Working While Traveling How To

Question: What are your strategies for making money and working on your long term journey? What type of work do you look for? How do you get it? How do you plan and set yourself up for taking employment when on the road?

Answer:

This is worthy of a book in terms of an answer, as it’s variable based on many things.

You can make money teaching english in many countries, but these days you need to have a degree, and be a native speaker.

You can make money building websites, but you need to know how.

So you see the real answer is “what are you good at?” Answer that, and you have a start.

Next up is sales. On the road you are not working for anyone other than yourself. Even if for short periods you are working for someone on a project. You are the one who has to go out there, based on your skill set, and find that job.

None of this is easy these days. A bad world economy means many countries are shoring up their jobs for locals only. Meaning you are at a disadvantage in a new country, unless your skills and experience come into play. Setting up your own business model can help here. But again, you will need to invest financially in it, if you want to jump start it into peoples minds.

All this means is that you are basically a traveling Salesperson. The product is you. If you don’t like sales, then, you better start pretending very soon.

Work visas are also something to keep in mind. If you place to stay a long time working overseas, you’ll really need to have a working visa. 30 day tourist visa’s simply won’t do. Not only that, but if caught, you will be treated as a criminal. Which means jail time and fines.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly. You need to drop any notion of what worked for you business wise in your home country, will work else where. New cultures mean new ways of dealing with. I wrote an article about How to avoid business mistakes when you travel in it I describe a situation that happened to me. More importantly if you read it closely, you’ll see I did something I would never do in the USA. Why? Because the country I was working in had a culture that meant you can’t just lay the rules of business down straight away.

Dave, from The Longest Way Home, has been traveling overland on a sea to sea journey from Portugal to the Philippines for over five years. Ask him questions about long distance, overland travel at ASK overland travel questions.