you approach and enter retirement, all the knowledge you have acquired over the years suddenly has a place in the world. You can actually help people now. Helping other people is one of the ways to live a purpose-filled life in retirement.
There is no longer a barrier to entry in front of you. There is no publishing agency standing between you and your students. You can share knowledge directly and immediately to anyone typing a question into Google.
In this report, I am going to talk about various ways to live a purpose-filled life in retirement. First, I will discuss ways that retired people can make money while living a purpose-filled life in retirement. Second, I will discuss volunteer work many retired people do. Both of these purpose-filled lives may be able to leverage social media to do the most good.
Make Money Helping People
Information has been the greatest source of power since the beginning of time. Recently, when we were traveling through the Mayan empire in Central America, we learned how knowledge of the movement of the stars gave Mayan leaders control over millions of followers.
Leaders with knowledge of the movement of the stars were able to construct temples such as at Chichen Itza, Mexico. The sun casts shadows on the temple’s sides that appear to the common man as the Mayan serpent god descending the side of the temple.
Because the serpent god’s descent accurately predicted the equinox each year, Mayan farmers knew when to plant crops for the next season. Thus, the Mayan leader’s knowledge of the stars caused their followers’ to believe that the Mayan leaders were communicating with the Mayan gods.
Thus, information has remained one of the greatest sources of power for centuries. If you understood the nature of the physical world, you could protect your followers, and assure yourself a seat at the helm of power and influence.
With knowledge and its subsequent power now democratized and decentralized, you can now help people directly with the life of wisdom you have acquired through trial and error for decades.
Here are three examples of categories of knowledge you can use to make money in retirement. I will start with the least desirable and move to the most desirable.
On the Job Knowledge: During your working years, you may have gained a great body of knowledge about your profession, skill, or trade. In a previous video, I shared an example of how someone could share the knowledge they learned during their working years to help other people who search for that knowledge on Google. I have a Youtube video explaining how someone makes money using knowledge from their job: How to retire in 36 months starting with no money (link provided).
Because you spent your working years gathering that knowledge, it is much more likely to be accurate useful information when people type questions into Google trying to find answers to questions in that industry.
To make a long story short, you share the knowledge you learned during your career in blog posts or videos online. So, when people type questions into Google about real-life problems they want to solve, your videos and blog posts may help them solve problems.
If your on-the-job knowledge is deep and wide, people end up watching your videos to the end and you may become shared by Google as a source of authority in your domain. If so, Google will move your content closer to the top in searches.
If people spend time on your content this signals to Google that your ideas are actually useful to your audience in solving real-life problems that the viewer typed into the search box on Google. This will increase your authority even more.
Once you have a steady stream of followers, Google starts paying you for views when people start advertising in your videos and blog posts. You may also eventually start integrating what you teach into online courses and eBooks and charging people for access.
This is one of the fastest-growing industries on the Internet. In fact, I have a course that teaches you how to do all of this. It is one of the best ways to help other people solve problems while you make money in retirement. My course is called The Hobby Income Course (link provided).
But here are two other categories of knowledge subject matter that might be more fun for you to share as you build your following.
Something New You Are Excited About Learning: The problem with On the Job Knowledge is that you might not be all that excited about it anymore, during your retirement years. You might want to just let your working years fade from memory and start focusing on something new that you are more excited about.
However, you won’t have as much knowledge to share about something new you are excited about learning. So it might be more exciting to learn about it but may also be a little slower getting off the ground. You would just share what you are learning about the subject matter, as you learn. Let me give you a short example.
Let’s say that you are really excited about learning about how to cook Thai food. You could begin studying all about how to make various Thai dishes. You would start learning about and sharing what you learn as you go.
You could do YouTube videos of you making new recipes you find online with slight variations in the recipes to give them your own flare. You could also interview various Thai chiefs and invite various Thai chefs to make their best dishes on your channel.
You would present yourself honestly as an excited newcomer to the field and people could watch your skills slowly develop over the weeks and months. Now for the last category of subject matter, you could share wisdom about.
Your Favorite Hobby: In the Hobby Income Course, mentioned above, I suggest sharing everything you know about your favorite hobby in your blog posts and videos. You already love your favorite hobby and you know quite a bit about it.
Also, since it may take some time for your income to grow, it will be easier for you to stay excited and keep going if you stay in the subject matter domain of something you are excited about–your favorite hobby.
You would dump everything you know about your favorite hobby into videos and blog posts. That would give you a great head start on content. People would more quickly find you because you already know so much about your favorite hobby.
Your information would be more valuable and on point right from the start. In fact, that is why I picked my favorite hobby for my YouTube Channel and blog posts. People could quickly identify me as a great authority for writing retire cheap reports all over the world. Traveling the world is my favorite thing.
After 67 countries and 14 years of travel, my video and blog posts contained information that helped people avoid many of the mistakes I made when I first started traveling the world 14 years ago.
In fact, after seeing the success of my retire cheap catalog and my YouTube videos, people asked me to create a course that they could use to turn their hobby into an income. That is why I started the Hobby Income Course.
So, if you are looking for a purpose-filled life upon retirement, what better way than to create a body of knowledge that helps people, than to record your legacy in videos and posts, then to start sharing your knowledge for all the world to see and use?
Maybe you are camera shy? Many people share videos online that never show their faces but still deliver the answers that help so many people. You could also deliver the information in blog posts, eBooks, and online courses.
It feels good knowing my knowledge of traveling the world is helping so many people. Sharing my favorite hobby with others has turned out to be my purpose-filled life in retirement.
Volunteering to Help People
Many people around the world like to do volunteer work in retirement. One of my good friends started a charity that helps poor families in India get medical treatment. He has a nonprofit charitable organization that he started with his own money. But he also has a growing list of people that make donations that are used to pay for medical treatment for some of the most underserved communities in India. Here is his non-profit organization: Save the Kids Trust (link provided).
But many of these kinds of organizations all over the world could use people both in their foreign service centers with various services and logistics and in their western locations to help raise awareness and funding.
There are also organizations that keep track of various volunteer opportunities all over the world. You can explore these various organizations just by Googling the “name of the country and the word volunteer.”
Some are better than others at actually helping people, so make sure to get a list of people that have volunteered for each organization of interest. Contact those former volunteers to verify the value and impact they believe the organization is providing on the ground to their target underserved communities.
If you are in a foreign country now, you could also do something as simple as visiting local schools or churches near you to see if they need any help with various projects on underserved communities.
There is no shortage of ways to make a difference in the world.
Related Resources:
I have included the following other resources that are related to this topic:
- How I make money with my hobby
- How to retire in 36 months starting with no money
- What is the best online business for retirees?
Thanks for reviewing my report “Finding a purpose-filled life in retirement.” This is Dan of Vagabond Awake, the Youtube Channel for VagabondBuddha.com. The world is your home, what time will you be home for dinner?