Some people get bitten hard by the travel bug. Others just don’t get it. They think travel is just a waste of money. But the travel bug bit me hard, and I’ve been sick with it my whole life. I remember the day it happened. It changed the trajectory of my life.
I have spent 19 years overseas in 78 countries. Qiang has spent the last 9 years traveling with me to 54 countries. People often wonder how this life got started for Qiang and me. In this video, I’ll be sharing how Qiang and I have made this life possible for ourselves.
The idea that my life would be about travel started when I was young–eight or ten years old. A friend of mine asked whether or not I would have kids. I told him that I wanted to travel the world.
A few years later, when I was about fifteen, my mom was worried because my life was headed in the wrong direction. So she gave me a copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. After reading that book, I decided I would be a millionaire by age 25.
I became singularly focused. I was sidetracked by a deep-rooted desire for money for 8 years. All I thought about was money. I became a workaholic. But getting rich was never really in the cards for me.
I busted my ass, but I didn’t make a million by age 25. Instead, I was broke by age 22. My business collapsed in the 1981 recession. I don’t remember even thinking about travel during that time.
But a year after going broke, I ended up on vacation with a friend. We had a total blast for about 10 days in West Palm Beach, Florida. Six months later, I was on vacation again in the Bahamas. The travel bug bit me hard that year.
It bit me so hard that I promised myself that I would never again go a year without travel. Something about going broke, and still being happy, put the value of money in perspective. I would never again keep my nose down on the grindstone for years without enjoying travel, my true joy in life.
So, for the next seventeen years, I spent a week or more every year traveling, both domestic and international. Getting rich never pushed travel off my calendar again. I traveled every year like clockwork. Even in slow money years, I would still do a cheap domestic trip since I loved travel so much.
And every year when I loved a new place, I would say to myself, “Why do I have to go home?” “Why can’t I stay here?” “What would it cost to live here and how could I make that much money so I don’t have to go home?”
But I always went home. I was financially handcuffed to my desk. I had old school thinking at the time. I thought I had to grow my net worth before I could travel the world permanently. So I dragged myself back to that desk, with my tail between my legs.
Other than trying to figure out how to make enough money to retire, all I thought about was where I would vacation next. Those one or two weeks per year in paradise kept me going the rest of the year.
I dragged myself back to that desk only because I knew someday I wouldn’t have to anymore if I kept saving and investing.
When I turned forty-four, the travel bug was biting me harder than usual. I realized I might not be able to keep working long enough to retire the old-school way. My mind was wandering off, thinking about exploring the world.
I didn’t want to wait any longer. I felt my life was slipping away. I wanted to do something else, but I didn’t know what. There was a life I wasn’t living. There was a better me that had never lived.
So I was looking for a business, or investing in real estate, or becoming an author. So every day before work, after work, and on weekends, I was trying to figure out how I could make enough money to cut those chains and leave that desk.
I sensed I was a character in a novel who had to figure out how to start his adventures. I wanted more out of life. And I knew I had enough passion and desire to make it happen. I just needed to focus in a direction long enough to make it happen.
From the outside, my life appeared to be doing well. My wife of 13 years had left me six years before, and she took her two kids from her first marriage with her. I had no biological right to them. By then they were grown up, living in other states.
I had weekends and evenings all to myself. I was having pretty good luck dating online. Hitting the gym every morning before work. Keeping myself fit for the dating game.
I owned my own place, and I had a fun, cheap convertible car to drive around in. I had a high five-figure income and a desk job with a view of the city. But I just knew there was more to life for me, and I had to figure it out.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay at that job until retirement age. That was 20 more years. I wouldn’t have the same energy. And I wouldn’t have as much time to enjoy the world before I kicked the bucket. The years were passing quickly.
One or two weeks a year were no longer enough for me. I wanted to leave and explore the world.
That is when the telephone rang. The caller said, “Would you be interested in a job on the other side of the world that pays twice what you are making now?” I wanted to say, Yes. Get me out of here. Instead I said, “Tell me more.”
Ten days later I was on a flight to Asia for a job interview. I was offered more than twice what I was making in the U.S. But it didn’t make any sense to me to be on the other side of the world if I was going to be working fifty weeks per year. So I pushed back.
I said, “I’ll work a seven-week rotation: six weeks on, one week off.” In the sixth week, I’ll leave on Friday night. I’ll be gone the following Monday through Friday. Then I’ll report back to work the following Monday. He said yes.
So for the next three years, I had seven weeks’ vacation per year on the other side of the world. I traveled all over Asia and parts of Europe and South America.
One day my boss gave me a book called “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss. In the book, Tim Ferriss talks about starting an online business. A business that creates money that follows you wherever you go in the world.
That’s how I first learned about online businesses that could pay for your life as you travel.
My dreams had come true, but I needed to fix one more thing. I had 7 weeks of travel per year, but I still had to come back to that desk. So, I quit that job and worked remotely for another eight years for two different companies.
During that time, I was traveling around SE Asia. That is when I met Qiang in Malaysia. We met on Tinder. I kept coming back to Malaysia that year to get to know her better. After a year, she quit her job and joined me, and we traveled the world together ever since.
But eventually I got tired of the job. It was boring and didn’t really provide any meaning for me. I was just a cog in someone else’s wheel. Luckily, I got fired in 2018, when they closed that division of the company.
That was my chance. I said to myself, “I will never work for anyone else again, for as long as I live.” So I made a plan.
I set aside $40k USD in seed capital to start a new online business. And I said to myself, “You’re going to make an online business work before this seed capital runs out.” I set our cost-of-living number target of $2,000 per month.
At 2,000 per month in living costs, that meant the business had to make enough profit to pay our living costs within 20 months, or the $40k would all be gone. So my motivation was never wanting to work for someone else again. And I only had twenty months to accomplish it before the $40K was gone, at $2,000 a month.
I shared the plan with Qiang. She said $2,000 a month was too much. She said our goal should be $1,000 a month in living costs so the $40k lasts longer, giving us a better chance of being successful with more time.
That is why we spent the first few years talking about $1000 a month. You’ve seen our videos where people say that you cannot live overseas on a thousand. I think the difference between them and us was that we had to do it in order to survive and become successful.
Most other people are older and more established, and they just want to live comfortably. Many of them make more than two thousand a month, so why would they want to try to live only one thousand? Plus, that was 2018, so costs have inflated since then.
But the truth is, the locals were often living on less than $500 a month in many of these places we were living. So it was not impossible for us, and in most months we were able to do it.
That is how Vagabond Awake and Hobo Ventures YouTube channels were born. That’s also how and why the vagabondbuddha.com retire overseas resources and how to make money online resources were created.
We show people places in the world where they can live on less than in their own country. This allows some of them to quit earlier because the cost of living is lower. At the end of this video, I will put a video up that shares the resources we have to help you retire or live overseas.
The hardest part of all this was figuring out how to create a business online that actually paid for this lifestyle. That was the hardest problem, and it took the longest. But we did it.
Now we are Captains of our own destiny.
Win or lose, succeed or fail, we have only ourselves to credit or blame. We have creative control of what we create for you. That is the most exciting part. Getting up in the morning, living the life of your dreams, and having a creative outlet that pays for your dreams.
The thing that we didn’t expect was that all of you have helped us figure out what information to provide to you about this way of life. When our listeners ask questions in YouTube comments, and our members ask questions in YouTube comments or by email, we learn new things that you all need.
What really surprised me about this whole adventure is the meaning it has given our lives. Most of my life, I just focused on travel and making enough money to live a good life. I never really felt like the work I was doing was helping people.
I was just going through the motions, pushing paper around a desk. I was never really excited about what I was doing. But now every day when I put out a new video or new report or make changes to one of my courses, I get feedback from real people, like you.
You leave comments on my videos to help me improve your experience and knowledge. This helps me help you become a character in your own novel.
So not only are we adventurous characters of our own novels that we get to live every day, but we help others live their own adventures. We help others write their own adventure novels.
People email me and tell me in person when I run into them overseas, “You gave hope for a new life, and a path to run on.” They learned they could live a better life overseas. They may not need to wait until their 70s to retire.
Some have learned they already have enough to retire overseas. Some have found love in foreign countries. Some slow travel the world like us. Hearing their stories has given my life meaning.
My life has become about helping people. A day rarely goes by when someone doesn’t thank us for making their life a little easier or more adventurous in some way. And that is what has made this the greatest adventure of my life.
So scan this QR code and get a free copy of my ebook that will teach you the ten things you need to do before you leave your home country. The video in the upper left will teach you the resources we have to help you retire overseas. The video in the upper right will take you under the hood of my business, which creates money that follows us all over the world.