How To Pay For Your New Life Overseas
A follower on Facebook writes, “I’m a software guy (and musician in remission). My wife is a full-time mom (we have an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old and another on the way) and a former schoolteacher. Though retirement is not in the cards anytime soon, we’d really like to live overseas for at least some period of time while the kids are still kids. “The obvious question is, How do you swing it when you don’t have much money to begin with? We’d have to find a way to make a living. Any clues?
“We’re looking at a two-year horizon.”
My response: Start a business.
You sound like the entrepreneurial sort. Set yourself up to do some kind of work (consulting, programming, writing software manuals, etc.) virtually. With your technical experience, you’re an ideal candidate for starting a laptop-based business you could port anywhere.
Spend the next couple of years launching something on the side. Then, two years from now, you could have enough of a client base built up to allow you to take your business on the road with you…and relocate wherever you and your family choose.
It’s not as easy as all that, I understand. But it’s definitely possible. Over the years, I’ve known many who have pursued all kinds of entrepreneurial activities in all corners of the planet in an effort to find a way to make a living living in the place where they wanted to be. For example…
My friend Mick Flemming left his home in the UK for Belize with about US$600 in his pocket. This was maybe 30 years ago…but the theory holds. Mick met a fellow British expat in Belize, from whom he bought a parcel of land. In the years since, on that piece of land, little by little, one structure at a time, Mick has built what is recognized today as one of the premier jungle resorts in the entire country.
Another friend, David James, left the United States about a dozen years ago. He funded his initial adventures in Ecuador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua by opening restaurants in each of those countries.
Kjetil Haugan, an expat from Norway, funded his new life in Ecuador by starting a Spanish-language school.
I know a half-dozen people who are right now paying for their globetrotting lifestyles by writing about them and selling their adventure tales to us and others like us.
It is not easy to get a job in another country. But it’s easier all the time, thanks to ever-evolving 21st-century technologies, to generate an income almost anywhere.
Kathleen Peddicord
