Making money On The Road: An inspirational interview With The Motoroamers

Do you want to travel the world, but aren’t sure how to get paid to travel? In this short article we have an inspirational interview from Karen who shares her experience working as an online life coach, and as a travel blogger with her husband. amazing travel jobs, right?!

Karen and Myles are currently travelling around Europe in their RV, and they figured out how to make money online as they go.

They have diversified their earning streams in buy to be able to travel in a financially sustainable way. Not only do they make money from home (well, a motorhome) while being absolutely location-independent, but they are doing what they love! read on to learn more.

Hi Karen & Myles! Please tell us a little bit about Yourselves

We are Karen and Myles, aka, The Motoroamers and after 30 years of corporate anxiety and self-employed submersion, we made a decision to take up the reigns of our lives and make some enormous changes.

Within a four-year period we had sold our home on Isle of Man, UK, relinquished the hold on our company interests and relocated to Somerset to live the ‘good life’. finally we could heal from our burnout. Yet despite for me, retraining and committing to a meaningful volunteering role, there was something missing. even Myles’ valiant efforts to decrease his golfing handicap was not enough to soothe his soul.

It took a six-week excursion of new Zealand to show us the missing piece of our jigsaw. TRAVEL!

New Zealand taught us how much exploration needed to be part of our lives and that we needed to feed our adventurous spirits. We wanted to empower our best to freedom from a system that tries to control us.

When we got home, it was no surprise to hear Myles suggest that we purchase an RV and go travelling for a year, whilst we sold home on Isle of Man. After battling my fears and ‘what if’s’, we gotten our new travelling companion and by March 2016 we had packed up, packed in and headed off into the European sunset.

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Two weeks into our ‘gap-year’ we knew this was much more than just a year out – this was what we craved in our lives – forever. A life that nurtures my creative soul and feeds our adventurous spirits. totally free to expand our minds with culture, language and life outside of the daily grind.

Tell us about Your online Jobs

Part of being on the road for us, is not just a holiday, that became clear within our first month. certainly being tourists has its place, although what was much more significant was our transition into digital nomads.

Having run our own businesses, we recognised that we couldn’t simply stop working. We just needed to work in a different way that was much more balanced, heart-centred and meaningful.

So we started to explore how we could work whilst travelling and earn an income that sustained our lifestyle. After all, we moved from a six figure annual income to considerably less, practically overnight. I should add that we’re ‘not there’ yet – it’s a work in progress as we create a structure that flows with our hearts and not just the purse-strings.

Our work platform centres around our skills, desires and what our potential audience might want from us. combining this trio enables us to build something that nourishes us and helps others. given our absolutely different personalities and skills, it was imperative to tackle this from two angles, exploring our competence individually and collectively.

First and a lot of foremost, we needed our base-line! The vital income that we needed to feed our account so we could live day-to-day. This is mainly Myles’ domain as he has a really good eye for home and investment. So after selling our house in Isle of Man, we invested in three rental properties; two are still located on the Island and the third in the U.K. being managed by a home agent.

The remainder of our capital Myles has invested into a share portfolio which includes Tax-free ISAs used by UK government and medium risk FTSE100 businesses, which give us regular dividends.

For me, my competence lies in coaching and creative writing, both of which have served me well for over 25 years. finding my niche in our new nomadic lives was easy when I stopped to reflect on the story of anxiety and burnout that led to our life-change. I had a ‘stress to happiness’ story to share and a substantial audience to work with, suffering the same plight.Over the last year, with Myles’ technical capability, we built a new web site that features my love for helping women find their inner happiness. using my meditation teachings and my own personal insights, I focus my energies on publishing books, which give me bi-annual royalties, creating on-line programmes and coaching, which I do through email, telephone and Skype.

I also use social media and a Facebook Group, Wake up to Happiness, to create a presence in the virtual marketplace and am currently allowing this to develop organically.

Secondly, having these baseline elements in place, we now have the foundation to build the most exciting aspect of our remote working – how we turn our travels into a trustworthy brand and income stream.

Myles, with his humorous view on the world and my creativity makes us a formidable team and so The Motoroamers and our Seriously Entertaining travel brand was conceived. We are still building our profile in this new arena and we have a way to go, although with approaching 1.7k followers on our FB page and affiliate marketing partnerships on our website, we are beginning, slowly to build our infrastructure. We focus on writing useful content, sharing funny, ‘on the road’ insights and taking Drone videos that inspire our audience.

The best bit about the framework we are creating is that our primary income allows us to do what we love without any stress. So different to the life we had before.

Why Did You decide to Leave Your “Regular” jobs Behind?

My love for helping people and making a difference drove my corporate work and my personal development and coaching consultancy. Yet as an introvert, whilst I was good at my job, it didn’t nourish my heart. I fought a constant battle with my need for financial security, on the one hand, forcing me to never turn a contract down, and my people-pleasing, perfectionist traits on the other. These two beasts pulled me into burnout with a thriving bank account. This did not bring the happiness and freedom I strived for, and something had to change – that something was me!

So at breaking point, I pulled out of a $80,000 contract and started to put my needs first. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done although letting go of my company was crucial to my survival.

Over three years I pulled back until eventually I released my final client. now it was time to find a role that nourished my introvert. I retrained in meditation and I started to find a much more anonymous route to meeting my need to help others than the very public one I had been used to. This became the central part of my story and my realisation of how I could channel this into my virtual coaching services.

As a partnership Myles and I knew we needed to be active and seized the opportunity to work in a different way that gave much more implying to us and the people we were seeking to reach. and what better way than to blend our skills and our travels?

Where in The world have You Worked?

The charm of our method is that we have been able to work in every country we’ve visited, that’s 11 so far in Europe, because March 2016. The rest of the world will wait for another year.

We’ve been fortunate enough to call our office the beach, with sand between our toes, the swimming pool dressed in, not much to be honest, certainly no suits to be seen. We have worked in towns like Annecy, France armed with only a video camera and a video or out in the wilds of Crete, Greece as we converse with nature rather than listening to the sound of corporate wheel churning. We are privileged to have gorge walls that frame our work space and the open, blue skies as our ceiling.

Whether we stay for one day or one week depends on our need to rest from our travels and how much Internet we can get. We can in some cases work solidly for days and then we play. Although this really doesn’t feel like work, at least not in the standard paradigm.

And when I say work, let me be clear what that looks like; we film, we walk, we park up and enjoy the locals go about their lives, we cycle in the name of research and we photograph. and let’s not get too martyr like – this is as much about filling our own memory bank of experiences as it is creating a work output. What a joy; that we can live this life, travel and share our experiences to inspire others to fulfil their own travel dreams.

Our viewpoint is, travel when you can, for as long as you can and in whatever way you can – just travel.

I can’t say that it’s creating a luxury level income, although we see the potential as we build partnerships, connections and profile. and we’re having a blast whilst we’re doing it. This really is the meaningful, heart-centred work we’ve dreamt about all our lives.

Can You tell us a bit about Your Certifications & Qualifications?

Certification is a really interesting topic as it has shades of the system that we left behind. Although we have learnt in our 17 months on the road (and I know we’re still babies in this game), that you cannot escape the system completely. There are just some policies that you need to follow and certification, in some fields, is one of them. tax is another, although let’s not go there.

As a newbie coach, back in 2001, I made a decision to get my qualification with the UK’s Coaching Academy. I managed to protected a bursary, which gave me totally free access to the weekend residential course and the follow-up Diploma assessment process. these days their foundation weekend is now totally free to all, although the Diploma enrolment is now $5,100 +vat. If you are paying for the programme yourself, 5-10 bursaries are available typically awarding $1,275 towards the costs.

To add to this, I found an accredited, on-line Life Coaching Diploma with the Newcastle college of additionally Education that was sponsored by author and coach, Fiona Harrold. This course now runs at $765 and has multiple entry levels throughout the year. Achieving my two Diplomas, I received the credibility I need as a fledgling trainer to set foot in a potentially enormous market.

Interestingly as I sit on the sidelines of some ‘coaching’ FB groups, I feel concerned, with my standard coaching hat on, about the modern take on coaching. Today’s market is flooded with wanna-be coaches who are influenced by this ‘Get rich quick’, ‘Earn six figures a month’ coaching viewpoint that misses the heart of what a trainer is and does.

My perspective is that to be a trainer is a privilege and a skill, and the modern wave of fix-it-all coaches worries me. Although before I get on my soap box, I would like to emphasise that training in the basic coaching concepts is vital, if this is a route you’re considering. learning and embedding coaching’s core values are imperative if you are going to harness the power to help shift someone’s life. So find a course that’s run in your own country and arm yourself with the core skills and build from there.

To become an investor really needs no qualification, in Myles’ opinion. Although when asking him the attributes of a successful investor who can sleep at night, he said you needed three essential things amongst a long list of attributes; be conservative – there is no ‘Get rich quick’ scheme in this field; time is your best pal and your worst enemy – so patience is the virtue and finally, invest in affordable index funds, because if it’s good for U.S investment guru, Warren Buffet, it’s good enough for him. To develop your competence and, much more importantly your confidence, then read:

The Snowball; Warren Buffett and the company of Life, by Alice Schroeder
The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham
The little book of Behavioural Investing; how not to be your own worst enemy, by James Montier

For our travel blogging, there are no exams, just passion and art combined. There are courses you can take to learn about travel photography or to be a travel writer, although I think much of this is about a love for expressing what you experience, through words, lens or recording.

I guess if you want to be taken seriously in the industry, then advancing your skills is required and we are painfully aware of our gaps with, say Social Media. Although our rewards so far have been due to hard work, content creation and persistence.

Our work method is, on the whole not work we have to find. In numerous ways we are fortunate, as it finds us. M