Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. Today I want to share with you why I do not believe moving around is conducive to wealth.

Now you'll notice that I'm giving myself quite a broad scope of conversation here. By moving around I mean traveling a lot, but I also mean just frequently moving around. And in today's episode you can basically consider this a report from me, your intrepid experimenter, your intrepid investigator, about what I've learned of moving around a lot and trying on some, shall we say, alternative lifestyles and how I think that those things impact wealth.

My thesis is simply that moving around is not conducive to wealth for the vast majority of people. I want to leave a small caveat here for the point that moving around might be helpful to wealth for those who take jobs because changing jobs on an appropriately frequent schedule or going to places where there are jobs that pay highly can actually be a pretty decent strategy.

So this is from the professional, on the professional level, right, maybe you're a turnaround specialist that goes in and takes command of a failing company, works there for two years, fixes the major problems and then that company is sold. That might be a very highly profitable job. It could also be the case at the low end of the income scale.

There are people who only work during certain times of the year on a seasonal basis, but the seasonal labor that they do is actually pretty highly paid. So during the summer they might work as a concessionaire with a local fair of some kind or a carnival. Then they might go and sell Christmas trees for a time and then take several months off.

None of their jobs would be enough on an annual basis to support them, but because they're seasonal and they're moving around for that work, they can be highly paid jobs. There are various ways that you can apply that. But on the whole, I think that instability of location, moving around a lot, whether it's short term, medium term travel, as well as just simply moving is bad for wealth.

I want to tell you why in a little bit from my own experiences. For context, I lived for the first 30 plus years of my life a very stable existence. I lived in one town, we moved once or twice that I remember, but not frequently. I lived in one town in South Florida my entire lifetime.

I went to school in that same town, elementary school, high school, college. I built businesses and had jobs in that town. Because I lived that continual settled lifestyle, I was kind of like the fish in water, meaning I didn't see the advantages that were accruing to me from that stable lifestyle, from that settledness.

It was only after I started to lose those advantages that I became more aware of them. Take a fish out of water and he quickly understands, "Hey, the water was really nice. That was where I could breathe." Take a man out of a town where he's been stable and all of a sudden he starts to realize, "Wow, I lost out on a whole bunch of things that I couldn't make work because I'm not in that same place where I know how everything is done." That moving around has involved a few different expressions.

It's involved living in rentals, it's involved getting rid of ... My wife and I, we had a home, we had a stable lifestyle. Then we decided to give that up. We moved into a rental apartment. Then we decided to get rid of the rental apartment, move into an RV.

We RV'd around the United States. Then we decided to get rid of the RV, downsize more, jump in some suitcases and travel around the world. We bounced around the world, set up a couple of rental houses. Then we decided we would go travel again. This whole experience culminated with our adventures of 2020, excuse me, 2021, wherein we became full-time digital nomads in June, March, April, May, June, July, August, all the way through.

We spent about six months living as full-time digital nomads with nothing but literally six personal item under seat suitcases and one backpack. Let me begin by telling you honestly how I felt about it. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. Kind of that hardcore moving around, full-time digital nomad, just a set of small suitcases, which means we can get into any rental car, get into any bus, get in any airplane, setting off with nothing.

We had no rental house. We had no owned house. We had no mortgage, no nothing. I loved it. I have never felt freer in my whole life than I did during that period in 2021 when we were full-time digital nomads, going from Airbnb, Central America, Europe, all around, Airbnbs, hotels, et cetera.

I felt amazing during that time, amazingly free. I felt like we could enjoy all kinds of cool experiences. We could do fun things, have all kinds of great cultural experiences. I felt like we could literally go anywhere. We booked the whole trip with one-way tickets all along the way.

I was just booking them as we went. I felt like, "Hey, tomorrow we're going to go to Asia. Tomorrow we want to go to Europe. Tomorrow we're ready to go." It was amazing. There were also a whole long set of challenges that made it not as amazing as I'd always hoped that it was going to be.

That's where we get to the meat of what I want to talk about. For background, I want you to know that when I accomplished that goal this last year in 2021 of basically six months of digital nomading, it was in many ways the culmination of almost a 15-year goal.

I remember back in the mid-2000s, I was working at a corporate job. During my slacking time, I would read blogs. Some of those blogs were written by young digital nomads. Some of the unique things that they were doing at the time was to say, "Hey, look. I only own the things that are in my backpack." This came out when I was paying attention to the minimalist space.

It was, "Hey, I only own 100 things," or, "Everything I own fits in my backpack." There was a foundation of people who were gaining notoriety by moving frequently. There were remote web workers who would pick a new country every three months and move every 90 days. Or there were guys like Benny the Irish polyglot who would say, "Hey, I move every three months and learn a new language every 90 days." I was enamored by the ideas of what that lifestyle could entail because for me, traveling had always been a source of joy, of great pleasure.

I loved it. I thought, "Wow, what if I could do that as a lifestyle?" When I accomplished that in 2021, it felt pretty cool. It wasn't a major goal. It wasn't something I said, "I want to do now, now." I just woke up and said, "Hey, here's a chance for me to do it." I think the big difference, of course, that I want to acknowledge between the Joshua of 2006 and the Joshua of 2021 is that the Joshua of 2006 was a single adult male.

The Joshua of 2021 was a married father of four young children. But my wife and I are intrepid adventurers at heart, and we're not scared of a challenge, and we decided to do it even so. I'm glad we did. What I want to report to you as an outcome of that trip is it's not all that it's cracked up to be.

I think that most people find this to be the case. In fact, if I went back and I went through the list of so many people who have become full-time digital nomads, the vast majority of them are no longer doing it several years later because it sounds romantic, it seems wonderful, and there are many wonderful things about it.

But then you start to realize there's a lot of embedded wisdom in the traditional lifestyle that I didn't understand before. There are some things that I didn't recognize how important they were, and it's only when you lose those things or miss those things that you start to understand. In some ways, this has been the experience I've had time and time again.

You have this young, brash, aggressive desire to minimize the wisdom of the old ways, and then you go and you try your fresh radical ideas, and all of a sudden you realize, "You know what? There was a lot of embodied wisdom, and there was a lot of—I don't have a better word than wisdom—there was a lot of embodied wisdom in the old ways, and now I understand more of the wisdom behind those ways, why that emerged the way that it is." Let's talk about some of the costs of moving around frequently.

When I think about costs, I think about costs to my income, and I think about costs to my expenses. Let's begin with the most aggressive of moving around frequently, which is traveling. I worked hard, I have worked hard, and I have succeeded in developing a really, really good mobile office, a really good, productive mobile setup.

For most of us, a computer and a cell phone is pretty much all you need. A computer that can grab a local Wi-Fi signal if you have it, and a cell phone to create a Wi-Fi signal for that computer if you don't. We are so blessed to live in the age of connectedness, where it's easy to travel the world and be on the grid at virtually all times, and for remote workers, for those of us who make a living through communication, this is powerful.

I've been so fortunate, and I have loved working in so many interesting locations, and it's amazing to be able to sit down virtually anywhere, pop open a computer, put your cell phone there on the table, tether the two together, and boom, you're at work. It's incredible. You can get very high-speed connections, you can get 5G, very high data limits.

It's wonderful. Now, my job involves a little bit more gear, not too much. I, on occasion, do create podcasts directly from my phone, just like all of us create videos directly from our phone, et cetera, but I carry a little bit more professional gear. But I've done all kinds of stuff with just what fits in my backpack.

I have an amazing podcasting setup that allows me to have high-quality microphones and to do live Q&A shows using my cell phone and my computer and just the little pieces of gear that I carry with me. I've got a great camera. I've got all of the cool stuff that works really, really well.

The problem is not having a simple stability of where you work is a much bigger drag than you might think. The question is always, "Where can I find internet today and how fast is it? Is it actually usably fast or is it just okay, good enough?" Finding internet, you'd think, is pretty easy and in some ways it is, but then there's all these little things that crop up.

Where can I find internet where I can also be left alone to focus or where will it be quiet enough for me to do my work or where will I be allowed to sit and actually do it? Let me share a few rather humorous stories with you to prove this point.

To me, one of the most memorable for me happened near Thermopolis, Idaho during my family's RV wanderings around the United States. The way that we handled my work during our RVing days was that when we were moving the RV, when we were traveling from one place to another, I would usually do about a half day's worth of work.

The rhythm that we found worked well for us with having three young children at the time was to get up in the morning, have breakfast, and then after breakfast, break, camp, hook up and then drive from somewhere around usually 9 o'clock, 9.30, 10 o'clock to around noon, 12.30, 1 o'clock, do about three hours of driving.

There were many days where we did long marathon days, but we couldn't get anything else done on those days except drive. So a three-hour drive was really a nice fit for us. Check out of one campground, check into another. But then that meant that I needed to get to work.

So usually we would get to a campground. Our children's nap time is right around 1 o'clock and we're pretty committed nappers. So the goal was always to be in a campground set up by 1 o'clock, if at all possible, so that the children could nap. And then I would grab my gear and I would go and work.

And I would work for about three hours from say 1 to 4, 1 to 5, then we'd go on a walk, prepare dinner, etc. And then that would just be a half day's work or a few hours of work on those travel days. There was a problem though. I was finding that we were having more days where we were traveling, because we were traveling fast and there were more days when we were doing fun things and I wasn't getting as much work done as I wanted to get done.

And so I was feeling a little stressed. By the time we got to Idaho, I was feeling a lot stressed. And so we got to this little campground just south of Thermopolis, Idaho. And the goal was that afternoon to go up to the hot springs in Thermopolis. So we set up the camper and everything's good.

It's a fairly quiet campground. I parked the trailer. My wife starts getting the children to bed. I grab my gear and I make a beeline across the campground for an empty picnic table. And I think, "I've got it made. I can create a podcast all day while I'm driving around.

I'm thinking of the podcast. I got the whole outline. I'm ready to go." So I sit down, pull up my computer, pull up my microphone, set up my recorder. Everything's ready to go. And I hit record. "Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And I'm about three or four minutes in and the sprinklers come on right in the middle of the day, one o'clock.

And I start getting whacked with a sprinkler. And I'm making a mad dash to get my computer closed and get my recorder closed and grab my phone and all the stuff off the table, trying to shield it with my body from the sprinkler spray, feeling totally disillusioned, just saying, "What on earth am I going to do?

How am I going to make this happen? I thought working was going to be great." And it was great until it wasn't. And so I found it was a continual problem of, yeah, I could sit out under a picnic table, but it was too hot. And I was sitting and sweating.

Or it was too sunny and I couldn't see the screen. Or it was too cold. It was too windy. It was just always something with the external environment was difficult. I'll come back and tell you at the end of the show how I solved that because there are solutions for these things.

So whether it's an external weather problem or maybe it's something where you say, "Okay, I've got a better solution." Very little, only some of my work involves actually creating audio. Where when I create audio or video, I need to actually have a good environment around me. But a lot of times I just need to pop up on my computer and have an internet signal just like anybody else.

And so this happened a few months ago. We were in Savannah, Georgia, passing through Savannah. And we had a couple of days and my wife was good. We'd rented a nice home. Everything was good at home so I could go and work. And I went to the local library.

And I felt very rich being in the United States because there are libraries everywhere and they've got these big tables and you've got a great internet signal. They're quiet and you can work. It's like I could build a multi-million dollar business just sitting in the library. It's wonderful. So I go to the library and I'm sitting in Savannah, Georgia and I'm getting all this kind of work done.

Get in there around 10 o'clock when they open and it's around I think 12, just after 12, 12-15. Somebody comes and taps me on the shoulder and they say, "You have to go." I have to go? I'm just getting started, right? It's a public library. I'm planning to be here until 5 o'clock.

Well, no, we have COVID time limits where due to COVID, you're not allowed to be here for more than two hours. You're sitting there saying, "Well, does the virus like I've breathed out enough of the virus and in enough of the virus in two hours that it should be fine?

Like wouldn't it make more sense to have occupation limits?" But no, it's time limits. Okay, fine. So then you're back in it and you say, "Where am I going to go? Where do I go to sit and work?" And it's really annoying, but all of a sudden you face, because of your kind of transient lifestyle, you face this silly challenge of a COVID time limit at a public library.

So the solution to this is of course to establish better options, better solutions. So you rent co-working spaces. The co-working spaces are amazing, except that sometimes co-working spaces don't have all that you need. Right? This summer we were in Malta and I rented, we were there for a while.

We wanted to see all the stuff and tour all the sites and swim in the sea and we didn't want to travel fast. And so I rented, I took out a month-long pass at a local co-working facility and it was wonderful. It was a beautiful office. It was very affordable.

It was 600 bucks or something like that for the month's pass. And it was just going to be great. So they had a gym, they had a common area, everything was great. And then I needed to record video. And so I had a plan all set up where I'm going to record a bunch of videos.

I'm going to come in on Saturday when the office is empty because I got these really beautiful locations and it's going to be wonderful. So I'll come in on Saturday to do it. Well, you come in on Saturday and all of a sudden other people have the same idea.

And so you don't have enough control over your surroundings to actually get things done. And I can't record videos at home because of the noise level in the home. I can't record videos in a common space because of respect for other people. And so you're frustrated, right? You thought you had it and yet all of a sudden you don't.

And so there's always challenges of finding and setting up an appropriate work environment. And then even there's the little hassles. They don't seem like much, right? The time spent packing and unpacking your stuff. It doesn't seem like much of a hassle. But what happens is it often takes time to get into a state of flow where everything's just simply working.

And the more friction there is between you and flow, the harder it is to regularly get into flow. And so you want to minimize that friction. And the simple things of packing up and unpacking, firing up and shutting down, et cetera, is all these little annoyances that kind of mess with your brain and make it harder to get into your state of flow.

Other big, big challenge. It's extremely difficult to schedule your future work properly. Now some things are like time zones. Time zones are actually really not as hard as they once were in terms of getting them right. All of our devices, our calendar apps, everything works really well with time zones now.

What I do is I pick a time zone that I live on. The time zone that I live on is East Coast time because it's just a big standard time zone. And then I schedule everything in terms of East Coast time. And then by making sure that I'm careful whenever I put calendar appointments in, et cetera, I put the time zone in properly.

And then the phone and everything just figures it out for me and it keeps me on track. The challenge is, well, what if you move all of a sudden last second? And then what if today there's a market or a beautiful festival or something? Well, rats, I scheduled that at the wrong time and now I can't get that thing done.

Or more difficult and much bigger deal is where am I going to be able to get my deep focus work done? I've had a long string of classes and courses that I have planned to create and release. Several of these have been collaborative. Some of them have been on my own.

And what has happened is every time I was sure that I was going to schedule my month in this place and I was going to have the location that I needed to perform that long work of recording the videos, recording the audio, recording the classes, all of a sudden something would happen and I wasn't able to do it.

And that's really frustrating because it affects your income and it affects your ability to actually do the work because there are times when you need to do the really important work and you don't do that sitting on a beach, getting sand in your keyboard, scratching up your screen, picking up mosquitoes.

Nobody works on a beach with a laptop. And so the stuff piles up, right? You can hear even the tension and the frustration in my own voice as I just simply tell you the stories. And then another challenge to your income, it's hard to maintain your energy when you're moving around a lot.

Traveling and dealing with logistics and the fresh decisions every day is very tiring. It's very tiring to be moving a lot and figuring out where do I go. So the best way to handle this is of course slow travel. But then when you're doing slower travel, then you wonder, "Shouldn't I get better digs?" It's one thing to pop down to the hotel lobby and have a good couple of productive hours sitting in the restaurant or in the side of the lobby.

That's great. But then doing that every single day, week after week, it's old. And so if you're going to be moving more slowly, you want to have a solution. That's where, again, the coworking space comes in. You rent a month at a coworking space, but then the coworking space isn't good enough and you really wish for the benefits of your own private office.

You wish for the ability to take a call without having to step outside and walk around in circles or without having to schedule the Skype room in advance. All the little stuff just simply adds up. So my point is that you can generate income while traveling around. And I'm so blessed.

You're so blessed. We're all fortunate to live in the time and age in which we do. What happens is after you get past the initial excitement, some of these little things really wear on you. And you realize that for me to operate at my best, I need to have good infrastructure set up.

I need to have good infrastructure set up. So can you solve these things? Yes, you can solve them, which is where we move on to the expenses, the expenses of moving around a lot. The challenge is when you solve them, you start spending extra money, a lot of money sometimes, for suboptimal solutions.

And I'll work my way through some of the solutions that really do work. They really do. But yet sometimes you wonder, "Is this really what I want to do?" So when you don't have consistent internet, meaning a good stable home network or good stable office environment, then you need to have backups.

So I have multiple cell phones and I have multiple cell phone plans from multiple regions of the world. Why? Well, because I want to make sure that I always have what I need. I make money from a phone. And so it's not a luxury for me to say, "Oh, I have two phones." It's a tool.

And no carpenter would have a single hammer. No electrician would have a single pair of wire cutters. You need something as a backup. And so when you make money from your phone and from your computer, you have backups. And I have multiple levels of backups. But that adds expense and it adds hassle.

And the reality is none of those backups work as well as the traditional model. If I have my own office, I can put in a high-speed fiber optic, whatever, bazillion gigabyte connection and a really good high-quality stable network. I don't need to have backup after backup of a cell phone.

And everything would work great. And I could get online and I could do wonderful video conferences and I could do great YouTube lives and it would all just work. But you have to wind up maintaining multiple cell phones, multiple cell phone plans, knowing to carry them around. It's a hassle to use them and they're always suboptimal.

They're never great. They're just good enough. They get the job done most of the time, barely good enough. And then that moves out, right? Other expenses. With traveling a lot, you think, "Okay, I'm going to be here in this certain place." But every single time I have been here in a certain place, I've wound up leaving early.

So I rent a place for a month in a co-working space and then three weeks in, we decide to leave. I rent a place for multiple months on Airbnb thinking, "Okay, we're going to be stationary," and then I leave early. And so you're always leaving little money on the table, which on the whole, it's not that big of a deal, but it adds up.

It adds up. It adds up. And you're annoyed because now you're spending extra money, but it's not actually getting you a great solution. It's barely getting you an adequate solution. And that's annoying. You need quiet, right? I need quiet. And so what do I do? I always rent a second hotel room.

And so I have one hotel room that is for us, and the other second hotel room is my office. And that's fine. You can do it. It works. But again, it's annoying when it doesn't work well. And you think, "If only I just had one office. If I just had one stationary office where everything worked, imagine what I could get done." You could solve the solutions in other ways, right?

I told you I'd tell you how I solved my problem when we were on our RV trip. I bought two RVs, and I had a second RV. And so the original plan, I had a pickup truck, and we had a travel trailer, a bumper pull travel trailer. That was what we started with.

But after the sprinkler incident south of Thermopolis, Idaho, I went and I bought an in-bed truck camper, and that was my office. And so I bought a second RV, put it on the pickup truck, and that way we would have our house and we would have an office. And so then I could get out of the sun, out of the wind, out of the cold, out of the heat, out of the sprinklers, and I could drive my truck somewhere, and I could set up in there, and I could work.

And by the way, that was actually a really great solution. I'll get to it at the end of the show. I'll give you some recommendations as to how you can actually do this and make it work. And I think that that is a really, really high-quality, good solution. But the expenses start to get annoying.

You also spend, because of moving around a lot, you wind up spending a lot of money on servants and services. So when you're traveling, you don't have access to a good kitchen or kitchen equipment, so you eat out a lot. Or if you move frequently, you just change your house and you move frequently, you wind up having, "Oh, my stuff's in boxes," and so you wind up eating out a lot.

You wind up using other people to launder your clothes. You wind up using other, you just constantly are paying other people to do stuff. And then you have the cost of the time. Whenever you move, you have to figure out, "How am I going to do this?" And so you say, "Oh, I'm in a new place.

I need to get a new local SIM card." Well, can I do it easily? Do I speak the language? Who has the best plan? Is it going to work? Is it going to set up and work? In Europe, I needed data, and so I went and I grabbed a local SIM card, and I thought it was going to be great, except that then the SIM had a lock code on it.

And so every single time, I had to put in the lock code, and just, again, little frustrations. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it keeps you from being as productive as you would like to be. And so there's a constant stream of expenses that are associated with travel. Same thing that happens, there's a constant stream of expenses that are associated with moving frequently.

There's the cost of moving. There's the cost of setting up utilities. There's the cost of decorating a new house, cost of swapping out furniture, getting rid of stuff, buying new stuff. "Oh, I thought I didn't need that. I can get rid of it." It's just, there's a constant stream of costs.

So what I have learned is moving frequently is not conducive to generating as much income as otherwise. Moving a lot is not ideal. It can be done, and there can be great adventures that are a result of it. If I were going back three years, I would make exactly the same decisions that I've made, and I would deal with all the hardship, partly because it's been fun.

I've enjoyed the adventure, partly because it allows me to share with you some of the things that I have learned, et cetera. But it's been fun, and what has happened is it's created a greater appreciation of the value of stability. But what I want to tell you is, if you think that you're going to be as productive while you're on the road, just because you can pop open your laptop and code, or just because you can pop open your laptop and write, you are deluding yourself, as I myself have done.

As I myself have deluded myself significantly on this topic, you are deluding yourself. It's not possible. It's not possible to be as productive on the road, moving around, as it is for you to simply be stationary. So what are some solutions? What are some things that I think will work really well?

I think that remote working has its place, and can be a really great lifestyle for many people. I think the first thing to look at is to say, "Can the remote working open up something to me that is not otherwise available, such that I'm willing to deal with the hassles?" I love kind of the RV lifestyle, RV living, RV travel.

And I know of a lot of families who live in an RV, and dad has a traditional job, and he's sitting at his desk from 9 to 5, he's got to be there. And he's got some dinky little makeshift solution working, and everyone's trying to be quiet so he can do it.

And he's dealing with the hassle and the frustration because of what it opens up to him. It opens up the chance to take his family on an adventure. And they're loving it. And I think that if you look at it and you say, "Would I rather deal with some of these frustrations and annoyances, and also be able to see the world, travel to 12 countries this year, or RV to 20 states, and I'll just deal with the frustrations and be able to do it?" You can do it.

And as I've said, it can be worth it. It really can be worth it because by eliminating perhaps your home expenses, you open up a chance to do something totally different, and that can be transformative for your family. That can be wonderful, a wonderful solution. It can be well worth it.

It's worth putting up with those hassles if you wouldn't otherwise have a chance to do something. And you just accept as kind of cost of doing business the fact that I'm going to have diminished productivity here. And I'm choosing to accept the diminished productivity because I have something else that is going to be a much better solution for me, something else that I'm going to be able to do.

Another thing that you can do is you can invest into – before I do that – people who I think are actually very well suited for the traveling lifestyle is going to be individuals without children. If I were single, I would live in an RV full-time, and I would work in the RV, and I would love it.

I would move around. I would love it. Whether I did it all year or whether I just did it for three or four months of the year would be no problem. And in today's world, you can solve the Internet issues pretty well. If you're in your own RV, you can solve your noise problems, you can solve the environment problems, and you can be extremely productive.

I would love that. Many of my challenges simply come from children, and those are challenges that I embrace eagerly. But I do think that it works well to be productive as an individual as long as you don't have the difficulties of dealing with children. Similar things to things like hotel rooms.

I don't believe you're going to build an eight-figure business bouncing around a different hotel room every week. That's just too draining. It's not there that you can't do the work. You can set up in a hotel room, and you can have a computer, and you can have your phone, and you have a computer.

You can have a good work scenario when you're by yourself. I find when I travel and I'm by myself in hotel rooms, it's wonderful. It's very productive. It's not the same problems. The problem with that kind of bouncing around is, well, can I actually maintain my own personal energy well enough to do it?

Or can I actually deal with the hassles of travels? When the flights are delayed and things are canceled and everything becomes more difficult, can I do it then? Or it's a matter of, do I actually need to manage my staff? You're not going to get there alone, so you need to manage people.

You don't want to be reliant on a tenuous 3G connection in a foreign country when there is a real great market opportunity on the horizon. I think single people can do the digital nomad thing much more effectively than parents can do it. It may be something that you just decide, this is great for a certain time of our life.

There are lots of people, empty nesters for example, who have raised their children, and they've said, "You know what? We don't have enough money to retire. Nor do we necessarily want to retire. We're going to work, but what we'll just do is let's take our work on the road.

Let's get a nice RV or let's go and do multi-month rentals at nice places." By the way, Airbnb has a new thing now where you can test your internet speed, which is a useful feature to know, am I going to have pretty decent internet at this house? So the travel can be a great way to keep an income coming in while also continuing on and enjoying the adventures that are different than what you've previously done.

The next thing is investing in the right equipment. Every time I have invested in the right equipment, it has paid off. I've never wasted money by buying the right equipment. Every time I bought something that was just good enough, I've regretted it. And so if we expand that, I think one of the challenges, many of the challenges that I have faced have often been simply due to being too cheap and not investing properly in the right tools.

And when I have purchased the right tools, it's made all the difference in the world. Example, when I actually bought that second camper on our RV trip, everything changed. It was not still perfect. It was challenging still, but I made a lot of money from the back of that camper.

It was hard sometimes to find the right location. I'd be sitting in some coffee shop somewhere recording a class or something that I was doing, but I made a lot of money because I had better equipment. And so investing into the proper infrastructure and doing it as a cost of doing business is I think important.

I'm going to have a standalone trailer. I'm going to have a standalone office. It's going to be set up properly. It's going to have the very best cell phone repeaters. It's going to have the very best MIMO system, the very best mesh network that works with my whole system.

That's the way to do it. And investing into the right infrastructure of your life can pay dividends as long as you're in some place where there is an opportunity for you to make more money. It really is worth it. I think the ultimate lifestyle, the best lifestyle, if you have kind of the bug to move around a lot, the best lifestyle is to simply not try to do it on the cheap, but to say, "I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to set things up properly." If you want to have multiple homes, I think that's ideal, but multiple homes with proper offices, right?

You want to have a multiple, your house with your office where everything is set up, where you can go in and you know everything is going to work, and you can sit down and be productive. That might mean I have one primary house and then I have a house that I go to every year for the summer, or I have a second home, or I have three of the houses across the world.

But just going ahead and planning ahead and saying, "Here's what's necessary for me to be productive. What's necessary is that I have a good internet signal, that I have a quiet environment, that I have enough space to set up a video camera," or whatever your personal needs are, and then committing it to it.

Not everybody creates media. Not everybody needs a video camera. Not everybody needs as much space even as I need. I have gotten lots of great work done by just simply taking a large closet and putting in a table. Again, I share some of the tips that I've learned. One of the first things that I do is if I'm in a new location, I'm going to be there a month, I find that I don't like leaving the house to go to work if I can avoid it.

So I usually grab a master bedroom closet, a walk-in closet. I'll pop into Costco or Walmart, grab a folding table, a folding chair, buy them, set them up, just leave them in the house when I go. It makes all the difference in the world to have a good place where everything can stay set up and I can get my work done.

So the best lifestyle is going to be just simply buckling down and recognizing it's not optional for me to have this. It's not just in the same way that it's not optional for a contractor to have the necessary tools to do his work. It's not optional for me to have the tools that are necessary to do my work.

One of those tools that I need is a computer, a quiet space, a good internet connection, a microphone, a video camera, whatever your personal needs are. Make sure that you have those. Then you also can adjust your travel to that. So for example, there are many great YouTube video makers who their life looks glamorous but it's actually not quite the way it looks.

They will have two or three days of adventure, they'll film it and then they sit still for three or four days to edit videos, handle the business, etc., do their calls. I think that's where it's also valuable to look at and say back to the complications of children, right?

Because we homeschool then it's kind of you're always on in that context. Yes, we don't do formal academics every day. We do lots of world schooling, etc. But there's something about saying, "Hey, there are work days and there are rest days." When you're homeschooling though, every day is a work day because you're always in charge of supervision.

You don't send the children away to school, thus you don't have the breaks to be able to work on your own things for sure during those times because someone else is doing childcare. And so those demands are high and thus it leads to more complications. I do think that there's a place for traveling around as kind of a part-time thing.

I don't anticipate – I'm always careful with these statements. I think I've got it cautious enough. I don't anticipate ever again becoming a full-time digital nomad the way that we did for the six months of last year. I enjoyed it. I loved it. I felt totally free and I loved it.

But I don't anticipate doing it again because it was too disruptive. The costs of kind of reintegrating and the costs of doing it all again and the cost of the time and everything like that is too disruptive. I think I will always keep at least a primary house even if it's empty.

I don't care about the money. I'll always keep a primary house because it smooths everything out at least for the foreseeable future while we have children. I won't do the digital nomad full-time thing again. What I will do and what I think is great is enjoy the fact that we can do more mobile work and let it add a little bit of spice to life.

And so it's actually fun to go for a week or two weeks or a month and do a working holiday on the road. It's a really neat lifestyle to say, "You know what? Let's go spend a month in London and I'm going to work every morning from 8 a.m.

to noon and I'll rent a second hotel room to work in. But then in the afternoon we'll do cultural stuff." That's really fun or even on a smaller basis. One of the things that I talked about how I love having the pickup truck camper. I've actually over the years when I've had trouble focusing in my primary office, I've found that going somewhere else with a specific focus has been great.

And so there was one time a few years ago, actually the income course. I created the entire income course sitting in a local park and I carried a table with me and every day I would go and I didn't have internet signal. And all I did was work on it and record.

And so using an external place was very good for my personal productivity. Now go set up my table in the park, set up my gear. At that time I didn't even have it as compact as I have it now and get the work done. And you can solve with a simple inverter.

You can grab all the power you need from your car. For most of us there's no problem there. Or grab an extra battery. I would carry an extra deep cycle battery with me and it worked great. Another solution that I think is great for creative folks, just people who want to have a change is grab yourself a little cargo trailer.

Something like a 10-foot cargo trailer that you can pull behind your vehicle. Put in the cargo trailer a desk and a chair and then put in a nice recliner. Just grab a nice lazy boy type recliner and put that in there. Or maybe a futon sofa. And then have that be your mobile office.

You can take it to a beautiful place, take it to a beautiful park, open the door, look at the mountains, take it to a beautiful river. Find some place that's different and you can pop your laptop on the desk. You can get just as much writing done or just as much planning and goal setting and things done.

That's what I've done most of the time. And yet having that chance to be productive out of the office is really refreshing. And you're covered in the – you've got protection from the sun, protection from the wind, protection from noise even. And yet you can see something different outside of your door.

And so it's not that traveling around is always a bad thing. It's just that you need to be aware of what your particular situation is and then learn from other people. In summary, for me, I don't think that I'll do the full-time digital nomad thing again. There may be times, right?

Maybe when the children get older we'll do the RV thing again. We might do a sailing thing at some point. We might just travel. But right now my plan is to stick to my three months on, one month off. Three months on, one month off. Three months of intense work in a standard traditional setup and then one month off to travel, to do whatever we want, to have a wacky schedule.

Three months on, one month off is my plan. And then we'll see how it goes. As always, I'll keep you in the loop. Thank you so much for listening. Hope these ideas and my experiences are helpful to you. Remember if you'd like my personal help, you can book a call with me at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult.

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