It has been about 7 months since the last time I posted an update here. And there’s a reason for that. These 7 months have been crazy.
First of all, I have been attending the CMSEO 2019 conference from Matt Diggity. I went to Chaing Mai for this conference and met a lot of inspirational people. These successful affiliate marketers inspired me.
It was my first solo travel as well as my first time out of Europe. But these people were so nice, I’ve been at ease at all time. Ok, some of the guys do have an ego but most of them were really nice persons.
Some of them were Digital Nomads, travelling the world while they work remotely. I’ve never really had the urge to travel a lot but I always felt attracted to move to a city like Chiang Mai in Thailand, Da Naang or Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and stay and work there for a year or so.
But after this journey, I did feel the urge to travel. I do feel the urge to explore the world. It’s beautiful out there and it would be a shame to never have seen so many nice places and so many nice people on our planet.
So all of this changed me in a big way. I didn’t feel the need anymore to buy my own house and settle down. I didn’t feel the need anymore to buy expensive luxury items. Only thing I wanted to do more was travel.
My affiliate websites were making already a little bit of money but probably not enough to make a living. Definitely if you take in account that about 50% of my income through my affiliate websites has to go to the government as taxes. However, even with that amount, I would probably be able to survive in a country with lower cost of living than Belgium.
Thailand is one of the countries that would be appropriate for this. Some of the digital nomads at CMSEO convinced me to stop making excuses and just quit my job to live anywhere I want, to travel and work remotely.
As a digital nomad, I would find ways to provide for myself anyway. I would have the time to do properly work on my affiliate websites and if these websites don’t make me enough money, I could do any type of remote work.
I figured they were completely right. Worst case scenario: my affiliate websites don’t make enough money to cover my expenses and save/invest some money and I have to go back to Belgium. As long as I keep my Belgian nationality, I would always have a room to live in and food. On top of that, if I keep some kind of “emergency fund”, that’s something I can always fall back on when I return to Belgium.
So, as soon as the conference had ended and I returned to Belgium, I started planning everything. I’ve quit my appartment lease contract, quit my job, bought travel insurance, got myself a VISA for Thailand for 6 months, bought plane tickets, changed my official address to my sister’s place,… And, not to forget, change all my plans because of COVID-19 forcing me to leave earlier than planned.
All of this, combined with my full-time job made it near to impossible to post new updates here. I did get some work done for project Alpha though. However, not as much as I initially planned obviously.
At this time, I’m self-isolating at a small city in north-east Thailand. I plan to move to Chiang Mai in a few days. If you’re interested, you can read everything about my digital nomad life and travels at digitalnomaddict.com
Since I have a lot of time for my affiliate projects now, I’ll also be updating this website more often, that’s a promise 😉