What in the hell are we doing? I don’t like writing about “us” as the topic of a blog, but I wanted to at least update everyone on where we are at and what we’re doing, in case it helps others navigate unconventional lifestyles, lifestyle design, or alternative retirement. So what’s this have to do with “working from anywhere”? Well, if you can earn from anywhere, you can be anywhere…
I’m not sure when our lifestyle design obsession began, but it’s quickly gaining momentum. It started with a love for travel and new experiences. Slowly over time, we started to realize that we couldn’t travel MORE without changing our lifestyle (we both worked traditional “9-5s”). And then we had kids. It will likely come as a shocker to most people reading this (insert wink face here), but the thing about “9-5s” and kids, is that working traditional jobs doesn’t provide a ton of time to see them. Which frankly, kind of sucks - especially when you are passionate about spending time traveling (not to be confused with spending time, time traveling - ok, sorry - stupid dad joke).
So all of this led us to the question: “how could we earn income and do what we love, with the people we love?”. We knew right off that our lifestyle had three buckets of time - one for travel, one for family/friends - and then one bucket for earning income. So how could we fill each one equally?
Lifestyle design: This is where we ran head first into lifestyle design (LD). LD is all about defining what an ideal life looks like and then setting specific goals in order to achieve it. And for us, LD isn’t about “being rich”, or “retiring early” (both of which sound pretty great), but rather defining our day-to-day, month-to-month etc, so that we can optimize our time to earn income and be fulfilled. Since we already defined “how” we want to spend our days, (family/friends and travel), we can start aligning our financial bucket to support them. And that’s exactly what we’ve set off to do.
Alright, hopefully I didn’t lose you with that long introduction.
70+ day United States adventure: First and foremost, we just left for a 70+ day cross country road trip with our girls. We took our truck and we’re staying in hotels and short term rentals (like air bnb, homeaway, VRBO etc). Our goal is to see 11 national parks and over 20 states. We’re very grateful we get to do this with our girls and we’re going to try and see as many other friends and family as possible along the way. For the next 2+ months, our travel and family buckets will be FULL.
Earning from the road and working from anywhere: This is where our lifestyle design plan’s “rubber hits the road”. If we can’t earn income and fill the financial bucket, this trip could leave us with a pretty large hole in our pocket. And if we can’t sustain the lifestyle, it’s back to the proverbial salt mines (traditional 9-5s for us). So what’s the plan?
NOE Media LLC: We made it official! Nowhere on Earth will always be our brand, but we have set up an actual business entity named NOE Media LLC. Functionally, this doesn’t do anything more than allow us to open business accounts (for easy accounting) and protect us from personal liability. BUT officially, this means we’re earning income and making a “run at this thing”. So what do we do? We focus primarily on social media marketing for brands and offer the following:
Virtual assets - Fully licensed (photos and short form videos) for websites, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube shorts and TikTok
In-feed Instagram posts/reels highlighting brands on our NOE socials
YouTube video marketing (product/location appearing within an ad at the beginning of our video OR featured within the video itself)
Blog posts featuring the product/service/location (fully licensed for client use, or posted on our website)
Social media management (Consult on, or manage social platforms for brands)
Know a hotel, or product/service that needs any of the above? Please have them reach out!
My flexible job change: In addition to the NOE Media LLC, we also setup a consulting LLC and fell under agreement to convert my current corporate role to a remote, contractor based position. While this will detract from overall income and benefits, this gives us much more flexibility and the ability to invest more of my time in our media company, travel and our family. It’s all a balance…
Additional investments: So that it doesn’t go un-mentioned, we place a heavy emphasis on planning for our financial future. Just because we’re trying to find a balance between our three “buckets” I mentioned above (travel, family and money), it doesn’t mean that we don’t invest our earned income in the real estate and stock markets. Because we do! It fact, this is the engine that will one day lead us to financial freedom.
Alright lets wrap it up: Well, that was a lot about us. I hope it sheds light on the “why” for “working from anywhere” (WFA) and the foundation for this blog. It is truly integral to our lifestyle design goals. I also hope that it helps paint a very realistic picture for lifestyle design and the power of WFA. It’s easy for people to promote these “pie in the sky” ideas, but we’re living it, learning from it and hopefully helping others along the way.
Thanks for reading - cheers,
Kyle