This book was very similar to the previous property investment book I read, Property Magic: How to Buy Property Using Other People’s Time, Money and Experience. The buy, remortgage, reinvest technique was exactly the same but one thing that this book covered, which the previous one did not, was ways to identify the going market rate for an area and then ways to find and identify the below market rate properties. This was basically the missing piece of the puzzle.
If this is the direction you want to go in, it’s probably best to buy both books as the first one I read goes in to the process with a lot more depth than this one.
One of my friends is following this system and just bought property #2, I’m still on the fence about it as I fear change, and interest rate increases.
After Norway it was a short rail trip to Gothenburg, Sweden, which was a lot of fun. I did the super tourist thing and went on all the tourist buses and boat excursions etc. to see the city.
The city itself was beautiful and the boat tour followed all the canals and even went out in to the sea as it we travelled around the harbour. Prices weren’t quite as bad as Norway but it still felt quite expensive.
Food
Despite all the pictures of food I’ve been posting, I have been mindful of the fact that I’ve just lost a ton of weight and I’m a diabetic. In the Gothenburg old quarter the thing to do is grab a coffee and eat a cinnamon bun. What you’re seeing in the picture is one of the tiny ones, the ones everyone else eats are over 12″ across and about 6″ deep. Whilst I wanted to eat one, I couldn’t bring myself to! I did have a small one though and of course I tried the meatballs, which were nicer than Ikea’s 😉
The 3rd and final book in Steve Alten’s Mayan trilogy, Phobos was a bit of a head fuck but wrapped things up superbly. With multiple time lines, the story was starting to get more confusing than the Terminator franchise, but it was still an enjoyable read!
Whilst not quite as awesome as the first book, Domain, Resurrection was still really good. Starting pretty much where the first book ended this one featured far less archaeology but intertwined the Mayan doomsday prophecies with the characters in the story, explaining how they fulfil it. After reading it, I had to push on to the 3rd book straight after for the complete conclusion, fortunately I had lots of train journeys going on!
This book was extremely cooky, but really well researched and a great read. Combining pretty much every UFO conspiracy I’ve come across, with the Mayan doomsday prophecies and other ‘lost’ archaeology such as Stone Henge, this is the kind of trash I like. Fortunately it’s the first book in a trilogy and I ended up chaining all 3 back to back ..
After a really nice flight with Norwegian on their new Boeing 787 Dreamliner I landed in Oslo, Norway on Sunday 11th May and the difference hit me in the face with a POW. First up I was still wearing shorts, and it was freezing cold when I landed. Secondly, going from one of the cheapest places in the world e.g. £0.70 for a beer, to one of the most expensive places in the world e.g. £10.00 for a beer, made me cry.
My seat had a really cool Android tablet which offered a wide variety of movies and more importantly, let me press buttons to order booze. The windows also had a magic electronic coating, rather than a blind, and at the push of a button the would dim to a dark blue colour blocking out all the light!
Bergen
The railway from Oslo to Bergen is one of the most beautiful rail journeys in the world, and Bergen is the home of Black Metal, so I simply had to pay the place a visit. The trip to Bergen was pretty amusing. There was an avalanche and the line was blocked, so we had a replacement boat service take us some of the way followed by a replacement bus service and then another train for the last mile. It was quite the adventure.
Unfortunately I arrived during a National Holiday so there wasn’t much to do. I was hoping to catch a true kvlt black metal band in a cellar somewhere, but mostly I just walked about and drank beer.
Fantoft Stave Church
Fantoft Stave Church in Bergen was originally built around the year 1150 and looked totally badass. Then it was burned down in 1992 by Varg Vikernes of the one-man band Burzum as retaliation against Christianity for building a church on sacred, pagan grounds. It was then rebuilt in 1997 and now Black Metal fans all across the world come to visit. Unfortunately I visited 2 days out of season, so it was closed.. my timing on this trip was rubbish! It still looked awesome from the outside though.
National Day Of Liberation
The 8th May is Norway’s National Day of Liberation where everyone dresses up in their best suits, has a champagne breakfast, watches some parades, then get drunk. This meant I had to do some clothes shopping as all I had was shorts and muscle tops.
Food
I was hoping to finally do some cooking, but my mate’s kitchen was still being built so we ate out for every meal, with style. I have to say a huge thank you to Andreas and all the other wonderful people I met for showing me around and getting me drunk a lot 🙂
My triple entry Thai visa has been used and abused, I’m all out of entries and it’s completely expired so after first coming to Thailand on September 1st 2014, I left for Oslo on May 10th 2015 to meet a friend of mine and for operation Europe!
Weightloss
I got weighed recently and was down from 99kg to 77kg so a total loss of 22kg since I left the UK. That’s 48 1/2 lbs or 3 stone and 6 1/2 lbs. There’s still more to go, maybe another 10kg but I’m extremely happy with my results. The weight was lost the right way, with healthy diet and exercise. I’m currently wearing 34″ shorts.
Reading
I’ve read 22 books since leaving the UK now. My rate of reading went to 0 whilst I was ill but now I’ve recovered I’m back at it. The mixture of books I’ve read has been really awesome and I’m so glad I’ve gotten back in to it. The ease of purchasing Kindle ebooks is quite dangerous though and it takes great responsibility to not just buy dozens of books priced at £3 because they sound interesting!
Business
On the surface business looks terrible. Amazon sales are massively down from January. I also made a mistake where a coupon I gave to a friend to buy a review product got leaked, causing a few thousand dollars in stock to get purchased for peanuts. Lesson learned.
In reality though, this is the calm before the storm. The storm of ultra epic kick ass success. We effectively stopped marketing our first 4 Amazon products back in January, the sales and profits have been completely passive. There’s nothing like making money whilst you sleep. All the profits from those products and that brand have been used to create a new, second brand, of the most awesome product range ever. We’ve invested in professional web developers to put the most awesome Shopify site together for us. We used the gold 99designs plan to come up with best logo and product packaging you have ever seen. The first product is also a game changer, the actual best on the market. No one is selling a comparable product that beats it. We’ve been hard at work and shortly it’s about to pay off!
I’ve also been paying a developer to work on a SaaS project for me for another passive income revenue source and a bit of diversity which I hope to launch shortly. One of the awesome things about it is it solves a lot of problems that I’m experiencing at the moment and I know other people are also experiencing. And once again, it’s miles better than the competition!
Education
I managed to get my PADI Enriched Air certificate, but the diabetes kicked in the morning I was supposed to go out and do some dives on enriched air so I still haven’t actually had any practical experience.
Before I got ill I bought the Fluenz Spanish course and was diligently doing a session a day, as well as using Duolingo. Unfortunately since getting ill I haven’t looked at either. Now that I’m better I will be getting back on it, but will have to start form the beginning.
I’ve done the first week of Coursera’s cryptography course. It’s not as fun or interesting as I was anticipating, being just probability theory and maths so far. I’m not sure what I was expecting really but it’s just like being back at school again and I’m not really interested in it so far, also there have to be better ways to teach people things and learn things than the old school classroom method.
Blood Pressure
I haven’t been using Qardio to measure my blood pressure recently as the Diabetes is the priority and the doctors are measuring my BP with each visit anyway. My last check in Thailand was pretty good though, 129/83, way lower than it was before I left the UK.
Diabetes
Still got it! But I left Thailand with enough medication for a month which sorted out my travel plan.
I’ve spent the majority of my stay on Soi Tad-ied staying in the BM Guest House which was nice enough and covered the basics, single room, cheap (12,000 THB / £240 pm), great bed, working air con, separate shower room, balcony, cleaned weekly, but lacked on luxury, a tiny TV that was miles away from the bed making watching anything on it a bit pointless and Internet that didn’t really work. The state of the generic, consumer ADSL on the street is a nightmare featuring regular, daily, intermittent outages, not to mention you’re going to be sharing one 500K connection between 30 other people. Whilst I was able to get work done, it was frustrating and we’d tend to end up meeting up at one of the local restaurants to get work done.
Slowly some of the other nomads on the street started moving in to the new kid on the block, the Blue Phuket, so for my last week I decided to up the ante and rent out the penthouse there.
Internet at the Blue still isn’t 100% reliable, but it’s head and shoulders above what I’ve been used to and I don’t have to share with anyone.
The penthouse features an open plan lounge, kitchen, dining area with a jacuzzi and TV unit that rotates so you can watch it from where ever you are. The bedroom has a large walk in wardrobe as well as it’s own ensuite bathroom with two sinks. Off the lounge area there’s a 2nd toilet as well as a spare room which currently has a shrine in it. The jacuzzi takes an hour to fill.
Staying up here has been a complete blast. Amazing sea views over Chalong bay. An awesome balcony to chill on and watch the sunset from. The TV is 4k and I’ve been able to watch so many amazing movies in stunning quality whilst working on the sofa, as well as play a few computer games. Having this much space has definitely changed my attitude whilst training here, I’ve had room to move and breath.
Whilst my friends and I regularly meet up and eat out together, this is the first time I’ve had the ability to eat at “home” around a table so we’ve been able to do simple things like have a curry night round the 6 seater table. Being able to do that in the privacy of the penthouse just made it so much better.
Obviously I’m not going to be living like this all the time as it’s an unnecessary extravagance. One of the biggest takeaways from the Drop Ship Lifestyle conference was definitely “money you don’t spend is money you don’t have to earn” but I’m not going to lie, it’s totally awesome.
If you’re a digital nomad, meeting other nomads and entrepreneurs as you travel should be pretty high on your agenda. The benefits of tapping in to the accumulated wealth of local and business knowledge will make a huge difference to your travelling experience and potentially open you up to new business ideas and opportunities you may not have realised.
I’ve been using 4 main resources whilst I’ve been moving around to connect with people, make friends and create opportunities.
#nomads
#nomads, also known as Hashtag Nomads, is a series of different chat rooms created by Levels, the guy that bought put together the Nomad List.
There are many chat rooms, covering every country and city you can think of. There are also more general channels about topics like finding work. As you can see I’m currently in the Barcelona channel organising my next adventure. In the Phuket channel I met one digital nomad training on Soi Tad-ied who then introduced me to 5 others on the street that I didn’t know existed! I spent months thinking I was the only one here. Since then I’ve met a few more people in Phuket through #nomads.
#nomads requires a one time fee which fluctuates. Originally it used to be free, a great move to gain traction, then I think it went to $10, $15, I think I paid $25 and currently it’s at $35. Sometimes there will be a 24 hour period where all signups are free. The money seems to be going towards building the community and creating new forums etc
Whatever price #nomads is, you should sign up immediately and get it over with as it will be a huge benefit to your social life and it can make things a lot easier. The day I registered I joined the Ho Chi Minh channel, was offered an apartment which turned out to be in the centre of digital nomadville and met a great bunch of people. It paid for itself in that one day and has been an awesome resource ever since.
Levels has also put together the Nomad Forum. Slowly he’s building out a digital nomad empire and doing quite well with it!
The Dynamite Circle
The Dynamite Circle, aka DC, is a forum created by the Tropical MBA guy, it’s been about for a few years so is already quite established.
The cost of the DC is in my mind a point of contention, either $147 a quarter or $499 a year. That’s expensive considering in essence it’s a paywall surrounding user generated content, but I’m bitterly resubscribing as the value, socially, to my trip to Barcelona will be amazing. Everyone I have met that is a DC member so far has been totally awesome so I guess to a certain extent having such a high subscription fee keeps the riffraff out … ahem!
The DC also put on numerous social events and conferences, your subscription doesn’t cover the cost of these though, it just lets you buy a ticket, a pretty expensive ticket. Baring in mind that one of the best decisions I’ve made in the last 12 months was to attend the Drop Ship Lifestyle conference, regardless of the cost these kinds of things are great ideas to do.
I really need to use my Dynamite Circle account a lot more to justify it’s high price, so I’ll probably do another write up after 3 months in Barcelona after I’ve fully got to grips with it and worked out what else it has to offer.
Facebook Groups
Most of the places I’ve visited have a nomad related Facebook group. The Chiang Mai Facebook group has become so popular it’s had to split off in to separate other groups to separate out business chat and general Chiang Mai chat as the traffic was getting pretty heavy. Currently there are over 5000 members.
There wasn’t a Phuket Facebook group so I started one which is growing in popularity. Physically there’s a bit of a divide though as so far the Phuket nomads have fallen in to 2 groups, people in Patong on one side of the island and people training on Soi Tad-ied, e.g. Tiger Muay Thai, on the other side. The Soi Tad-ied group is pretty stable, meeting up almost daily, with core members who have been here for 2 or more years. The Patong side is a lot more sporadic though, with people coming over for just a week or 2 and never really integrating as there are generally few nomads in Patong at the same time and crossing the island for lunch with the Soi Tad-ied crew is a bit of a logistical nightmare for a casual tourist. So far we have just 39 members, but we’re growing!
The Ho Chi Minh Facebook group was also very busy, but seemed to attract infighting and bickering, probably due to the fact there are 28,000 members and something will always upset someone!
Reddit
r/digitalnomad has close to 10,500 subscribers and is a halfway house of posts asking “how do i digital nomad?” and digital nomad blog self promotion.
The subreddit isn’t too traffic heavy, but regardless of what stage you are in there will generally be something of interest posted each week. e.g. I’ve just learned that theres a budding entrepreneur scene in the Ukraine!
Usually in the UK I carry a leather bifold wallet with a dozen cards, driving license, etc and if I’m lucky, some cash. This was fine then when I was wearing jeans with 4 pockets or a coat, but out here I seem to live in board shorts that only have one small side pocket that also needs to hold my phone and my keys!
The money clip works a treat, I can carry 2 credit cards, my driving license, door key card for my room and a bundle of notes in something about 4-5mm thick. My empty leather wallet was probably 15-20mm thick, this downsizing leaves a ton of space in my pocket so I can actually fit my phone and keys in there now.
I’ve been using the money clip for about 3 months and the surface is picking up light scratches, probably due to carrying it in the same pocket as my keys. The spring tension of the clip is still solid though so the scratches aren’t really a big deal.
Actually using a money clip is a bit of a pain compared to a real wallet though. Paying for things involves removing a wad of notes from the clip and then fingering through them to find the right ones. Receiving change means you then have to muck around with your wad of notes, folding the new ones in to them and then replacing your clip. It’s not as simple as just pulling or pushing notes in to a wallet and more often than not my pocket ends up with a few loose notes in it.
