How-To-Retire-Young.com

I have been quite busy lately trying to mix traveling with setting up a website, and I just realised that I haven’t been keeping you guys up to date with what I am up to. I recently arrived in Australia on my working holiday visa. This visa allows you to work and travel around Australia for up to a year, and can be extended if you meet certain requirements.

I arrived in Sydney about two weeks ago. After exploring Sydney for a few days my first impressions of Australia could be summed up in two words: cold and expensive!

It’s probably a bit unfair to label Australia a cold country (especially as I’m British), however I did arrive in Sydney in the middle of winter, after spending a month in Thailand, a country which is always hot and humid and never gets cold. After spending a few days in Sydney I decided to head north to Cairns, where the climate is tropical and I am pleased to say the cold is no longer a problem.

However Australia these days IS an expensive place to visit. The Australian dollar has done quite well in recent years compared with other countries, and whether you are from Europe, America or some place else, you will find Australia expensive.

But it is not all bad news, as if you have a working holiday visa then you will be earning your money in Australian dollars and consequently you can actually make some good money if you decide to work out here, whatever job you find yourself in. There are lots of jobs for travelers if you look in the right places.

The Australian working holiday visa is only available to people aged 18-30. If you decide to visit Australia for a long holiday and plan on working while here, then there are a few things you will need to do when you arrive in Australia on a working holiday visa. These include:

• Setting up your Australian bank account. All Australian employers require you to have a bank account to pay your wages into.

• Setting up your tax file number. This is another requirement to work in Australia, unless you want to pay a massive 49% in tax.

• Buy a local SIM card. You will need to unlock your phone if you haven’t done so already, and buy a local card for cheaper calls, also many banks/jobs will require you to have a local phone number.

• An Australian address. This can be quite difficult if you plan on traveling the country like I do. If you do not have a permanent address or any friends with an address, the best thing to do is set up a mailing address. There are various places offering this service, prices ranging from $50-$100 a year. These companies will hold your mail and forward it to any address of your choice, I.e the hostel you are staying at.

• Training Courses. Australian health and safety laws require many employees to undertake training courses before they can begin work in certain roles, including things like bar work, hospitality and construction. These are not too expensive, however I would recommend doing them when you arrive if you plan on working in these areas whilst you have some money behind you, and you then open up a lot more options for when you do seek employment.

• Sign up with Travellers At Work. I recently joined this organisation myself and can highly recommend them. They offer a jobs board designed specifically for people on a working holiday visa. They also have great arrival packages available, and can offer help with all of the above.

Australia is a fantastic country to visit and the working holiday is a once in lifetime opportunity to experience life in another country. I hope this post will go some way to helping those who are about to arrive in Australia on a working holiday visa. There are also plenty of other countries that take part in the working holiday scheme worth checking out if you meet the criteria.

If you read that title and wasn’t sure of the difference between riches and wealth then this article is definitely for you. Too many people believe that the only way they can become wealthy is by amassing an amount of riches. My idea of wealth is very different, i  just want a simple life. I’m not gonna say that I don’t want to be rich, however I will say that its not something I’m aiming for now or that particularly bothers me.

For me I’ve more or less given up the consumer world. Material possessions no longer interest me. The few thing that I have in my backpack are all that I need.

I would highly recommend reading Rolf Potts book Vagabonding, or at least go and check out the website. Rolf Potts has been Vagabonding all over the world and knows what living this lifestyle is about.

His idea that it is actually Time = Wealth is something I’m trying to live by.

We work hard and live very hectic lives in the western world, and by the time we’ve gone to work and then commuted back, most of us don’t have the time to enjoy our day because its practically over. So whilst you may be earning a decent salary (riches), if you don’t have the time to enjoy yourself then I wouldn’t consider you as wealthy, and if you have no plan or are not saving up for something, then I would ask what is the point.

We all know the saying ‘money doesn’t make you happy’ but most of us dismiss it, thinking that a little bit more money will improve our lives. Yet there are so many miserable rich people all around us. Even the celebrities we see on TV all seem to be miserable these days. The happiest people around I have come across seemed to be in the least touristy parts of Thailand, where generally people are very poor. Thailand may still be a developing country but it is also known as LOS (land of smiles) for a good reason. Most people in Thailand lead simple lives, and yet they seem to be a lot happier, even though they have very little in terms of material wealth or riches.

If you haven’t already then you should check out this parable about The Mexican Fisherman. This really explains what I’m trying to say and ultimately what I’m aiming for. I may not be a fisherman, but it is the lifestyle I would like to follow. If a poor Mexican fisherman can lead this kind of life, why can’t I do something similar through blogging and web design?

That’s why I’m aiming for a simple life. For me i really believe that time = wealth and I believe I can become wealthy through creating a life where I have the time to relax and enjoy myself and my surroundings. I may not have a big house or a flash car, but by working to free up my time instead of collecting riches and material possessions, I believe that is how I can become truly wealthy.

After speaking about blogging, I thought I would write a brief introduction to internet marketing. You have probably come across the term internet marketing before, but may not necessarily know much about it. Word is slowly spreading about the potential to make money online, but too many people still seem put off by the idea. Many believe that internet marketing and affiliate marketing are for the computer geeks and the tech heads, but I want to make it clear that anyone can get into this game if they are willing to take the time to learn a few basics.

Imagine I was to offer you your own shop for a few dollars a month in rent. This shop was in a special location that could be visited by anyone in the world. Imagine I then offered you unlimited stock, and said this stock would be free, however much you need, just sell as much as you can. You would probably either bite my arm off, or dismiss me as a nutter. But this is the kind of business on offer with affiliate marketing.

If you are not familiar with the term affiliate marketing, it simply means selling other peoples stuff. As an affiliate you find a product that has an affiliate program, and more and more companies are starting to use these. Clickbank.com is one of the biggest affiliate networks with thousands of digital products to promote. The great thing about promoting digital products is that there is no real cost involved with the sale, so the commission you receive can be very high. 50% seems to be quite common, however there are programs that even offer 70-80% commission.

You do not have to sell digital products, Amazon Affiliates is growing rapidly and allows you to promote their products too. The commission may not be so high, but there is still good money to be made if you are promoting the right products in the right places.

The best place to do this is through your own website. Now please don’t be put off by this, creating a website is easier than ever and programmers are continuously coming up with new ideas to make creating a website even easier. I’m not going to go into how to do this right now, but I do want to make one thing very clear:

YOU DO NOT NEED MAJOR TECH SKILLS AND YOU DO NOT NEED TO LEARN HTML TO CREATE A WEBSITE

I hope that’s clear enough. There are lots of guides around on internet marketing and a lot of them are a little dated from a time when you would have needed to learn the HTML basics to get a website set up, but I am writing this in 2010 on my website and guess what, I know hardly anything about HTML.

I do know how to copy and paste, and if there is the odd bit of HTML I need to incorporate into my site, I simply look it up, copy/paste it into my site and follow any instructions to make sure any changes I need to make are done correctly. There is heaps of information on HTML online but personally I’m too lazy to learn it all, I prefer to just copy the bits that I need.

It isn’t essential to get your own website if you want to get into internet marketing, you can promote using certain forms of social media, and there are certain forums that allow you to promote affiliate links, but your options would be limited and I would highly recommend getting your own site.

This is a very basic introduction to internet marketing, there are whole courses and ebooks that tell you a lot more about how to make money online, but the main point I want to get across in this post is that internet marketing is something that anyone can get into. There are bored housewives and weird nomadic twenty somethings like myself with little or no computer experience all over the world making money online, so it is not just for the techies and the gurus.

Most people today are familiar with blogging, but I thought I would write a brief introduction to blogging for those of you who are not. These days anyone can start a blog, there are free start up programs like Blogger and WordPress.com that make starting a blog a very easy process. It is also becoming even easier these days to make money blogging, and ultimately that is what I will be trying to do.

The word blog actually derives from “weblog” and it is presented online similarly to a diary or an online journal. You will notice with nearly all blogs that posts are listed in a chronological order, with the most recent post presented at the top of the main page. By scrolling down or looking through the archives you can see some of the older posts of the blog. This is how most blogs are set out including How-To-Retire-Young.com.

Blogs were originally designed to be used as online journals with many bloggers using them to keep people up-to-date with what they are doing. This has changed in more recent years, with blogs being used more often as a source of information.

So blogs differ from ordinary websites because they are set out in this way, rather than having static pages like the other websites. Blogs are usually updated more often, and updating a blog is much easier than updating a normal website, because of the ease of use of programs like WordPress and Blogger.

Blogging has made it much easier for anyone to start up a website. Even a dummy like me with hardly any HTML skills can start up a blog with relative ease. I am actually using WordPress.org for this site, which is slightly more technical than WordPress.com and it is not totally free as you do have to pay for your own hosting. But don’t let that put you off, the current WordPress 3.0 that I am using is really not too technical and is designed for internet dummies like me. The hosting costs can be as low as a few dollars a month, and when you consider a blog can make you money like a business (potentially thousands of dollars a month), the costs really are quite minimal.

If you are serious about blogging and possibly making money from your blog, I would recommend hosting your own blog. I will be going into more detail about this soon, but basically you get more control over your blog when you host it yourself, where as with a free hosted blog, you do not really own the blog and the host can potentially close your blog if they wanted.

But can you really make money blogging?

Yes you can make money with blogs, but it is not easy, and most blogs do not make any significant income. At the time of writing this blog is not making me any money at all, and it probably won’t anytime soon. There are countless ways of making money with blogs, but they all require one thing, Traffic.

Traffic is the number of people visiting you’re blog, and getting significant traffic to your blog is where most bloggers fail. You can write as much quality content as you want, but if you do not have any traffic then you are not going to make any money.

In the beginning it is very difficult to get traffic to your blog and keep people coming back. This blog is still in its early days so I currently have very low traffic. I am not going to kid you, or myself, it is not easy to get significant traffic to your blog. It usually takes several months at least. This is why most people fail to make money blogging, they do not have the patience to keep blogging when they are not making any money.

This is why I’ve given myself two years to build up this blog. I’m putting my life in the hands of this blog, so hopefully this will give me the drive and determination to keep going. It can be quite depressing in the early days of blogging as you are not making money and it feels like you are constantly talking to yourself.

There are many different ways to make money with your blog, but it is important to plan for the long term if you are serious about profiting with your blog. If you want a “get rich quick” plan then blogging is not the answer.

I will be writing a lot more about how to get traffic to your blog and how to make money blogging in the future, but I am not going to go into too much detail just yet as I am still learning and going through this process myself!

I came across this parable a while back and it has stuck with me. It is obviously not written by me, in fact nobody seems to know who originally wrote it, but this story of the Mexican fisherman has stuck with me and I never forgot it, I felt I just had to include it somewhere on this site.

I loved it the first time I read it and it kind of sums up how I feel about life and goes a long way to explain why I’m doing what I’m doing. It shows you don’t have to be rich and making a lot of money to live a good life.

The Mexican Fisherman

An American tourist was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked.

Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The tourist complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “Not long, only a little while.”

The tourist then asked, “Then why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?”

The Mexican said, “With this I have more than enough to support my family’s needs.”

The tourist then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life señor.”

The tourist scoffed, “I am a businessman, I think I can help you. You should spend more time fishing; and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor; eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles and eventually New York where you could run your ever-expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But señor, how long will this all take?”

The tourist replied, “who knows, 15 to 20 years maybe.”

“But what then?” asked the Mexican.

The tourist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”

“Millions señor, really?…Then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. You could move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”