How to live your dream life

Whether you are 20 or 70 years old there are two things that you must understand before you will know how to live your dream life. First, you must have a clear picture of your dream life before you can create it. Second, you have to get your money right.

If you already have a clear picture of your dream life and you have your money right, then this video is not for you. Otherwise, keep listening.

I will give you a short introduction to my life and why I was failing to live my dreams. Then I will explain why I am finally able to live my dream life now. I will show you pictures of my dream life as I explain.

Introduction

I did everything wrong for 47 years. Everyone thought it was right back then. You see, I bought into the “normal” American dream. I learned about the conventional path to success in my teens. Then I set out after it like a raging bull.

When I was in my teens, I read a book called “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napolean Hill. I bought into the idea that I would have to work hard all my life, become a multi-millionaire, and have fun once I was retired. I would travel the world after retirement.

The American Dream was all about delayed gratification. You put your nose down and grind it out for 40 years. Then maybe, if you were still healthy, you could spend the final years doing what you wanted. Maybe you would travel, fish, golf, volunteer, or write the great American novel.

But keep listening if you don’t want to wait so long. You see, it was only 18 months ago that I was not living my dream life. I am not saying you will make all your dreams come true so quickly. But don’t be so sure that I am smarter than you either.

I was more ambitious than most of my friends so I started several businesses along the way. I was hoping a business owner would make more money so I could retire earlier at 55. I would have more time for fun at the end of my life. It worked, or so I thought.

By age 47, my retirement plan was in place. The assets, mutual funds, and real estate were all in place. I had made it ahead of schedule. With normal market growth, I would be retired traveling the world by age 55. So in early 2007, I moved to Asia and started a job that allowed me to travel 7 weeks per year.

Then, about a year later, the market crashed while I was living in Asia. My diverse retirement nest egg dropped in half. My retirement dreams were in jeopardy. Instead of normal growth, the crash had put my early retirement dreams into jeopardy. But I am not a quiter.

Later, in 2009, another book changed the trajectory of my life, “The 4 Hour Workweek,” by Tim Ferris. That book helped me understand how to live my dreams no matter what happens to the markets. First, I will discuss how the book helped me reformulate my dreams in the post-crash world, and then how to get my money right, so that I could live those dreams.

Here are some of the main things I learned from that book. First, I should not wait until I am old to retire. Instead, I should have mini-retirements spread throughout my life. That made sense to me. I knew I would be healthier if I was able to experience parts of my retirement at an earlier age. I could do more fun stuff if I was younger and healthier.

Second, I learned that I needed to start an online business that created a monthly cash flow that I could live on. So, instead of waiting until I had amassed a fortune over my lifetime, a new business creates a monthly cash flow income that flows into your bank account. I never dreamed it could all happened in 18 months once I figured out the right path for me.

Third, I would leverage the financial arbitrage of earning dollars while living in lost cost of living countries. I would earn dollars, Euros, or pounds, and spend it in low cost of living countries. The book transformed my life. In summary, retire more often and sooner, start an online cash-flow business, and live in low-cost countries as my income grows.

But first, I needed a clear picture of my dreams.

Have a Clear Picture of Your Dreams

I am going to tell you my reformulated dreams just as an example. But you will need to create a clear picture of your own dreams. Your dreams are likely to be different. No matter what they are, you have to become clear about it, so you know if you are moving closer as you go. Here are my dreams.

I wanted to live all over the world. I didn’t want to have a home somewhere with an empty bed that I would come back to. I wanted to move forward slow traveling the world. I didn’t want to buy any round trip tickets. I wanted to go wherever I wanted, and stay for as long as I wanted.

Yes, I would go see family once a year or so, but that would just be a visit. The other 50 weeks of the year I would enjoy slow traveling the world.

I wanted to have a beautiful woman at my side that enjoyed travel as much as me. I didn’t care if she was conventionally beautiful. I just wanted her to be beautiful to me. She would not be interested in having kids, a house, or anything normal. She would not be normal. She would be interested in slow traveling all over the world with me.

She would be smart and creative. She would have a mind of her own. She would only accept cultural norms that felt right to her. She would not be controlled by the judgment and fears of a society that did not approve of how she lived her life.

She would be very smart with money. She would not be interested in proving her significance through material things. Her joy would come from seeing the world and learning by experience.

We would move around the world together discovering the beauty and uniqueness of each culture, arts, foods, and traditions. We would be interested in living like locals to better understand their culture. There is an authentic view with your feet on the ground.

We would prioritize our path through the world in a way that took both of our dreams and fantasies into consideration. We may eventually buy a place somewhere but not until we knew for sure it was our favorite place in the world and we would want to spend considerable time there every year. That decision could not be made until we had seen most all of our fantasy destinations with our own eyes and selected a favorite with true knowledge.

I also wanted to learn how the new economy worked. I wanted to learn how to make money with my laptop over the Internet. This would keep my mind fresh and engaged during retirement. It would also be a hedge against inflation and increase our travel choices over time as the income increased. But after the first few years, it would occupy no more than 20 hours a week.

But I wanted the Internet business to be more passive, so I could take weeks off at a time to visit remote places in the world like the Amazon Jungle where the Internet connectivity is very poor. Since I didn’t know what this new business would be, I would have to do research and find out which suited all of my needs best.

Learn How to Get Your Money Right

I wanted to live a life where my income was untethered (unrelated) to my geographical location. I no longer wanted to trade my time for money. I wanted a webpage that threw money at me no matter where I was in the world.

Now I will tell you the short version of how I was finally able to get my money right.

I started an online consulting business in about 2010. I was basically selling my time for money. The problem with selling your time for money is that you can only sell 8 hours a day. So your income is limited by time. Also, there is no stream of income when you are not working. You are only paid when you work. It is the same as a job really, except that you can do it anywhere in the world that has a decent Internet connection. There is geographic freedom but no passive income at all.

So, while I consulting, I started a second business, an online training program in 2015 to meet my passive income goals. I posted courses online that people could sign up for and take at their own leisure. I made videos and materials for them to read. The concept was great from a passive income perspective. You create a course once and sell the same course hundreds of times. That was the classic form of residual income–make once and sell many times. But I picked a market that was too competitive. So it never got off the ground. My first passive income business failed.

So in 2016, I started a third business. I started importing products from China and selling them on Amazon. It sounded like a great idea. I could import the products from China, warehouse the products at the Amazon distribution centers, and Amazon would ship the products when they sold. It sounded like a perfect solution. I would only have to fly home from world travel once a year to receive imports from China and then ship them to Amazon. The course was very expensive but it worked.

But then Amazon changed the rules. They said I could only ship them so much product at a time or they would start charging warehousing fees. That meant I would need to rent a warehouse in the USA and fly home more often to ship smaller quantities to Amazon. No thank you, I wanted the geographical freedom. So I shut down that business even though it was making a profit. I don’t trust partners that change things so drastically in a way that limits my personal freedom. Plus, I had read other stories about how Amazon was making other changes periodically that hurt their private label sellers. I didn’t want to depend on Amazon’s goodwill so I shut it down.

Next, I tried affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s products and get a commission when people buy the products using your links. Since I was traveling all the time anyway, I decided to try affiliate marketing in the travel business. That was in late 2016 when I started the affiliate marketing business for hotels, tours, and airline tickets.

Unfortunately, affiliate marketing of travel services is the most competitive business on the Internet. So that never really got off the ground. The most I ever made was about $20 per month. You need about 100,000+ page views a day to make that work in the travel niche. That business was called VagabondBuddha.com.

Luckily, I figured out a way to make money with VagabondBuddha.com. In 2019, I read an article about how to make money in the information business by selling memberships to a catalog of eBooks. That is when I decide to convert VagabondBuddha.com into a membership site and create “retire cheap reports” of my favorite places all over the world and sell memberships to my reports.

As soon as I read about the concept I knew it was the best concept for meeting all of my online business goals. Here is why I believe it is the best way to make money on the Internet:

One. Inventory. There is no physical inventory to purchase, store, or ship. People just download eBooks (PDFs) when they want to read one. Whereas on Amazon, I would have needed about $100,000 in inventory turning over about three times per year to make a $100,000 profit.

Two. Software. Low start-up costs. The software I use to run my membership business is around $1000 per year.

Three. Advertising. No advertising costs. In fact, I get paid by YouTube for posting videos. That means, effectively, I am paid by YouTube to advertise my products. Whereas, with Amazon, I had to pay for advertising to get my products on the front page of Amazon. Affiliate marketing also requires you to advertise until you promotions are highly successful on their own.

Four. Employees. No employees. It is just me. Whereas, with Amazon, if I had rented a warehouse in the USA to store products, I would have had to pay someone to receive them from China and ship them to Amazon.

Five. Rent. No office, no phone, no rent. It is just me with a laptop somewhere in the world.

Six. Customers. You don’t need that many repeat customers. If you charge $9 per month per member and have 300 members, you make $2700 per month. Whereas, if you only have 300 people buying things you promote via affiliate marketing links in the travel business, you would be lucky to make $100 per month.

Seven. The only real money being made in affiliate marketing (by beginners like you and me) is in selling really expensive training courses for $1000 to $5000 per course. I know because I have purchased a few of these courses. And, I honestly doubt that more than a few people in every hundred people that purchase one of these courses, ever even make their money back. So I would not feel right selling courses that help so few people and costs so much. People can’t afford to waste thousands of dollars for partial educations.

Eight. Competition. Once you have a customer on a membership site they are your customer, not Amazon’s customer. So, there are no competing membership products being emailed to them every week or so by Amazon.

Nine. Shipping/Postage. There is no shipping or postage to pay in the information business. They just download PDFs and watch videos.

Ten. Low cost of entry. People can try out your membership for really cheap and stay for as long as they want. The entry is cheap and they can cancel whenever they are ready.

Once I understood all the benefits, I knew this was the vehicle for me. I finally found an online business that is consistent with my values and goals of providing more value to the public than I charge for my services. So, I have finally found out a way to help the public in a meaningful way that also helped me get my money right. So …

I Started My Membership Site

On May 15, 2019, just 18 months ago, I purchased a membership plugin for my VagabondBuddha.com website and started creating retire cheap in paradise eBooks for my membership site.

Well, I was right. In about one year, my YouTube and eBook membership income combined had grown to about $4000 USD per month. And all I was doing was making videos about my hobby and sharing information about my hobby in my retire cheap reports.

My hobby is traveling the world and learning about the most beautiful places where I can live cheaply as my hobby income grows. People appreciate what I am sharing and they are joining my membership website.

Since my dream life is already happening I would like to offer something special to my paid subscribers.

As a thank you to my paid subscribers, I have created a course that shows you how you might be able to turn your hobby into an income stream. The course is designed to help you take your specialized knowledge about your favorite hobby and share it with other people like I have, using a YouTube Channel and a membership site, like VagabondBuddha.com.

If you take the course and start sharing your hobby like me, you will be helping people learn what you know about your hobby more quickly than they would by trial and error.

Click the link in the notes below this YouTube video to learn more about our monthly membership that includes over 50 retire cheap in paradise reports and 5 other bonuses for paid subscribers plus our newly added bonus, the hobby income course.

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?