Quit My Job To Travel - 3½ Years Later

Good morning and welcome back to Bali. I mentioned at the end of the last video that I wanted to try and talk about how I'm able to travel full-time and how I've been traveling for the last three and a half years. I've done some videos on this topic before but I really want to go in detail on my own personal journey in this video. Firstly I'll just start this by saying I apologize if there's any background noise. I've been waiting for the past week to do this video and they're still doing construction next door so if there's a bit of background noise that's why. Right let's kick it off. About two and a half years ago I made a video of my travels which was quit my job to travel the world one second a day and some of you guys might have seen it already. It's just hit 1 million views which is insane and awesome. It was like the first video I put on this channel and it was really the jumping off point for me to start YouTube and now it's become my first video to hit a million which is really cool. Now I did that after already having traveled for nine months on a budget as a backpacker. I lived on about 15-20 dollars a day staying in hostels, eating local, traveling really cheap, traveling for a long time in each place and doing it over land to cut down the costs and that was really how I started traveling. I started doing it as a complete backpacker with a certain amount that I'd saved from quitting my job beforehand and selling all my stuff and basically saving up as much as I could in England before I left. I had a budget of about four thousand pounds and that lasted me about nine months traveling from Barcelona all the way on the interrail through to Turkey, flying from Turkey to India, spending a couple months in India before heading to Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and then that was where the money ran out. So what did I do? I already had my working holiday visa lined up and ready, I'd paid for that before I left and that was my backup plan. Initially I did set out with the idea that I wanted to travel full-time and work online but I didn't really put the work and effort behind the scenes into making that a reality. I was just enjoying the travel and I was enjoying doing all these fun things without really giving too much thought to how I was going to make money online and what I was going to do. So I got to this point at the end of that nine months where I'd run out of money and I had to go to Australia and use my backup plan which was working holiday visa and when I say I ran out of money I really had run out of money. I was into my overdraft. I still had my student overdraft from a couple years before luckily and I went about 200 pounds into my overdraft so I was properly on zero but I got to Australia with the working holiday visa. It was just a 20 pound flight from Bali to Perth at the time. I got there, checked into a hostel still using my overdraft and then asked if I could clean the hostel in exchange for accommodation and that's... they do that a lot in Australia. That's the deal a lot of people get. You go there and then while you're still looking for work or looking for a job you can work for the hostel and you'll get your accommodation for free. I ended up doing that for about three weeks while I was looking for a job that both I wanted to do and that would enable me to save. So I spent three weeks working seven days a week just a few hours a day of cleaning a hostel and living in the hostel eating cheap from supermarkets until I finally got a job and I actually had three different jobs while I was working in Australia but I got this first one. It enabled me to start saving. Eventually I moved out of the hostel into a nice flat and got a different job that was slightly better paying. Lived in a nice flat in the centre of Perth for a few months while saving up and getting ready to leave. Initially my plan was to travel Australia and I was planning to go and do like the full circuit around the outside, head to the east coast, do a massive road trip basically like a lot of people do. The problem was that I still had this dream of travelling and working online. I didn't want to give up on that so rather than spending all the money I'd saved up in six months to travel Australia I decided to go back to Southeast Asia with that money that I'd saved up which was roughly I'd say four thousand Australian so maybe that was two thousand five hundred pounds at the time and I went back to Southeast Asia at the end of the six months in Perth and went straight to Bali. Yeah straight to Bali where I am now. Now again I was back to being a proper budget backpacker saving as much as I could sleeping in cheap hostels but then rather than just spending all my time travelling I was committed to not being back in the situation where I'd run out of money and had to work somewhere. I actually ended up working in an office in Australia which isn't at all what I wanted to do because that was what I left in England and then suddenly I was on the other side of the world sure but I was working back in an office doing something I didn't want to do and that was what made me decide to really work hard this time when I set out on my travels and that was where I started this channel. I did that quit my job to travel the world video. I edited that while I was in Australia, launched it and it got a good reception and then from there I decided to do the vlog following my journey of trying to figure out how to live and work online while travelling. I started off offering freelance web design to first friends and family and then finding whoever I could online and I made a little bit of money from that maybe just enough to keep going but it was never more than a few hundred a so it wasn't really enough to travel nicely it was enough to travel and live and work in Southeast Asia where it's very cheap to live and of course I still had the savings from Australia to keep me going as well but I really needed to figure out the way to make more online. I actually also, side note, I did a whole web project, like a whole website for someone in Australia that I was previously working for and this took me about a month to be honest of working every day and I did this massive project and then still to this day I've never been paid for it so that was a big setback that was both motivationally and money-wise it was a big setback for me because it was this big amount of money that I thought yes I've done it and then it never came so I had to go back to what I did was work even harder on my YouTube channel and social media because I knew that was what I wanted to do I was enjoying making videos I was enjoying creating content so I just said I'm going to work much harder on this than I was on the website part of it. A few months went by while I was vlogging and creating content and learning social media and learning video editing I did it through Philippines for a couple months then Thailand I believe before flying back to England for Christmas with some of my savings to see my family because I hadn't seen them in maybe a year and a half at this point and then flying back out to Indonesia for a few months. Okay, that cut out for a second. Let's carry on. Here was where it really started to take off. I had a lot of videos in Indonesia that did quite well and I was then gaining subscribers and then I got invited to China to spend two months in China fully paid for fully covered accommodation and meals and everything included to live there and create content for a jiu-jitsu camp. Now some of you that have been following me for a long time may have may have seen these videos already but I was living there for almost two months making videos about this jiu-jitsu camp and it really gave me a chance to work hard on YouTube and social media without having to worry about the other side of it and now I actually I like I'm very grateful to his name was Ferdinand the person that invited me there it was me and my friend Kai and I'm incredibly grateful because that was really the big break that enabled me to really push on and do this full-time which is what I've been doing since then which is two years two years probably right now two years was when I yeah two years ago was when I was heading to China so I've been doing it for two years since then and from there it all kind of spiraled. I did that for two months started getting a bit of traction figuring out more things of how to make money online for example I recorded the clip of a guy using a slinky in a market there and then I licensed that to a few news companies and online sites and still to this day that still makes me money through video licensing. I'll get a check each month for whoever wants to use that clip and I figured out okay there's money in video licensing as well as YouTube there's money in stock footage so I started uploading to video licensing and stock footage sites and that's still something I would tell people to do now because it's residual passive income from whatever clips you've recorded before it just has to be good quality and about a certain subject like that slinky guy was interesting it was it was new it was something people hadn't seen before I remember it got shared by the ladbible who have millions of likes and it got hundreds of thousands of views and that was why then lots of news companies wanted to license it that's just one of the things I learned of how to make money and I kept doing more things like that and it just it just kept going until now really I think what happened was I decided to put all my energy into one thing which was video and YouTube and that was really what I would preach to people nowadays that if you want to really do something and you want to do it well then it has to it has to be one thing that you really want to do well like the biggest Instagrammers are big on Instagram and that's the biggest platform biggest YouTubers are very good at YouTube the biggest travel bloggers are just very good at writing you have to really dedicate and commit yourself to one thing and that's what I have done with YouTube over the last couple of years and that's why it's now become my full-time job and back to the story I came away from China with an invite to go on a Royal Caribbean cruise for a week which was incredible and I was surrounded by these top Instagrammers and people that I was just dreaming about doing that sort of thing a year before and then suddenly I was in this new world and from there that really pushed me on and made me want to do it even more create more videos and then I got invited to another thing and another thing another thing and I started to figure out pricing started to figure out that wow I should be charging more than I charged originally or wow I should be getting paid for this because although it's something that I love doing and although like it's something that like you probably if you're watching it and you are a video creator you just enjoy doing it so if you got invited to somewhere to go on a free trip you might accept straight away and to be honest that's what I was doing a lot of before but then you start to realize that you should be getting paid for this and you should you should be earning your worth from this so that's another piece of advice I would say to people make sure you figure out and know your worth and it's taken a couple of years maybe to figure out my my own worth and why I should be charging but that's really something that comes over time and just over the last two years it's just spiraled on and now I'm able to live pretty comfortably from wherever I want to be as I said at the beginning of this whole journey I had to pick and choose the places I wanted to live in because they were very cheap I wanted to live in I had to live in hostels in Philippines and Thailand and Indonesia and like I say that's a sacrifice I had to make it wasn't a big sacrifice they're beautiful and amazing countries but now I'm staying in a nice villa get to do cool things I'm heading to Japan in a month's time Philippines and then Europe for the summer and it's just it's only because I've really put these last couple of years of effort into it and it didn't happen overnight it didn't happen in the first nine months actually I went it didn't happen in those six months after it didn't happen in those six months after it just sort of gradually worked and got better over time and I figured out more and more over time and now I'm able to do this and show you this so I've tried to intertwine my story with some lessons there but I really want to share more lessons in the future of things I've learned over the last couple of years and the things I'm still learning now because I don't think that it's the sort of world where you're ever going to stop learning with social media and online work there's always something new there's always a new way to make money and things change constantly so I'm still learning and as I'm still learning I want to share more of those lessons on here on this channel I can hear it really loudly I don't know if you can but there's construction work behind me it's very distracting I'm going to finish this video here and that's just like a brief overview of my life for the last three and a half years while I've been traveling the world continuously and celebrating 1 million views on quit my job to travel the world which is very cool and thank you to everyone that's taken the time to watch that next up I've got a few vlogs coming from Bali I actually just went exploring over the weekend with a few cool people you might have seen it if you're following my Instagram if you're not then do me a favor and go follow it because I'm doing more live updates there rather than these videos that take longer to put out yeah I'll see you in the next vlogs again thank you for watching and this is my life