How to Become a Digital Nomad: Get Paid While Traveling the World

In fact, now there's a whole industry surrounding digital nomads.
There's uh hostels which cater specifically to digital nomads, and so they will have high-speed internet even when you're in the middle of the jungle in Guatemala, so that you know that you'll be able to do your job no matter where you are in the world.
Hi, welcome back.
I'm Rabuzeri, a curious journalist that always wanna know what people do for a living and how much they can earn.
I thought you might be interested to know too.
So here we are.
When I heard that Caleb, who is a family friend and our guest today, is a digital nomad, my ears perked.
What is a digital nomad?
Well apparently there is such a job.
And if you like to travel and still want to make a living, this could be the job for you.
So let's dive right in.
Thank you, Caleb, for agreeing to do that.
I highly appreciate it.
Let's start by telling us what is a digital nomad.
Digital nomad is a person who has a job which is primarily or fully online.
It allows them to work from anywhere in the world.
Typically, that person is employed by a company in their home country, and then they can uh travel the world with just their laptop.
Oftentimes they're just living out of a backpack.
And what kind of jobs can you have while traveling?
There's there's a big variety.
So there are English teachers, people who teach um students online, a lot of you know Chinese or Vietnamese or Korean students.
Um then there are people who are software developers, engineers.
Uh there's really tons and tons of different kinds of people.
I've met lots of people.
There's people who do consulting work, there's people who are creatives, so like uh digital designers.
Um they're traveling while they do that?
They visit different different countries?
Yeah, visiting different countries.
They, you know, they stay in hostels um along the way.
And uh in fact, now there's a whole industry surrounding digital nomads.
There's uh hostels which cater specifically to digital nomads, and so they will have quiet working spaces, they'll have private booths where you can do conference calls, they'll have high-speed internet even when you're in the middle of the jungle in Guatemala, so that you know that you'll be able to do your job no matter where you are in the world.
So there are agencies for people that want to become digital nomads?
There are some websites where they will advertise or they're kind of guiding you on how to become a digital nomad.
But I think most people sort of find their way into it naturally uh as a result of their career path.
Maybe they've chosen to be a software engineer and they realize, well, I'm working from home, why not travel and live in Buenos Aires instead of in uh New York City when the cost of living is five times cheaper and uh it's more fun and uh I get to experience a different culture to the opposite.
But how do you make sure when you're in uh the other side of the world that the guy that hired you or the woman will actually pay you?
It's hard to know, I guess.
I mean, like with any job, right?
You can only hope that they're gonna follow the laws and uh pay you well, so as long as you have a good contract and uh it can also be a good idea to work for that company for a few months, six months, or maybe even a year, or get to know the company and see if they're legitimate before then setting off on your adventure.
Right.
The best opportunities you're gonna have come from engineering, software engineering, and artificial intelligence-related jobs.
So because those are two burgeoning fields, if you really wanted to become a digital nomad, you should probably study a coding language of some kind.
How do you work around the challenge of let's say you're in China or Japan and your employer is American?
Yeah.
With the time zone.
Yes.
So that's that's something that a lot of people find challenging.
A lot of uh people in Europe find it easier to be a digital nomad in in Asia because the time difference is not quite as big.
A lot of North Americans you'll find will choose to go to Latin America instead because it's in the same time zone.
If you're willing to make the sacrifice and work overnight, then you can go to China or Southeast Asia or somewhere like that.
Or ideally, you can get a job where it's not dependent on the time where it's more about just production, as long as you've got the job done, as long as you get the work done, it doesn't matter when you submit it.
Okay, let's get to the nitty-gritty.
How much money can you make?
It varies a lot.
So, you know, I'm a person who's been an English teacher before, and I was looking into teaching English, and teaching English online is a job which has become extremely saturated.
There's tons and tons of people, especially during the pandemic, who wanted to work as teachers.
The salary is, you know, anywhere from 1,000 USD to maybe up to 2,000, 3,000, depending on your qualifications.
Per month, per week.
Per month.
And if you're living in Vietnam,$1,000 is enough to survive.
And it's it's enough to thrive, in fact.
You can have a very good lifestyle when the you know the average uh wage there is only 100 or 200 USD.
People who are in software engineering, they can get up to, you know, 100,000, 200,000 a year, depending on their experience.
So it's a very wide range.
Because there aren't just it, there isn't because there isn't just one digital nomad job, it can vary very like extremely.
Right.
And so did you get to actually travel and enjoy travel while doing it, or is it mostly work like everything else?
It was hard to balance.
So I was digital nomading around Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and and then South America a little bit.
And there were times when I had to sort of sacrifice the more fun aspects of the trip in order to do my work.
When my friends would go out to do water, whitewater rafting or go cave exploring or whatever.
I had to stay home because I'm on the clock, you know, I have to fulfill my duties.
Um, and what I ended up doing is I took the route of kind of establishing myself in one city in uh Oaxaca, Mexico, where I spent about one year.
It was easier in that way, and then I still had the benefit of the lower cost of living, experiencing the new culture and you know, eating food different foods all the time than I would get back in uh my home.
And your home you had to rent a place for a short period of time, correct?
Yeah, so initially I I rented on Airbnb.
Um is it worth it with all the expenses?
Can you actually make money?
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, so if I compare the average sort of cost of living in Toronto, maybe you're paying$2,000 Canadian per month for a room, right?
Whereas in Oaxaca,$500 is easily gonna get you a really nice apartment.
So your lifestyle is still really, really nice, you know, and then you go out to eat and it's a dollar or two dollars for a meal.
How did you get your first job?
So my first ever job in terms of like the nomad lifestyle was as an English teacher in South Korea.
I had talked to a friend who had taught in South Korea before, and she told me about this organization.
It's a uh recruiting agency.
So they did most of the heavy lifting for me, get getting the paperwork done and um getting me the visa.
And then the amazing thing about working as a teacher in South Korea is they will provide the f the they'll pay for your flight and they'll also provide you with an apartment and an airport pickup.
So it's very, very like smooth.
You just get there and they're like, Well, here's where you're living for the next year or two years, and uh it was an amazing, amazing, amazing job.
What are some travel-friendly jobs for people who are not tech savvy?
So that's the other side of like nomading is not working from your home country, but working in the local country wherever you're going.
And so that can sometimes be a more complicated process because it involves visa work, right?
You have to get the proper visa to work wherever you're going.
There's a lot of options for Canadians and particularly for English speakers, so from the UK or United States or Canada or Australia with English teaching.
So my my journey essentially went like this.
I spent two years teaching English in South Korea.
After that, I went to Australia for two years, and there they have a visa called a working holiday, which allows you to work, travel, study.
Then after that, I went to Thailand for six months and I work there as an English teacher as well.
So these countries, especially East and Southeast Asia, they're looking for English teachers.
They want to teach their kids English.
It's part of the curriculum.
Um, so Japan, Korea, China, Thailand, Vietnam, they're all very intent on hiring Westerners, especially like English native speakers, to come to their country and teach the kids English.
And because of that, they offer pretty fair salaries, like uh competitive salaries, and you get the benefit of having a ex essentially a very long extended vacation where you get to really immerse yourself with the culture.
And for how long do you have to commit yourself to this country?
Um typically the contracts are one year, and usually they'll have a signing bonus to continue on.
Because people come for such a short amount of time, usually, usually they're there for one year and then they leave, or even for less for six months.
They will try to highly incentivize you to stay longer.
So, for example, in South Korea, they offered me a flight home uh that they would pay for and then an extra month of salary in order to stay an extra year, which was you know very enticing for me.
And it and did you take it?
I did, yeah.
And uh but instead of actually taking the flight, they said they I could like just get the money instead, and so I thought, well, I don't need to visit home, so I'll just take the money.
Right.
Yeah.
What's the most rewarding part of this kind of job?
Uh for me it's the cultural exposure and immersion that I get from it.
So I feel that I have learned so, so, so much about all the countries that I've lived in.
I absolutely love learning about these places.
I love experiencing the food and uh traditions and and music and everything that I wouldn't be able to see in my home country.
Yeah, I can see how that is exciting.
Before we get into specific agencies that can help somebody who wants to start a nomadic lifestyle, can you tell us which country left the biggest impact on you?
And uh is there any story, any experience that you can share with us?
I guess I would probably have to choose South Korea.
It was the first one for me.
It was the one where I had the most sort of diverse experience and I made the best friends.
And so I think because it's the first one, it also holds a very special place in my heart.
I was put into contact with a few dozen other teachers, and of those uh maybe nine or ten of them became amazing friends of mine, and uh pretty much every weekend we'd go out and experience a new thing.
So there were all of these amazing festivals in all these uh small towns.
The one that stands out the most in my mind was the ice fishing festival.
You had to take off all your clothes except for your shorts, get in the ice cold water, freezing cold water, and try to grab a fish with your hands.
And my friend told me a strategy to help because when once you get in the water, your hands get so freezing cold that you can't bend them anymore.
So he said, Okay, tuck your shirt into your pants, and once you get the fish, shove it into your shirt because otherwise it's gonna slip out of your hands.
So I had the fish in my shirt, like uh kind of like flopping around against me.
And I was I was freezing cold, like my feet and my hands, I felt like I was gonna lose them.
I found out later that um like the Koreans had been filming it, and uh basically they were like, look at all these uh foreigners ice fishing uh here at the festival.
So we had made like the local paper by uh just being foreigners at this festival and uh ice fishing.
Yeah.
Can you give us some names of companies or agencies or website where people can get some information on how to start their nomadic lifestyle?
The one that got me the job in uh South Korea is called uh Adventure Teaching.
They are a recruiting agency and they place people in a bunch of different countries.
There's another one called XPAT Resources, so XPAT Resources, and they as well they do recruiting and they uh help people to find jobs in different uh countries.
There's uh Dave's ESL Cafe, that's a job board for finding jobs, uh particularly English-speaking jobs in um East Asian countries.
And then there's one I believe it's called Global Work and Travel, and they are there's so they're a paid service.
You'll they'll take part of your salary?
Take part of your salary or like an upfront fee to give get you jobs and also but they're more focused on like adventures, so it could be volunteering, it could be teaching, it could be work, working holiday or something like that, and then they offer support while you're in those countries.
Fantastic.
Well, thank you so much.
Very welcome.
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