The Life of a Permanent Nomad | MetaFilter

It's standard internet marketing, which should be synonymous with "scam!". Sell an ebook about how to get free $$$ with no work and little effort. Usually it's "Earn money $$$ online to fund your travels!" or "How I travel for less than $1000 a month and so can you!" for a low low price of $19.99.

From his site:
December 2008
Sold my first eBook online
Continued working on promoting my eBook while creating a second eBook to sell
Began earning some income through affiliate marketing

eBooks + affiliate marketing = scamming the ignorant. I've yet to run into a reputable business with real, good services or products that enrich people's lives by using this combo. I mean, sure, it's not illegal and it's totally capitalism to sell knowledge to people willing to pay for it and if people stopped paying then he'd b out of business. But the way they - and he - goes about it is absolutely unethical and no different than "Unemployed single mother?! Earn up to $10k a month without ever leaving home!" Or the University of Phoenix.

There's so many travelers who do this or try to do this because, yes, they really love traveling and don't want to go home and it's so much cheaper to live and travel around India than return to their homeland. But money eventually runs out, and no one wants to just donate money to you so you can live like this. So they grasp at straws and many of them learn the internet marketing practices so that can live their dreams.

It's pretty shameful. It's selling wishful dreamers empty promises in exchange for robbing them blind.

Also, I wish people wouldn't advertise the whole "just left my homeland with $1500 in my pocket and have been traveling ever since!" Most of the time when that happens, you're lost and alone and trapped in a foreign country and need to call family or friends to help bail you out and pay for the flight back. Sometimes you end up in jail because you stayed at a hotel and could cover the bill, or get deported. Those stories are far more realistic.
posted by subject_verb_remainder at 12:18 PM on November 4 [5 favorites]

I quit my job and left home with a few thousand to tour Central America just a few months ago. I planned on spending 6 months, I made it three. I could have easily stretched it out to 6 months, but it would have involved getting jobs in hostels, and skimping on food, etc, which I didn't really want to do. Working a shit job for no money in Nicaragua isn't any better than doing it at home. I'd much rather work for a few years in the us, then travel for a month in comfort.

I did almost no planning ahead of time, and went by myself, not knowing any Spanish. You can do pretty well with a copy of lonely planet and a little bit of cash.

I hung out with a guy who was staying at my hostel in Nicaragua who was making a living doing SEO bullshit-- he spent a few hours a day on it. You don't need that much money to travel. I was spending about $1000/mo in Central America, and that was with splurging a lot on food and staying in private rooms a lot instead if dorms, and going on tours. I knew another guy that spent two years down there spending just about 3500, but he worked in hostels.

If you are willing to live cheaply, it really is possible to throw away everything and travel indefinitely. Just forget about having a family and a retirement, etc. I ran into a lot of old travelers who got stuck in various towns and settled down, but they didn't seem very happy, just broke and lonely.
posted by empath at 12:51 PM on November 4 [5 favorites]

Working a shit job for no money in Nicaragua isn't any better than doing it at home.

See, I think this is the thing. There's this romantic notion that if you're traveling, it's somehow "not really work".

I've considered the long term travel supplemented with low-level work (whether in exchange for room and board in a hostel, or by WWOOFing, or doing odd jobs under the table). I don't think it's a bad thing to do, or that it's impossible. I've met enough people who do it in my own travels, and it seems to work for them.

Of course, the bottom line is that this sort of thing sounds a lot more fun than it is. I wouldn't mind checking in hostel guests for a month or two. But that's not "forever". That's not "take a few thousand dollars and your passport and never look back." That's a few months in a part of the world that interests you enough to make menial labor and continuous broke-ness worthwhile.

I've even considered the cruise ship thing, until I looked into what the work actually is and what the conditions are. I can make better money doing a job I mostly like here at home, and then travel in ways that are actually meaningful to me. I'm not that interested in stamps in my passport just for the sake of having them.

The SEO garbage, too. I find that sort of work boring, not to mention useless and ethically questionable. Yes, I could spend months learning how it all works, then do a few hours of work a day while traveling. Or I could just go to the job I'm actually trained for, in a field I think is worthwhile, and travel on my own terms.

(It also doesn't surprise me that a lot of corporate and finance folks take this approach to travel - if your career back home was dull, soul-sucking, and worthless to humanity, SEO from an expat bar in Thailand doesn't look too bad.)
posted by Sara C. at 1:05 PM on November 4

a lot of what makes cheap travelling so easy for him is that he is a goofy presenting white dude. ?I may be a solo traveler but I?m never really on my own.? yup, you and that invisible backpack of yours buddy.

Well, sure. But this is true of any affluent white person traveling abroad, especially in developing countries where travel in general is more difficult.

I spent two months backpacking around India, and it was amazing. Part of why it was amazing was that I'm a white Anglo-looking American woman who presents as your sorta spunky but vaguely desexualized older sister. (The female equivalent of "wacky", basically.) I was constantly getting "adopted" by locals, if even just for help with bus transfers and advice on how to mail a package.

I'm fully aware that I had access to that, not out of altruism, but because I'm a white lady in India, and your cousin is an NRI, and you love the New York Yankees, etc. It's a mutually rewarding situation -- I get help buying a train ticket, and you get to feel important on various levels based on your ability to make small talk with me in public.

Yes, people who aren't white, or who are from less locally-interesting countries, don't get that privilege. But that doesn't mean that people who benefit from it shouldn't travel.

(I do think the guy is a moron for assuming that YOU, TOO, CAN WANDER THE GLOBE FOREVER LEECHING OFF EVERYBODY ALL THE TIME, because obviously your ability to get away with this depends on your gender, ethnicity, nationality, and socio-economic class.)
posted by Sara C. at 3:37 PM on November 4

Yeah, in my experience with the Travel community (I'm a sometimes travel writer, frequent backpacker, and blogger on "place" AKA a pretentious way of thinking about Travel - website is in my profile), people there are absolutely in no way hip to:

privilege

race/class/gender issues

scams/dishonesty in general which is kind of amazing for a group who pride themselves on being good at that stuff

work/labor, especially in the sense of is this a job worth doing/are these OK work conditions/what constitutes labor. Sooooo many people who insist that they "don't work" but who spend hours a day on SEO shit. Which is a job. Or who are career travel writers. Which is a job. Or who teach ESL and also have a monetized blog which earns them supplemental passive income.

Actually, the online Travel community aren't good at much of anything aside from visa runs and selling PDFs. I wish I wanted to be one of them, but my couple-or-three years on the outskirts of the community has me convinced that they are, at best, not a group of people who ask the hard questions, and at worst, fucking idiots.

A good antidote is Julie Schweitert Collazo, who is my fucking hero. She's a journalist/travel writer whose beat tends to be Latin America, and who is one of the few people who is clued into this stuff. She is not "location independent" or a long term traveler.
posted by Sara C. at 4:14 PM on November 4 [2 favorites]

I spent two months backpacking around India, and it was amazing. Part of why it was amazing was that I'm a white Anglo-looking American woman who presents as your sorta spunky but vaguely desexualized older sister. (The female equivalent of "wacky", basically.) I was constantly getting "adopted" by locals, if even just for help with bus transfers and advice on how to mail a package.

I'm fully aware that I had access to that, not out of altruism, but because I'm a white lady in India, and your cousin is an NRI, and you love the New York Yankees, etc. It's a mutually rewarding situation -- I get help buying a train ticket, and you get to feel important on various levels based on your ability to make small talk with me in public.

Yes, people who aren't white, or who are from less locally-interesting countries, don't get that privilege. But that doesn't mean that people who benefit from it shouldn't travel

.

I was often stunned by how far out if the way locals would go to help me. One lady in Honduras walked with me off the bus to the grocery store to get money from the ATM then bought ME a soda while we were waiting for the bus, then she told the bus driver where I was going so I wouldn't get lost (i had to transfer a bunch of times between buses to get where I was going).

When I got stuck at a bus station overnight with a bunch of Nicaraguans during a protest that was blocking the road, one lady who spoke no English said I could stay at her place if I couldn't find a hostel when I got into town, though I didn't take her up on it.

I missed my bus stop at a run down beach town with dirt roads in El Salvador and an old man insisted I hop on the back of his bike and he'd ride me to the hostel... I paid him money for that, even though he insisted that I didn't have to.

And, even aside from locals being friendly, if you're doing the lonely planet hostel circuit and are even remotely outgoing, you'll find tons of people from all over the world to travel with. I'm not particularly outgoing, and I was only on my own for two or three days at most at a time, before I found someone to hang out with.

I'm not even sure how much of it has to do with being white and American, and how much it has to do with being foreign. I had the same kind of experiences with random backpackers from other countries being super helpful as I did with locals.
posted by empath at 7:36 PM on November 4

Source: http://www.metafilter.com/121540/The-Life-of-a-Permanent-Nomad

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