I am presently homeless, and (technically) without a country to call my own. Unlike many unfortunate people in this world I am not a refugee, and nor am I living in poverty. Since selling my home and giving up my residency in Canada last summer, I have been on the road, in six different countries, and haven't yet felt the need to declare residency in any one place, or put my name on any sort of long-term lease or mortgage agreement.

Being a writer makes a nomadic life possible. But so do many other careers in this increasingly versatile and high tech world. You can find a whole list of them (along with examples of the nomadic folks who are successfully pursuing them) over at Nunomad.com.

Copia Magazine Creating a Location Independant Lifestyle If you crave a location independent lifestyle, there are a few things you need to bear in mind:

You'll need money, or at least the ability to generate income without being physically present in one place all the time. If you work online, freelance or generate income from a website or blog (I do all three) you've already taken a step in the right direction.

It won't be as easy as you think to combine work and travel. As a freelance writer specialising in travel writing you'd think 'on the road' was the perfect place for me, but I'm not as productive when I'm travelling. Running your office out of a laptop bag has its challenges, and it takes a while to get yourself sufficiently organized to run your business affairs when you don't have a permanent physical location.

Location independence means different things to different people. It could mean having two or more places you spend time in on a regular basis. It could mean having a base in one country but spending a large chunk of each year travelling. It could mean spending all your time on the move, travelling from one place to another. It could mean anything you want it to.

Copia Magazine Creating a Location Independant Lifestyle Life still happens when you're location independent. You get sick. You deal with daily hassles. You do your grocery shopping. You experience technical difficulties (especially when you need reliable wifi to run your business and don't always find it). Being location independent has huge advantages, but it's not a dream life where nothing ever goes wrong.

Don't think you can't do it because of your family situation. I have two school age kids who are currently home-schooled on the road, or road-schooled as we prefer to call it. And we're not the only family doing it. My favourite long-term travelling, road-schooling family can be found all over the internet as Soul Travellers 3.

Don't think you need to be rich to be location independent. It's probably more important to be relatively debt-free, which is not the same thing. Many of us spend a huge chunk of our monthly income paying off mortgages, car loans and other debts. If you're in debt right now, you probably need to get out of it to become location independent. If you're not, you'll still need to do some careful financial planning, but you're a huge step ahead of those who are spending the majority of their income on paying for something they did or bought months or even years ago.

Not everyone can become location independent right now, and not everybody wants to. If you're one of the people who do, you won't be able to do it overnight. That doesn't mean you can't start planning for it, or at least researching the possibilities.

LEARN MORE:
locationindependent.com
www.nunomad.com/blog
soultravelers3.com


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Creating a Location Independant Lifestyle- by Karen Banes