Firstly, It seems that this is actually a fairly popular thing.

Lots of people are in fact traveling the world doing what they love, just from their laptops or even smart phones in some cases.

There are many huge benefits to becoming a digital nomad, and a lot of them aren’t immediately obvious until you’re actually there, doing it. For example, not having to pay tax if you travel to a country where tax is lower.

You could save money on rent by travelling to somewhere where the cost of living is 10 times lower than the cost of living in your native country.

There are endless benefits, and that’s for another post but here we’re going to discuss the first stages and how to START becoming a digital nomad.

How to start becoming a digital nomad: The first steps

The first thing to realise is that this could be difficult. It’s not going to just be handed to you and you will still have to work, to earn money. Money sadly doesn’t just come flowing towards us most of the time, so you’ll need an income.

Building an income (passive or active)

The most important thing to be aware of here is that you need either a passive income, or an income that can be attained online through a laptop. (Or both, which is the ideal situation.). Because you’ll probably be moving around a lot, there are times, where you won’t have access to the internet.

This is why it’s important to budget, plan ahead and try and build up an income that doesn’t rely on YOUR time and instead relies on a system. You need to be able to make money in your sleep, and that’s a skill that’s new for most of us.

We’re not taught that one at school, and not many people can do this. to make money in your sleep, you need to create a system that enables you to be paid without you actually doing anything. For example:

A passive income system (example)

An example passive income system would be this. You create a website that has lots of articles about fishing. When people go on your site and read those articles, you’ve put a small link to your ebook you’ve written about fishing tips.

If they click on that, they go to your sales page for the ebook and if they BUY your ebook (through Paypal or another system that takes payment from them) you get PAID. more importantly, you get paid no matter what you’re doing, where you are or what time it is.

You could be sleeping, you could be swimming, you could even be dead. IF you’ve set up the system that enables people to FIND your thing, BUY your thing and then GET access to your thing, you’re winning and you’ve created passive income.

Planning your trip

Before you actually go anywhere, you should either have a large amount of savings ready or a passive income system, or both. This means that no matter what happens you’ll always be able to pay your bills, get on the plane, get on the bus etc.

Before you actually go anywhere it’s important to consider what you’ll need, where you’ll be staying, and the timing of it all. The best way of becoming a digital nomad is to plan things like this far in advance. Plan the Airbnb you’ll be living in for 4 months, plan the coach to the town etc.

Try and book flights for as early in the morning as possible so that you arrive at the very start of their day. This means if something goes wrong you have all day to try and fix it, and everything’s open. People will have their doors open, people will answer their phones and you won’t be wandering around a new place in the dark.

Putting it all together and becoming a digital nomad

Once you’ve got those things sorted, you can relax a bit. Get on the plane to the place you want to go to, (after already arranging to stay at a place on Airbnb for 6 months for example) and just go and enjoy it!