How I Became A Digital Nomad At 18 Years Old

today is a travel day and I'm having some travel delays as one does as part of this life I'm literally outside of the Airbnb that I just checked out of and so I thought I'd answer one of the most common questions I get which is how I became a digital Nomad the average age of a digital Nomad is 32 years old and 80% are male so I definitely understand why I get the question a lot I kind of became a digital Nomad in part by accident so to explain how it happened let's take it all the way back to when I was 16 I thought I had to go to university but I didn't want University debt so my plan was to join the Canadian Armed Forces I thought that I'd get to travel a little bit as part of that and even back then I did want travel to be a big part of my life in March 20120 everything closed so School took up most of my time that closed I worked at a restaurant about 20 to 30 hours per week that closed as well gym Sports everything kind of shut down so I had a lot of free time and like most teenagers I was spending a lot of time on Tik Tok and I started seeing these videos about how you could take Harvard courses online and I thought you know might as well be productive with with the time I have and I started looking at these courses and making money online was always something that I was kind of looking for not online necessarily but just making money and so I saw some Harvard courses that were about coding and I knew that that's something that I'd be able to monetize and start doing that freelance but as I was looking at it I was like this doesn't really interest me coding isn't something that I'd want to do or or development or anything like that as a job it does interest me a little bit but for some reason not as a job so what really always interested me was business so I started looking at the business courses that they had in Harvard and I would read you know what the courses was about and whatnot and I was like I already know this stuff I think what I really just need to do is is start a business and actually learn by doing so I start looking at different online businesses that you can start and of course I come across things like Drop Shipping but it didn't really seem like a real business to me whatever that means eventually I came across someone talking about selling on Amazon which I had thought about a few months before but I just didn't know what to sell at that point I did a little bit more research and then in March or no I don't know if it was March still or if it was April at that point but around that time of 20120 was when I bought 1,000 units of that first product I as a 16-year-old kid didn't have any experience I would not recommend I didn't have experience or Capital so I wouldn't recommend doing something like that but I worked really hard on it I was practically obsessed with it and I was lucky as well and that all happened to to just go well out of luck at this point I realized I didn't have to go to university to earn a living and because of the content I was consuming I was seeing some entrepreneurs who would travel they would have a home base and they would travel while they worked and I thought maybe I could just travel and just keep traveling to different spots right which is basically being a digital Nomad I just didn't know what that was at the time at that point I completely dropped the idea of going to University because my eyes were opened to this completely different lifestyle that I wanted to pursue the business was doing well at that point and so I signed with a warehouse in Toronto where I'm from and I was just reinvesting all the money into the business because I was a 17-year-old at that point I had turned 17 didn't have any expenses so I was just putting it all back into having more control over the process The Branding and everything like that in September of 2020 was when the second wave of that sickness you know what I'm talking about uh we can't mention it here but you know what I'm talking about that's when that hit and so I started having issues in that warehouse with outbreaks and every time there was an outbreak in my province in Canada they had to shut down the warehouse for 2 weeks and so everything slowed way down the business was still slightly profitable but it wasn't doing nearly as well as it was before now while all of this is happening I'm also having issues at home and I know that I'm not really going to be welcome at home when I turn 18 which is going to happen in Spring of that year while I'm still in high school so I'm going to have to move out this meant that I couldn't wait for that sickness situation to just clear up because I needed the money to move out so I started trying different business models I worked like a crazy person for that period I was still in school of course so I was sleeping like 3 to 5 hours a night and just working like crazy I've genuinely never worked like that in my life it didn't turn out well I definitely burned out after that but that's what that period was like and even still I wasn't able to replicate the same success I'd had with the first business either way way my birthday came around and as I said I had been reinvesting all the money in the business before hadn't really pulled out any for myself and I only had a few thousand Canadian to my name because I was 18 I also didn't have a credit score so I couldn't rent out a place and the only real option was to get an Airbnb after I paid that first month of the Airbnb I think I remember having $3,000 Canadian which is not a lot I lived in Toronto at the time so it was very expensive and that was only the first month so so yeah at this point I was still making enough to live somewhere like Bali for example so my plan was to go to Bali but I was in a relationship with someone at the time who was about to move to London in the fall and so I decided I'd go to London in the fall and then January of that year I'd go over to Bali London was amazing I really love that place um but it is very expensive it's definitely not the place to be while you're on a budget anyway because of the warehouse situation that I mentioned before that situation and cycle of continuous uh shut Downs of my warehouse caused my Amazon seller account Health to go down and so they were holding my funds A payout that I had for September or August of that year they were holding it in my seller account for 90 days and I really was counting on that payout because just before that I had spent the last bit of money I had on a new batch of of product so when they held my funds I had to shut down the warehouse stuff like I had to just throw out all that product basically so I lost money a lot of money there I obviously lost what I had just bought because there wasn't anywhere for them to ship that for that to be distributed to customers or anything so I lost all of that and I had to wait 90 days for that payout so at 18 I don't have a lot of credit or anything so I have just enough with that and a little bit of savings to make it to December of that year which would have been 2021 so December comes along and at that point my relationship with my mom since I had moved out months before has really improved and we're going on a family vacation to Kena so I fly from London to bot and I have just enough again with my credit score with my my credit score credit card to pay for the flight from Boa to G as well and so that's the last bit of my money sorry for the interruption guys I was in the middle of a travel day it was all chaotic couldn't finish a story but I'm here to finish it now so the payout was set to go I think it was December 14th and so I set it up so that my flight would leave December 14th from London and I would arrive in bowl with that December 16th to kind of buy me time so it was all these weird legs to the flight but I ared on the 16th and the funds still have not been deposited the funds that they were holding from 90 days before so at that point I'm pretty much completely out of money I happened to find a little bit money in one of my payment processors that I hadn't deposited from a long time but it was only a little bit so it was basically I had enough for food or for a place to stay for that time that I was in the airport and so I decided to go with food so I basically just stayed at the airport for I ended up being in an airport for about 10 days I feel so fond of that airport I can't explain it I it feels like yeah I don't know how to explain it exactly but I think back to it fondly and when I go back to the airport I'm like oh my God it's the airport I don't know it just it's weird like I don't have any negative feelings about it I just have obviously at the time I did but now I look back on it with Nostalgia but anyway we go to vacation as a family obviously I couldn't pay for this vacation my mom paid for it it was her gift for Christmas and it was a lot of fun and then with that vacation package was a flight back to Toronto included so I took that flight and I like at that point I have to get a job so I ended up getting a job it was a remote job but I couldn't leave Canada or the states so I didn't I knew I didn't want to stay in that job long term but I was so burnt out from everything that had happened before that I just wanted something kind of chill just get back up my feed kind of thing so I start working that job and then summer comes around and my initial plan was to go back to those businesses in the summer but honestly I just still felt a little bit burnt out to go back to such intense work and so much work so I decided to instead start looking for a remote job that would allow me to travel cuz I really wanted to go back to that but not have all the stress that came along with with having a business so I started looking for jobs that summer in August of that year I ended up in a rule that would allow me to travel anywhere in the world while I worked and that's when I booked my flight to M so from mean until now is all documented on this channel so feel free to go back if you want to fill in the gaps in the story and if you want to see where the story goes then you can subscribe and see more I'll see you next Sunday

Channel: Isabelle Rodriguez

Views: 2,515

Keywords: become a digital nomad, make money online, how to make money online, digital nomad, working remotely from another country, working remote

Id: J7XR14TRtwM

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2024