So, I got a job I can do while traveling. (You can too.)
Update: Over the course of some Skype interviews and emails I managed to land a job based out of Silicon Valley, back in California.
I’m working in the same field I was back when I lived in San Francisco, online community management. Except instead of heading in to the office each day, I’m logging on to my workstation from beaches in Cambodia, rooftop bars in Phnom Penh, balconies in Vietnam. I took my interviews from a hut on the beach and the TV room in my hostel.
my new office
I have kind of a sick habit of reading job descriptions for fun, even when I’m not job hunting. I didn’t intend to work on this trip, but this opportunity was pretty perfect, and it hurt my brain not to apply. It’s part time, flexible hours, deals heavily with a subject (politics) I spend a lot of time reading about anyways, and I can do it from anywhere I have an internet connection.
Before this I was just traveling using my white collar work savings from the past three years and, while I won’t be making enough to comfortably live on if I was still in California, it will more than cover my Southeast Asian travel expenses. This also gives me the freedom to travel longer, venture to more expensive places (hellooo Australia), and not worry so much about the extra dollar here and there (add cheese for 5000 dong? what the hell, let’s do it).
Anyways, due to the fact that I’ll now be spending 20+ hours a week working on my computer, the frequency of posts may slow down a bit on this blog. But hopefully not. This experience was always to learn more about myself and the places I visit, and that’s still my first priority.
I’m lucky to work in an internet-based field, but you don’t have to be in order to make extra cash like this while you travel. In a future post I’ll go over some of the other options you have to make money wherever you are via the internet. I’ve worked in web-based positions for over 5 years now, and first telecommuted (from Australia!) 4.5 years ago, and the opportunities have only multiplied since then. The internet is kind of my favorite thing ever, for many reasons, and I’ll detail some of the ways people located everywhere in the world have been using it to make extra money.
