To get around I have a little scooter. Brand new it cost a little under $1500. It’s the most expensive thing I own, and that is a total workhorse. If I’m not using it, one of the girls who works for me is running to the store on it. It covers all of our transportation needs. I can load two giant surfboards on it every day and hit the waves when the tide is high. Petrol is around $20 a month. You can’t even drive around in your car for a single day in America spending that little.
Living abroad lets you lower your costs, and that means you don’t have to put in as many hours. There is less pressure.
I value freedom above massive income. I just took a break writing this book to go in the kayak with my whole family. We jammed around for a few hours and had a blast. Now I can slip back to the office nook to put in some more time writing. In case you are confused, my office is in the corner of my giant bedroom facing the ocean. It’s just physically isolated enough so that I work when I’m over there, but the moment I step away I only think island thoughts.
As soon as you are willing to look at other countries, you will be shocked at what it costs to live there.
The news makes other countries seems scary so that you will never want to leave. They use fear to maintain the fourth chain. If people realized how cheap it was to live abroad, everyone in America would be jumping ship.
134
Internet
There are two different high-speed Internet choices on my remote tropical island. They have entirely different approaches to the Internet, so I’ll explain how they both work, and you can think about it as you make your escape plan.
With one company, you get better than 20MBs download speeds and upload is sometimes even faster. They have massive data caps on all their plans, so those are unusable. The best choice is to pay for time. I pay around fifty cents an hour and can download as much as I need to. Some of my courses require me to move over one hundred gigabytes of data so that speed is crucial.
I just started using the other provider for my daily use. With them, I pay just under sixty-five cents a gigabyte on my new plan. It works out better for me. I don’t have to watch the clock constantly and worry that my Internet will switch off. I use one for daily use and one for moving large files.
For example, if I want to download a video game, I want to pay for time because the file is going to be huge. But if I’m just sending emails, then I want to pay for volume.
It’s a little bit of a game and most people only need one service or the other. Even with two services, I still pay less than a third of my Internet bill when I was in America.
135
Health
Many people are trapped in America because they are terrified by the idea of a trip to a foreign hospital.
You can’t turn on a TV with some politician bragging about how the US has “the best healthcare in the world.” Unfortunately, that is a lie. The United States has one of the worst healthcare systems among industrialized countries. It ranks 37th overall!
If you’ve ever actually worked with the healthcare system in America; if you struggled to make it through the tangled web of HMO’s and mandated insurance plans in Silver, Gold and Bronze, Medicare, Medicaid, the Veteran’s Administration and all the rest, then you know that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
The quality of care isn’t bad, but it’s not very affordable, either.
If you’re going to make it in another country, you need to have a mental shift about the way you view your health.
[Since writing the original draft of this book, I went to the hospital in Thailand. You can ready about that entire experience on my blog.]
This is a book about taking control of your destiny, and health is certainly a part of that. In the West, we eat like pigs, avoid exercise like the plague, and hope a doctor will swoop in and solve those inevitable problems when they arise.
I’m a lot more proactive out here, and you’ll need to do the same thing.
In the past year, I have dropped fifty pounds and the year before that I quit smoking. It helps that the local diet is so much healthier. Remember when we talked about the snacks being out of reach at my house? Well, think about that on a national scale. Even if you’re eating out all the time, there’s simply not the temptation to eat some of the insane stuff they serve in the USA.
When things do go wrong, and that’s life, you can rest assured knowing that you will pay forty percent or less of the cost for the same procedure in America. There is a reason medical tourism is on the rise. Bypass surgery in America is going to set you back seventy-five grand at least. In the Netherlands, you are going to spend 1/6th of that at fifteen thousand dollars. That’s a huge difference in price. Suddenly, those insane insurance premiums in America don’t make sense. I don’t live in a medical tourism destination. But there are three JCI-certified hospitals within a 2-hour flight, and if it’s really bad, I can be at a medical tourism destination the same day. If I wake up and need heart surgery, I can be in an underpriced tier-1 facility filled with western-trained doctors by mid-afternoon. I take care of myself, get regular checkups, and try not to worry about that stuff, just like ordinary people who live out in the country in America.
Health is just another fear that they use to control us. We had my latest child locally. The looks of the hospital were abysmal. Compared to Western standards, it was shocking. But a lot of what we think we need in a hospital in America is just overpriced hype. We had zero complications and an easy delivery - at about ten percent of what you pay in America even with good insurance. This place delivers babies all day long without problems. It turns out that a lot of what you pay for in America doesn’t make a difference.
I’m not saying there aren’t great doctors in America. I just want you to realize that there are great doctors all over the world who charge a great deal less for the same experience. There’s not some special magic knowledge that comes from practicing medicine in the United States.
If you are worried about medications, prescriptions here cost pennies on the dollar. Most prices in America are artificially inflated to cover the costs of all those good looking pharmaceutical sales reps that spend all day schmoozing doctors and slipping them money to prescribe you their medicines.
If you do make the move abroad, the most important step is to start taking responsibility for your health. No matter where you live, being healthy can extend your life for thirty years or more. The sooner you take your health seriously, the better.
XXI
Travel Secrets
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
― G.K. Chesterton
136
A Trip Abroad
Phone calls with my dad always end awkwardly. I try to keep things positive – I talk about the kids, I talk about kayaking, I talk about the cool people I’m meeting. But inevitably, it ends with him talking about some terrible story he heard on the news.
“I just hear crime is so bad out there.”
If you only get your information from the news and the government, you might think that I live in a third-world hellhole. In fact, if you get your information from the news, you probably believe that the US is a war zone too! Maybe there was an excuse for falling for that thirty years ago, but these days the real information is literally at your fingertips.
This fake news is just another way that they use fear to control us.
Get online and research. There are communities of expats all over the world, based in every country so that you can find online discussions easily. And if something important is happening in the country, the odds are pretty good they’re talking about it. This is an excellent way to get a feel for exactly how dangerous some amazing countries actually are.
You already know that most other countries are cheap. The only reason people pay exorbitant prices abroad is ignorance. They don’t do any research beyond visiting the most popular hotel price aggregators. That’s the most simplistic way to use the Internet. Ther
e are tons of great books about the art of traveling skillfully. I just want to give you a real taste for how you can get out into the world without breaking the bank.
137
Longer Trips are Cheaper
Most people think that if a one-week trip costs a thousand bucks, a two-week trip will cost two thousand. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The most expensive part of most trips is the flight. The more people in your family, the more brutal those flights become. If you stay in high-end hotels and book everything online, you will massively overpay. Poor planning can inflate the cost of your trip.
But if you apply just a little strategy, you can come out way ahead. Even most fancy hotels offer a discount for extended stays. Get off the Internet and pick up the phone! You can save a lot of money on any trip that lasts longer than five days.
Where I live right now, the price is the same for ten days or thirty, because I came in person and negotiated a good long-term price. I do that over the phone all the time, but I happened to already be on the island. Some people book around me constantly. Some of them just pay the online price, but the smart people email and get a massive discount.
You can rent a whole house or apartment long-term quite quickly now. When the flight is the most expensive part, and the hotel cost is the lowest, extending your trip lowers your cost per day. That’s the value in taking a longer trip. The price of a house rental doesn’t change for one person or four. So the size of your family doesn’t affect the price. But plane tickets cost four times as much for an average sized family.
When you are looking at trying out a new place, I recommend booking for a month. You will be in a position to get an actual taste for the country and to also massively cut down on your costs.
When you plan a traditional short vacation, you have to budget in some serious expenses. Food in hotels and airports is always really expensive. We eat in restaurants way more on holiday than we do at home. If you are a little more strategic and rent an apartment or house, cook your own food, and rent a car instead of emptying your wallet for taxis, you can slash your costs and spend that money having fun experiences.
138
Cruise Secrets
Twice a year, all the cruise ships in the world move around. Ships in Europe move to the Eastern United States. Ships on the west coast shoot over to Asia. Then six months later they all go back.
See, cruise ships don’t do very well in the dead of winter. Nobody wants to relax on the deck of a ship during a snowstorm - too many memories of the Titanic. These cruise ship movements are called repositioning cruises.
A cruise ship might cost hundreds of dollars a night, but a repositioning trip often costs in the range of thirty bucks for the same room. Getting from Florida to London on a cruise ship is cheaper than flying. You get a nice room, you get three or four buffets a day, and you get the luxury of a pool all for the price of a plane ticket. The boat will take a lot longer than the flight, but you get to travel in style.
If you have kids, there are a lot of benefits to the cruise route. You can get one room for far less than four plane tickets, and the entire trip is a vacation.
The ships only move around twice a year, and if you do some research and learn when the movements are you can plan a trip. The great thing about this type of travel is that most people don’t have that much free time. When you are a cubicle slave, you get five weeks off a year if you are incredibly lucky. Most people get two.
Let’s look at this cruise in another light. You can give your family a home, unlimited entertainment, food and all utilities for a month or more. How much does all of that cost you right now? When you think of the boat as a month of living somewhere rather than just transportation, you can see how cheap the experience is. You can’t get an apartment in a bad neighborhood in New York this cheap.
You can take your planning to the next level. There are websites that travel agents use; you can hop on one and place a bid on a cruise. Sometimes they have a fixed bottom price, but you can negotiate to get the cruise lines internal currency. So you get a few hundred bucks to spend on drinks or in the casino.
Factor this in when you’re bidding on a cruise. Repositioning cruises never fill up because so few people have the time to go on such a long trip. That means you are always in a strong negotiating position. The people hired to fill up these cruises want those rooms filled, and they’re willing to hook you up with great amenities and even bump you up to a nicer room if the ship isn’t filled.
139
The Twenty Dollar Trick
When I heard about this one, I thought it was ridiculous. For a while, I was going to Las Vegas for conferences once a month, and each one was always in a different hotel. If you’ve done a little research, you’ll discover that rooms in loss Vegas are “loss leaders.” Hotels don’t expect to make their profit from the room rentals. They make their money from the shops, gambling, shows and food. Once you’re in, they know they’ll make their money back.
Hotels in Vegas are almost never fully booked. There are just so many rooms in a very small area. When you are checking in, you have to hand the clerk your ID and credit card. The simple trick is to slip a twenty-dollar bill in the middle and say, “Do you have any complimentary upgrades available?”
You are giving a twenty dollar tip and asking them to upgrade your room. The key is not to be ostentatious about it. The last time I did this, I was upgraded from a regular room to a lovely suite. Usually, the clerk will bump you up one level in quality. You know how hotels have like basic rooms, deluxe, mini suite, business suite, etc. They all use different names, but you can pay more for a better room. On that trip, my friend spent $1,000 to upgrade to a suite just like mine for the week.
I paid twenty bucks.
I don’t use this technique as much internationally. In other countries, the hotel clerks don’t always know how to upgrade your room. But in countries with a lot of Western tourism, you can certainly make this work. It’s best in hotels that have computer systems where they can upgrade you with the click of a mouse.
Not every hotel clerk has the power to upgrade you. Sometimes they will get confused, especially if you booked through a third party website. But in Las Vegas, this trick works nearly every time. It’s always worth giving a try. It’s only twenty bucks after all. The risk is small, but the reward is huge. You are risking twenty dollars, and the possible reward is a bump to a room worth hundreds of dollars more a night.
140
Frequent Flyer
There are a lot of ways to get value from your frequent flyer miles. The best move you can make is using the right credit card as a part of your business funnel. Let’s say you get into the arbitrage game. You’re buying and reselling traffic. If you use a great credit card with miles on your airline, you can rack up miles without actually losing money. With regular purchases, you only get miles on money you are losing forever.
You go to the store and buy a couch. You use your miles credit card and earn a few hundred points. But that money evaporates as soon as you spend it. When you use the same principle with your business, the money keeps recycling. You’re spending money, but it keeps coming back. This is powerful if you’re in the consulting game. Get a client to pay you to buy something for them. Then use that card again.
There are also great ways to hop between cards to get incredible amounts of air miles. When you do it right, you can get triple the miles on any trips you take. The best strategies for getting great miles are always fluctuating. Keep your eyes peeled and do new research to see which cards have the best miles. For personal finance, I’m not a huge fan of miles on credit cards. The debt you can build up is way more expensive than a few measly miles. If you’re not in the black financially, it’s a much better decision to use the card with the lowest rate or a cash back offer.
141
Cheap Flights
Many of us have a favorite travel website. We stick with the site we love because it’s reliable, we like the layout
, whatever. We like earning those points that we’ll never use. Those points usually expire before you can accumulate enough unless you’re in the top ten percent of their customers. The regular people love the chase, but they don’t get the benefits.
Those sites often charge a premium, so they can make a profit on top of what the airlines and hotels are charging. It’s how they can afford to pay their staff. Just because a site is your favorite, doesn’t mean it’s the best choice.
Some of the best airlines don’t list on those sites because they don’t want to give up money to a middleman. I can fly round trip from where I live in Asia to London for about twenty-five hundred bucks in business class. If I use one of the popular travel sites, the same ticket will cost me three to four times as much money.
The first step is to look at all the airlines that fly from your city. The operative word there is ‘all’, because there are tons you’ve never paid attention to because they don’t have a shiny button on one of those travel websites. Some of those airlines prefer to compete by offering lower airfares. The money that would typically go to a middleman website stays in your pocket instead.
Serve No Master: How to Escape the 9-5, Start up an Online Business, Fire Your Boss and Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Digital Nomad Page 25
