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We started our full-time traveling lifestyle with just $300 to our name. For 9 years we worked hard to keep our lifestyle, earning just enough to buy the next flight to the next house sit. Then along came crypto, and an incredible opportunity to create a passive income allowing us to semi-retire soon after. Here is our story… 

The following is an edited version of the video transcript…

Hey there! We are Nat and Jodie and we’re the authors of the International House Sitting book. If you don’t yet have a copy of it, you can grab your free copy HERE.

FUNDING A HOUSE SITTING & TRAVEL LIFESTYLE

This week we were invited to go live in a Facebook group full of travelers and digital nomads. And a lot of people were asking about the cost of house sitting with regards to, do you have to pay your own way there? And, do you get paid?

No, you don’t get paid. You’ll know that if you’ve read the book. The way that we choose to teach the international house sitting aspect is to be doing it through the trust economy, with fair exchange.

This means that some of the house sitters out there are fully self-funded, whether they’ve retired or they’ve got investment incomes that produce passive income, but many, including us, actually have to make money along the way.

So the topic was, how do you afford this lifestyle? We just wanted to quickly tell you that our lifestyle has cost next to nothing. At least for the first eight years of traveling. It’s only been in the last year or so that we’ve been making more than what our lifestyle costs. So we’re grown up now and we actually get to invest in things. So yeah, what happened a couple of months ago that really sort of started changing things for us?

Nat here. I’ve always been a really hard worker. I think that’s in my family and the last nine years that we’ve been traveling, I feel like I’ve looked at a computer screen more than I’ve looked at anything else on our travels.

And I don’t know, something just shifted with me one day. Jodie was off walking with the dogs with friends of ours. Another friend of ours was sitting on the verandah here and I was inside working still and something just hit me. And I went, “What on earth am I doing?” Our friend was sitting on our verandah having some wine and I wasn’t even out there! And I was like, “This is ridiculous! What on earth am I doing? Why am I working so damn hard and to what end?”

Jodie had been talking about the whole semi-retirement thing for a while and I just passed it off as a joke and thought it was a bit of a laugh.

It actually finally hit me and I went, “You know what, YES! I’m done. I’m 52.” I was like, “I’m done, I’ve worked really hard over all these years. Decades of working hard.” And I was like, “I want to enjoy my travels. I want to get out and about, I want to have the money as well, not just to be skimping along and just sort of just scraping into having the flight to get to the next place. I want to actually enjoy it. I want to go to a hotel if we feel like going to a hotel.”

We’ve been doing full time international house sitting the entire time we’ve been traveling. So that really shifted for me, everything just sort of crumbled in that one minute. And it was just like, that’s it, I’m done.

We’d also met a a number of people coming through this amazing city here in Mexico, Guanajuato, which we’re on a seven month long house sit in.

And they are F.I.R.E. which is Financially Independent Retire Early. They are young, in their late thirties, early forties, and literally fully retired.

Yet we’ve got some amazing house sitting friends who actually say, no, you never retire. You just “rewire”.

And for us, in this age bracket now, it sort of didn’t feel right to say we’re going to retire because we love actually working. We love doing creative projects. We love all the stuff we’ve done over the years. We just wanted to do less of it and take more time out. And yeah, so it was a real rewiring.

THEN WE SAW THE LIGHT!

Jodie here. So the biggest shift actually happened, I think when that happened to Nat. When she finally saw the light, like I had been seeing for a little while, and thankfully through my connections we were introduced to a BETA training program that was actually teaching this incredible crypto strategy where you are fully in control of your own finances.

You’re getting empowered to be in control of your own finances and very intentional with your investment strategy. It was like this perfect storm of good timing. And we just started on it. And the last couple of months we’ve seen numbers that are just blowing us out of the water, going oh wow!

Like this is literally, at the moment, with the little we have invested into crypto, a part-time income. And eventually, we’ll be able to make it a full-time income.

And then we really are making the choice of when we want to work. What do we want to work on? What creative projects do we want to roll out?

We’re not big on the idea of working on the clock for somebody, whether that’s being a freelancer or being an employee, we’ve gone down the entrepreneurial creativity side. But now we get to invest in crypto which is super exciting.

What we’ve discovered in talking to people in the last couple of months is that even though there’s a whole bunch of people around the world that are getting into crypto, not many of them know how to do it. 

HOW WE HAVE BEEN MAKING DAILY CASH FLOW & PASSIVE INCOME WITH CRYPTO

We’ve been into crypto for a couple of years now. We love cutting-edge technology and new things.

I think a lot of people when they get into crypto, don’t really know what they’re doing. And so they just hear about crypto coins and they think, oh, okay, it’s going up like 200%. Yep. I’ll jump on that.

Like my brother’s a classic example. He’s doing that right now in crypto. And he’s made a motza of money. But very ad hoc. That’s the thing.

It’s more like gambling. There’s no strategy behind it.

What I like about the crypto bots we’re doing right now, the strategy is a lot more intentional, but it also pays a daily profit. And I haven’t seen anything else that’s doing that.

This is, I would say 99% passive. Yes, you’ve got to set the crypto bots up and you’ve got to watch them a little bit. But the whole idea is that once it’s set up and you make your small investment, it is then hand’s off.

The program we did to learn how to create this daily cash flow and passive income is Dan Hollings The Plan. You can find out more about it HERE.

For the first time, I can see that a small investment in crypto actually will end up creating a full-time income for us. That is crazy! That’s blowing me out of the water!

It’s been a total mindset shift. I now have my wife back, she’s not working all the time. We do love what we do with helping people and doing our digital courses and creative projects. But, we’re shifting it up a bit and we’re looking at taking it a little bit easier and enjoying the space we now have.

It’s been great here in Guanajuato, having a whole bunch of people come through and meeting them and hanging out with them. That’s what we’re here to do.

So it’s about having money, or rather our crypto, work for us now. Not always working for money.

Hopefully, this has helped create a little bit of a mindset shift for you. If you’re crypto curious, fill in your email below and we’ll share what we’ve learned and what works.

Honestly, I’m a bit of a crypto geek now and I just love helping people get started… because you need to be in crypto. That’s my 100% belief.

Anyway, affording a house sitting lifestyle, you might not need to have any income. You might just want to save up and live off your own investments, crypto or other, and not have to work and just enjoy socializing and having fun and getting out and about.

But if you do want to travel with house sitting part-time, full-time, or anything, it’s nice to have money and crypto working for you instead of you working for it.