Archive for June, 2007

The Characteristics of a Happy LIP

Flexible and adaptable - you can’t be a stressball about having to have your life planned out 12 months in advance, you’ll hate being a LIP (this used to be me, it isn’t now!).
Organised & a careful researcher/planner - working out flights, layover hotels, pre-booked accommodation etc. etc. requires some careful research, planning & forethought. [...]

Flexible and adaptable - you can’t be a stressball about having to have your life planned out 12 months in advance, you’ll hate being a LIP (this used to be me, it isn’t now!).

Organised & a careful researcher/planner - working out flights, layover hotels, pre-booked accommodation etc. etc. requires some careful research, planning & forethought. You learn as you go along but the more organised you are about it to begin with the less time you’ll spend re-visiting that same site over & over & over again looking for that nugget of information you knew you saw once.

Good at making decisions - this is a MUST have. It can get very tiring & draining having to make constant decisions about where to next (obviously this only happens if you’re not really happy with where you are). The important thing we’ve learned is to make a decision and then action it.

Smile-y - another MUST have if you want to make friends, have people be nice & friendly to you and give a good impression of yourself to the locals whose country you’re in.

Adventurous - with food, with language, with experiences. There’s no point going somewhere new if you’re going to be scared to try new things & stay in your apartment all the time. Left to my own devices I can go for days without leaving my house (my record when we lived in our apartment in Nottingham was 5 straight days without leaving it - it was a very nice apartment) - but living in Grenada at the moment I live for the times we can jump in the jeep, go exploring for a new beach or down to our favourite coffee place.

Easygoing & go-with-the-flow - again, not really a natural one for me although the Caribbean influence is definitely rubbing off. Things will sometimes go wrong - flights will be delayed, plans won’t work out - as a L.I.P it generally really doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t cost you tons more money. We find nowadays that if we miss a flight (not that we have yet) or things don’t quite fit together, it really doesn’t bother us - we have plenty of time, are generally never in a rush for anything and it’s all part of the journey.

How Much Money Do You Need…

…to live the life of a Location Independent Professional?
What Tim Ferriss (from the 4 Hour Work Week) says is very true. You can live like a millionaire on a lot less than a million. As a LIP one of the benefits is being able to enjoy a much higher quality of living for a much [...]

…to live the life of a Location Independent Professional?

What Tim Ferriss (from the 4 Hour Work Week) says is very true. You can live like a millionaire on a lot less than a million. As a LIP one of the benefits is being able to enjoy a much higher quality of living for a much lower cost than you might pay in your home town (if of course your home town is in the US or the UK or any other 1st world, commercialised nation).

If you want a ball park figure, I would say that you can get by in some places very happily on approx. £1,200-1,500 per month (Approx. US$3,000). This would easily suffice in somewhere like Buenos Aires where you could afford a comfortable 1, maybe 2 bedroom apartment in some of the nicest areas, dinner at least twice a week in some of the nicest restaurants in town and transport in taxis. You could also afford the trappings of a fairly decent cultural & social life - cinema visits, theatre visits, weekend or day trips.

It would also just about be enough in Panama for a pretty nice life too - again covering dinners out, transport by taxis, social activities and some decent accommodation.

Not quite enough for Toronto however to live a comfortable life and afford all the stuff you probably don’t need but you’re surrounded by it, see it and therefore want it. I’d say here you’re looking at more like £2,500 to £3,000 per month to do the things you’d like to do and even then you’d probably need more than that to live like a millionaire.

But £1,500 is just about enough for Grenada, although again, it will depend upon your accommodation costs and also whether you choose to hire a car. I’d say in Grenada you’d be more comfortable on about £2,000+ per month.

Of course, you can live for less - and to some people this may sound a lot of money if they live in their small home town on a lot less than this. But remember, I’m talking about a higher quality of life - being able to live in the Caribbean for example (and do your morning workout on a paradise beach for free instead of paying through the nose for a gym) on about the same amount of money it would cost you to live a comfortable life in a ‘decent’ city in the UK. And of course, you could manage on less if you didn’t go out to eat, cooked for yourself all the time and didn’t experience everything on offer.

But where’s the fun in that? Who wants to just ‘manage’?

I’d much rather choose to live somewhere that allows my money to go a lot further and affords me a much better quality of living than I could have at ‘home’. That’s the benefit of being a LIP.

And another thing…if at any time your business or finances take a turn for the worse, you are free to go to an even cheaper country (for example, Bolivia) where your money will stretch even further until you get yourself on an even keel again.

The 4 Hour Work Week

A great book for L.I.Ps. You might even say he’s the “God” of L.I.Ps. I’ve just posted a bit more on my thoughts about this book by Tim Ferriss over on my other blog.

A great book for L.I.Ps. You might even say he’s the “God” of L.I.Ps. I’ve just posted a bit more on my thoughts about this book by Tim Ferriss over on my other blog.

Foods For LIPs: One of the Many LIP Benefits…

…is that you get to try a huge variety of foods around the world.
As a former health coach & BIG organic fan, one of the many benefits of living the Location Independent life is that you can try the local, seasonal food of the country you’re staying in.
On our journey we’ve tried:
In Panama

Sancocho (type [...]

…is that you get to try a huge variety of foods around the world.

As a former health coach & BIG organic fan, one of the many benefits of living the Location Independent life is that you can try the local, seasonal food of the country you’re staying in.

On our journey we’ve tried:

In Panama

• Sancocho (type of chicken soup)
• Empanadas (pastry things stuffed with meat & veg)
• Plantains
• Local corvina (sea bass)
• Balboa, Atlas & Panama beer

In Buenos Aires

• Grass-fed, Pampas-pastured beef
• Pizzas almost as good as in Italy
• Red wine
• Dulce de leche (sweet, sickly, caramelly & (over) used in desserts & cakes)
• Yerba mate (’sociable’ tea)

In Grenada

• Coconut water & tender flesh straight from the tree (we drink/eat this daily after our morning jog & swim)
• Avocados picked from the tree
• Mangoes
• Chin ups (try as I might, I can’t find much info about these little, round, green fruits - sucked like sweets and from the lychee family)
• Organic, award-winning chocolate (grown & made right here on the island in a solar-powered ‘factory’)
• Rotis - flat, ‘chapati’-like bread stuffed with curried potato & meat or conch.