Over the past twelve months, I have pretty much told you everything. Shared my intimate life details with you through this blog.

Some members of my family think I’m mental. Why would you want to share your private life with strangers they ask.

My answer? To show people what it’s like. So that they can know that whatever it is they dream of doing, they can do it – be it travelling the world, changing career paths or finding an online location independent job so that they can be at home with their kids more.

If I can do it anyone can do it. You just have to be brave. And in my case, consume lots of wine.

Some of you know that we spent the last twelve months backpacking around the world with our two teenagers. I loved it, we all did. It was without a doubt the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.

But there’s a slight problem. Taking a trip like that changes you. You come back home with different priorities.

Taking a year out has transformed the way we want to live our lives and being able to travel for extended periods of time is now very high on the important list.

You know how sometimes you are afraid to do something because you know it will stir up a whole lot of emotions and you will end up doing something crazy? Well, that’s us at the moment.

You can’t come back from a trip like that and slot back into normal life. You just can’t. Not without lots of tears or a fighting spirit. And I’ve got bucket loads of both.

So what do you do when you return home to normality and don’t want to live the old life that you had before you left?

You make a plan.

A crazy plan, ’cause you’re allowed to be crazy when you’re nearly 50. You get to blame it on the change and the fact that you were given lots of plastic straws as a child.

 

A Plan to Live Differently

 

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that deciding to change the way you live is easy. It’s not. Certainly not at first anyway.  But if it were easy everyone would do it and then you wouldn’t feel special, would you?

Changing your life takes courage and trust. Trust in yourself but mostly in your intuition. Know that your intuition is not very often wrong.

Back to my plan. Here’s how it looks.

You proceed to tell everyone about your plan by blogging about it, and then you lay awake at 3 am worrying yourself to death about the fact that you’ve told the world you are going to change your life, and now you feel like a big fat liar who suffers from imposter syndrome.

And you still use clingfilm.

We have been back home in New Zealand for two months. Apart from having a couple of days break at Christmas, we have worked our bums off putting our plan into action. Making our new location independent lives not just a dream but a reality.

 

What Does Location Independent Mean?

 

Location-independent is a posh and trendy way of describing a job that you can do anywhere in the world from your laptop. Obviously, I know this because I am both trendy and without a doubt, very posh.

For eight years before our trip, I took the kids out of school and homeschooled them which I loved.  Brian worked as a gasfitter in his business that took him away from us for fifty hours a week. Which was crap.

We would try and make plans about how to change our lives, but when you only have a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon and you have to cut the hedge and sort out the socks there’s not much chance of making a plan for dinner, let alone travelling the bloody world.

I get it. Honestly, I do.

 

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What Do You Need From Life?

 

I don’t know about you but here’s what I don’t need.

I don’t need to be mega rich. I have never wanted this. I couldn’t give a toss if people drive a Tesla or a battered pickup truck as long as they let my kids put the windows down when the A/C is on and have plenty of doggy poo bags in the glove box.

I couldn’t care less if you are wearing a channel cardigan that you ordered online or if you are wearing a fleecy grey pyjama top, the baggy one that you can wear without your bra.

In my opinion, Chanel is overrated. All the tops look like oblong Mister Men outfits.

 

To Be Able To Travel More.

 

What I need is for us to be able to travel. To change locations if and when we feel like it. I want us to never feel trapped in a fifty-hour a week job ever again. I need to know that I can go to Asia for a month and still be able to earn money.

That’s it.

Oh, and for Central Otago Pinot Noir to be on sale more often.

 

 

How To Make It Happen

 

Luckily, this is easily achieved.

Ok, maybe not easily achieved. It certainly doesn’t feel like it’s easily anything at the moment, but let’s say doable. It is certainly doable.

Far more so than buying a Tesla or finding a bra that doesn’t dig into your back.

Brian and I have done lots of jobs in our past thirty years together, ranging from gym instructors to property developers, but we have never made money online. Never had an independent location job. Not once.

But this year is when we will reinvent ourselves and jump into another adventure and I want you by my side when I do it.

 

How Much Money Do You Need To Live?

 

I don’t know about you, yours might be more or a lot less, but for us, to have a nice lifestyle and be able to travel, buy wine and pay for the kids driving lessons and stuff,  we need approximately $1000 a week.

 

How Do You Plan To Make This Income?

 

Here’s the secret. We are not planning on making that income from one source. Right now, that would be too stressful and unless we strike it lucky and I get a book deal, it’s probably not going to happen within the next few months.

So.

We will channel our efforts into three smaller income sources. All Location independent, all online. Each making approx $400 a week.

Now, that sounds very doable, doesn’t it?

 

Independent Location Job #1

 

A Blog

 

Believe it or not, you can actually make money from blogging. Some bloggers claim to be making six figures.

I know.

But I’m a newbie, so, for now, I don’t get to play in the big shark playground.

That’s ok.  I’m happy to be a tadpole in the big pond. Well. Maybe a Guppy fish.

I have been blogging for a year, and I must say, apart from wine and travel, it’s the best thing in my life. I love it. But I don’t want it to get to the point where, because it is our only source of income I become a slave to it and end up resenting it.

Blogging is my creative outlet, a wonderful way to spend hours on end. When we were travelling, I worked on my blog every day, and as a result, it has grown into a profitable (albeit small) blog which is growing every day.

A Blog that given time, could foreseeably make $500 a week no problem.

 

 

 

An Online Store Connected To The Blog.

 

Yes, this is a tag-along to the blog, but the idea and the income are entirely separate

In July we stayed with a friend in Germany. I say, friend, I’d never met this woman before in my life, but she was a regular reader of my blog and kindly contacted me offering us a bed for three days so that we could experience Germany.

Me, being the skinflint that I am of course accepted, much to the horror of my teenagers who were convinced that this woman was a psycho killer from hell and that we’d all be slain in our beds.

As it turned out the woman didn’t kill us all and we became friends. While I was there, she asked me why I didn’t have a shop on my blog, selling items that I had found around the world.

Lightbulb moment.

Fast forward three months and here’s what I did.

 

Selling Hippy Pants

 

As some of you may know, I love harem pants. The truth is, I love any kind of pants that make me look like a cool hippie chick and don’t require me to hold my stomach in.

When we arrived in Thailand, I searched for manufacturers who made those pants that I loved so much. I tried on 100 pairs before giving the owner of the factory $500, putting the pants into two big bin bags and carrying them all the way home to New Zealand.

They are currently sitting in my spare room waiting to be sold on my It’s a Drama shop.

If I sell these pants to only 1% of my readers, then I could make enough money to move the bags out of my spare room and into a fulfilment centre, meaning that they would take care of the delivery side of things. Yes, they would take a small cut, but it would mean that I could be location independent

In case you don’t know, a fulfilment centre is another name for a big warehouse that holds all of your stock. When an item is ordered from your website the fulfilment centre ships the goods out to customers for a small percentage.

Location-independent job number 2 taken care of. Tick.

I just hope to god it works or I’ll be lying in my coffin in forty years covered over in Harem pants and octopus silver bangles.

 

 

Location Independent job #3. Drop-Shipping

 

This time, we won’t use a fulfilment centre.

We will decide what products we are going to sell.

We build a website in which to market the goods.

We get orders (yay!)

We contact the supplier of these products and say “we’ve got an order! Yay!” She says ” Yay! Where do you want us to ship it to?”

The supplier then ships the products straight to the customer.

The customer has paid us; we pay the supplier. Job done.

All we have to do is sell the products on a website that we own.

The trick here is finding the right product to sell and then sourcing a supplier who will ship the item directly for you. This, my friends, (in very basic terms) is what is known as drop shipping.

 

 

Don’t You Have To Be An Internet Whizz For All Of This?

 

I hope not or else I’m stuffed.

 

Twelve months ago I thought that a laptop was called a labtop because they were designed for people who worked in labs.

I had never heard of SEO and believed that Google was a big pink elephant that sat in the clouds waving his trunk at satellites.

I started my blog and was so absolutely clueless on how anything worked I employed a website designer to do everything for me.

Our year away has taught us many things. Brian, who is a plumber, gasfitter and electrician by trade has taught himself how to build websites. He is quite the whizz. So much so that as we speak, he is making a website that will be our new online store.

I am teaching myself marketing and everything that goes with e-commerce. Because I want it to succeed.

Once this website has been built we plan to find suppliers and start to sell. Something that we can do from anywhere in the world because we won’t have to hold stock.

 

Related Posts That You Will Enjoy!

 

House sitting. How we saved ten grand while we travelled through Europe.

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Optimist or pessimist. Something has to change around here.

How to travel with kids and remain sane until wine o’clock

 

 

So That’s Me And My Location Independent Jobs Plan.

 

Yes, there are days when I want to beg Brian to go back to work. To bring in a regular income so that I can relax and book myself into the local beauty salon for some electrolysis.

But what would that gain? I would be right back to how we were a year ago. Just without a hairy face and no stories to share with you.

And, while it’s true that on any given day I go from being wonder woman to feeling like a scared mouse who is terrified of failing and looking like an idiot, deep down I know beyond a doubt that I can make this work and we can have the location independent lifestyle that we dream of.

So I’m sticking to the plan. For mine and your sake.

I’m telling you about our plans to make these location independent jobs work so that you and I can live this journey together. To see what all the fuss is about. I have a feeling that making changes to your lifestyle is something you want to achieve too. Am I right?

Hold my hand then. Not that tight, you’ll aggravate my raised veins.

Ok. Let’s show the world that whatever it is you want to do is possible.

Drop me a comment below and let me know what you think and if you can let me know about any other independent location jobs. And remember, if you know of anyone who could do with a gentle push please share this post.