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I am in Chiang Mai Thailand now.

The food is great! We eat like kings for ~$1-2 for lunch and ~$2-3 for dinner.

The humidity is terrible, and there's almost no sidewalks, and no public transportation. We might get a scooter like everyone else uses to get around here, but they seem pretty dangerous.

I was jet lagged for nearly a week, and I'm just coming out of it now.

We found a 1BR apartment that we like for ~$210/mo each ($420 total). This isn't the best deal considering there are seemingly hundreds of studios for $160-200/mo, but there's no good reason for us to optimize when things are so cheap already.

In Ecuador everyone spoke Spanish and never English, whereas here it is 90% Thai and 10% English. Taxi drivers know the English words related to driving, restaurants know the words for "chicken" and "fish" etc. Considering how hard it is to learn Thai, this is nice.

We want to stay here for about 5-6 months, but it remains to be seen whether we can make friends or find fast internet that doesn't go down.

Akratic-

If you feel like it would you mind hashing out why you chose Thailand and specifically Chiang Mai as a destination for 6 months? Just wondering. Obviously it is cheap but there are other South Asian countries that are similar I think.

Anyway, good luck with settling into your new home! Its really cool follow along with the globe trotting. Hope to do something like it one day.

Hmm, we wanted Asia because after traveling so much we had become bored with North America, South America, Australia and Europe. Africa would have been another good option, but we were perhaps not ready for that challenge yet.

As far as deciding where in Asia, Thailand has the best food! (my/gf opinion). It's also probably the most touristy, which is important in two ways: 1) we've been hearing encouraging tales about Asia from other travelers for years and years 2) it makes this an easier first stop in Asia

As far as deciding where in Thailand, Chiang Mai was the place most recommended by our traveler friends, and also the part of Thailand most recommended by the expat retirement communities online.

I haven't been to these other cities, so take this with a grain of salt, but here's the reputation I've been given for the three biggest cities in Thailand:
1) Bangkok - shit show, densely populated, crazy like Manhattan, which is already too much for me
2) Phuket - sex trade, travel destination for the "lets get black out drunk!" kids, drugs on the beach, etc
3) Chiang Mai - cultural capital, best place for cooking and massage classes, less humid, hiking and outdoor activities

For a while we were going to go to Vietnam first, but we heard from multiple people that the Vietnamese locals dislike tourists, and we didn't want to be worried about that. Then it was Taiwan, but we happened to leave the States right before the weather in Thailand turned good (apparently it's good six months of the year, and too hot/too humid/too rainy the other six months). Thus we wanted to hit Thailand first, during its good season.

By the way, the reason for six months is that each place we go we need to get a private condo with reallly good internet for my girlfriend's business, and since it takes us ~2 weeks to set all that up, our mobility is constrained. Being in a place for a longer period of time does give us a chance to make a real connection with the city and some people in it though.

You are two or three years ahead of me, it sounds like you are living the dream.

I am eager to hear about your experience hooking up and using internet service.

Have you hit Crossfit Chaing Mai yet? The one on Koh Tao looks good but expensive.

Yeah we've been to CrossFit Chiang Mai twice so far, and are going again tomorrow morning. I'd be surprised if I end up liking this one as much as the CrossFit in Cuenca, but it's still a good use of time and money.

I'm lazier about expenses when I live in cheap places, probably because it's so easy to be under budget. CrossFit is definitely a luxury, but I can afford some luxuries, and it's one of the better ones.

I tried to do CrossFit on my own this past August when I spent a month in Maine, but it seems that I really am motivated by the group class experience with CrossFit. I did quite badly on my own.

I have the same issue. I push myself much harder when there are others doing the same.

Your post prompted me to search for gyms in low cost travel destinations. It looks like Bangalore and Bali have options. Also there are several in South Africa. We stayed in Durban for a while. I think SA would meet your tech need. The box there looks exceptional. Durban is on our agenda for the next trip so we'll have to give it a try. Thanks for the motivation!

Sorry for disappearing!

The same obsessive focus that I brought to ERE came by completely abandoning my pre-ERE obsessions. Well now ERE is the obsession-from-the-past that's been abandoned!

I used to think about ERE constantly, if anything I had to hold myself back from spending all day on this forum. Now the mindset is basically just ingrained.

It doesn't help how stupidly easy it is to live on under $1k/mo in a place where the average cost of living is $500-750/mo. In the US I had to be twice as efficient, or probably more, as the average person to save so much. Here in Thailand I can be downright inefficient and still the numbers work out fine.

Daily costs approximately:
$1 for breakfast (imported cereal, eat at home)
$1 for lunch (out)
$1.50 for dinner, (out)
$2 for crossfit
$3 for health insurance (US based)
$9 for rent and utilities and internet
===
$17.50/day * 30 => $525/mo

Sporadic costs:
$1.50/week for 5 hours of duplicate bridge (new hobby)
$3/every week or two for a bus ride to a new tourist destination
$6/mo to get the apartment cleaned (still experimenting with this one; it makes my girlfriend feel extremely uncomfortable)

You can see that even when I lose my mind and buy four plates for dinner instead of two, it costs just $3 instead of $1.50, and so doesn't really break the bank.

Somehow expats living here do find a way to spend $1.5k/mo+, but their need for status as demonstrated through fancy apartments and fancy restaurants seems nearly insatiable. They also have a preference for expensive bars etc., whereas I'd rather be home on my laptop.

So our apartment is $433/mo => $216/mo each. I met an expat with a $100/mo apartment, living on as little as possible to pursue his dream of Muay Thai. He lives outside the city and commutes in on a scooter. I could do the same, I suppose. But when I can have the 1BR condo in the best location in the city without breaking the budget, it just doesn't' seem worth optimizing anymore.

===

Today I checked my networth for the first time in months. My savings are about the same as when I started traveling a year ago. It seems I picked a poor time for the PP, as stocks have done very well, and gold and bonds not so much. Oh well.

I guess with my savings earning about 0%, I have less money now by the sum of all the expenses I've had in the past year. That's okay. I suspect before my savings run out that either the investment income will pick up, or a new income stream will materialize.

===

Regarding traveling, I would say that I'm already kind of sick of it. I don't really get much out of seeing another new tourist destination. Having to continuously remake friends is a big pain for me as well. I really dislike the initial effort of putting myself into big social groups etc., but it's worth it when I can develop a few lasting friendships. Except when everyone in is your circle is continuously moving, the friendships don't actually last. It's rare for me to find someone I can connect with, and when you change cities every six months -- and they change cities every six months too -- then any connections you do find end as soon as they are getting started.

I'm not so sick of traveling that I *need* to stop. It's just not what I was expecting. I think I had this idea in my head that traveling would be put me in fundamentally new and challenging situations, like completely different places. Except to me Thailand and Ecuador and Chicago are all basically the same. People trade their time for money and their money for food and shelter and status. People have smart phones in all the places. They spend their days about the same, seem to value about the same things, etc., etc. People in Thailand smile more, people in Ecuador prioritize spending Sundays with their families. I like those small differences I guess, but somehow in my head things were more different.

Consider these three people:
1) person pursuing ERE in the US
2) normal person in the US
3) normal person in Thailand

I would go so far as to say that person 1 and 2 are more different than person 2 and 3. I was hoping that traveling would be more eye-opening, would be more difficult, would be more of a catalyst for change and self improvement. *Maybe* if we went to rural Africa or Saudi Arabia or something that might be true, but where we've been it's just not the case (and back in Ecuador I thought moving to the other side of the world like Thailand would be enough!). So basically it seems that almost all problems (food, transpiration, housing, etc) can just be solved by trading money for the solution. How boring!

My girlfriend wants to keep traveling though, and I'm flexible enough to do so right now, so why not I suppose.

===

So what are my new obsessions?
A) playing videos games (I know, I know)
B) entrepreneurship, specifically taking my girlfriend's business to the next level

== A) playing video games ==

I started playing videos games innocently enough, because I had the time to do so, and even had a business justification because I wanted to understand the most popular games better in order to create my own game like them. I got sucked in though.

Video games really tickle the part of my brain that likes mastery, likes control, likes analyzing things and making charts, etc. Video games are like easy-mode in terms of getting those feelings of mastery and control. I'm confident that if I put the time and effort in I'll always be good at them, and be rewarded with those feelings.

In comparison, I could analyze / attempt to master / work extremely hard at other things like in life such as entrepreneurship or trading or what-have-you, and my success there is not guaranteed. I might succeed, or I might get unlucky. There are many factors outside of my control that are just as important as my own individual effort. With video games though it's entirely up to my individual effort, and so entirely in my control, and thus immensely gratifying, although, unfortunately, totally pointless in the long term.

== B) entrepreneurship, specifically taking my girlfriend's business to the next level ==

One thing I've learned about myself with respect to entrepreneurship is that I have some fatal flaws in my personality. I have some great strengths such as being a strong engineer, but my flaws include things like:
1) sometimes I'll get a very important email and just never, ever reply to it
2) often I'll solve all the hard parts of something and then just drop the project before finishing it, completely uninterested now that the hard parts have been solved

So basically I need a partner that can cover my flaws (because I don't believe that I can fix them.) One reason I was excited about making video games is I had some people in mind who I could partner with, but it turns out that I don't.

In fact the best person I have to partner with is my girlfriend, and she already has a successful business! The website that I made for her to teach English on Skype while we travel has worked out brilliantly. This past year while we traveled she saved over 50% of her income from this business! In fact, demand for her lessons has been so high that she has had to start turning down new clients recently (much to my chagrin; the correct business decision is to raise her prices yet again).

Unfortunately, the income from her current business can only scale in proportion to the hours she has available in the day to teach. We tried to grow the business by farming out lessons to other teachers, but it hasn't worked. The other teachers are dramatically less desired. Students would rather pay more than twice as much to have lessons with my girlfriend than to have lessons with them. We tried raising my girlfriend's prices and have done so successfully numerous times, but there's a ceiling on how long that can work.

What we want to do instead is distill the best parts of her lessons into a product that can be consumed in a way that scales better. If we can capture the essence of her lessons into a suite of videos / games / documents / exercises / whatever, then that could be supplemented by in person lessons with lower quality teachers, and still have the same teaching impact. I guess what we're trying to do is franchise/McDonalds-ize her lessons, and thus scale beyond a five figure income into something that could be a six or seven figure business.

===

Speaking of entrepreneurship, I continue to be fascinated by the entrepreneurship community in Chiang Mai. Here's an article about the area we live in (Nimmanhaemin, Chiang Mai): http://magazine.theascender.org/issue-4 ... manhaemin/

I like entrepreneurs because I can talk business with them, which is easier for me than normal small talk.

I have noticed a weird disconnect between myself and most entrepreneurs here though. Many of them have two types of work: 1) how they pay the bills and 2) how they plan to get rich. It's a constant struggle to do enough of 1) to keep going, while also dreaming about 2). When they ask me questions about my business and income and work and stuff like like, they find out pretty quickly that I do almost nothing related to 1). Sometimes I try to preach the ERE gospel, explaining passive investment income and stuff like that, but they rarely get it. Almost everyone seems to be focused almost exclusively on the income side of the equation, and simply scale up their expenses to match their rising and falling income levels, to the point of rarely having actual savings or wealth (unless they stumble into an exorbitant income stream so big they can't figure out how to spend it).

Sometimes I wonder if they decide I am a trust fund kid. I want to scream: "No! I know what you're thinking, but I wasn't gifted this, I earned it! I worked smart and I worked hard."

But then I wonder, maybe I am a trust fund kid in some ways. I wasn't given a trust fund, but I was given all the tools I needed to build one: born to a strong, stable family in a rich country; steered into a top university and a top major within that university; born with extremely strong earning potential and little in the way of needs or dependents. It's like if the rat race could be modeled as a 26.2 mile marathon, and I got to start at the 20 mile mark. Sure I ran the last 6.2 miles on my own! Don't compare me to the people who had finance independence before they were even born! But then, is running that last 6.2 miles really that impressive when other people had to run 20.0 miles on their own just to catch up with what I lucked into?

I dunno. I do know I started out weird and ERE has made me even weirder.

===

So those are some of my random thoughts and experiences since the last time I posted. Sorry about disappearing. I don't really understand the part of myself that needs to give my new obsessions 100.00% effort, rather than saving at least a litle bit for past interests. I really do enjoy these forums and the community on them, I just get so swept up in other things, like to an almost uncontrollable level. Of course, it was being fully swept up in ERE in the past that enabled me to progress so quickly with it.

Thanks for this. Re, your girlfriend's business ...

What we want to do instead is distill the best parts of her lessons into a product that can be consumed in a way that scales better. If we can capture the essence of her lessons into a suite of videos / games / documents / exercises / whatever, then that could be supplemented by in person lessons with lower quality teachers, and still have the same teaching impact. I guess what we're trying to do is franchise/McDonalds-ize her lessons, and thus scale beyond a five figure income into something that could be a six or seven figure business.

You are talking about creating a distance learning/blended learning alternative at a time when this is tricky because a lot of free-of-charge resources are starting to be shared by more established providers. So this may be trickier than you think.

There is a concept in teaching at the moment (blended/hybrid learning) that talks about 'flipping the classroom' (it has roots in things like resource-based learning so its not exactly new). This relies upon resources being used by learners away from the teacher for most of the teaching time and using the teacher face-time only for those parts of the lesson which need that kind of responsiveness and contact. It gives the tutor more time to prepare and typically brings students up to a level base without taking teacher time to do this.

You could do this in a franchise model, with your girlfriend providing masterclass lessons and other tutors providing the more basic support, but (and you may have meant this) the support tutors should be very obviously (even conspicously) well-trained and not 'lower quality'. Can your girlfriend train up other tutors to be as good as she is, or almost, using her teaching system/resources? Could be quite a beast to run. It also depends on why your GF is in demand and whether and why she likes her work. If demand and her interest are because she is an excellent teacher in a personally responsive way its going to be far more problematic to capture what she does in static resources (or even interactive ones at any reasonable cost). It might be easier to teach the teachers and have an execellent tutoring squad who pay to be accredited to use her system.

You could consider looking at what open resources are out there (Duolingo has been mentioned here) and use those as resources which you build on. A premium service to take people who have already proven that they can learn well using those resources (motivated learners) and offering something that they can't get from these. A sort of besppoke guide through open resources.

There are now quite a lot of open online resources out there (called OER (open educational resources) of which MOOCs are one example). This potentially creates a problem for any video or other easy-to-make/duplicate teaching resources. Students will, I feel, only pay a premium for furture resources which are distinct from these. Note that distance learning resources of good quality take a lot of time to produce and maintain. But you will have replaced your obsession with gaming ...

Hi saving-10-years, thanks for the feedback!

When I compare our offering to Duolingo and other free online learning resources, I do get quite intimidated!

However, when I compare what we're making to other "skype english teacher" websites, the competition is quite bad.

The hope is that we can position ourselves against the Skype competition, not the OER. People are used to paying for Skype lessons; we hope we can transition that into essentially paying for "Skype-plus". And the MOOCs etc don't have Skype integration / personalized face-to-face conversation on their radar, as far as I know.

We're struggling to understand for ourselves why my girlfriend is so much more successful than the teachers we've tried on the website.

But yeah, there's also not much opportunity cost if we fail. It's a fun project for us to work on together, and I wouldn't be doing much else with myself without it... probably just more gaming.

Nice article.

I was wondering about the practical part of your finances. Do you live mostly on cash? Use CC's? Do you use a local bank, or do you have your money in a larger, international bank? If you did it again, is there anything you would set up differently?

Yeah, cash. I left about 40k of PP cash allocation in Bank of America Checking. I just withdraw it from the ATM in the largest amount possible, since there's a flat $3-5 fee each time I do this.

My girlfriend and I actually alternate withdrawals, since we split expenses while we travel. We keep things separate at home, but while traveling it's just easier to combine expenses.

I'd do the same thing again; it's just not worth the trouble of optimizing.

PS: 40k in my checking account actually makes me a Thai millionaire, since the conversation rate is 30 to 1. Seven digits on my receipts.

Great update Akratic, and I hear you about that all looks like the same after a while.
I have had the same experience once after 6 months traveling abroad. Still, it was a great experience for us and I bet it is (and will be) for your.

Your experience with travel don't surprise me given that you're the closest to a personal[ity] clone I've ever met. I've come to the same conclusions. I can do it---but I don't see the point---and it's not really a challenge after I've done it a couple of times.

If you think about it, you've essentially paid an airline to transport you to faraway locations and found that young entrepreneurs/freelancers (who do exactly the same thing) are everywhere the same except for minor quirks. I found the same.

I like to think of travel in the sense that it's possible to travel in many dimensions [of the human experience]. Not just geographically. Think of humanity as tribes. There's the middle class professional tribe, there's the hourly worker tribe, there's the criminal tribe, etc. There's not much to see/learn by visiting members from your own tribe even if they live 6000 miles away. They're still the same as you.

I think would be a bigger journey [in terms of personal development] for a tech professional to work at McDonalds for a year or picking apples in an orchard while living in a tent with five other people than to jump on a plane and be a tech freelancer in another country. Other journeys in unusual dimensions could be joining a political campaign (especially one on the other side); busking for money; working in a field that's entirely different e.g. personal care vs software; even living with 37 possessions in a yurt; ...

Another issue which may come up sooner or later is that you might slowly find yourself outgrowing the traditional travellers [as seen in the article]. Since they're on the earn-spend mentality, many of them will eventually return home, get a "real job", start a "family", grow roots, and possibly become trees. My sister was a nomad (teaching english, waitressing, vineyarding, assisted care asst, and taking a semester's worth of college classes in different countries for 6-12 months at a time for many years) and eventually stopped because of the want to settle and because the partying, drinking, and relationship drama of the dominant nomad-demographic culture became less inspiring at age 35 compared to age 22.

Jacob, I find your travel related statements here and elsewhere very disturbing. I think it's the dissonance between your being right and my liking travel so much:)

Nice to hear from you again. Thank you for sharing your experiences and observations. Thailand seems like a great place to keep costs low and pursue a risky idea. Is the air in Chiang Mai as bad as they say? Are there a lot of mosquitos?

I'd rather play a videogame, than, say, watch football because with videogames the reward is guaranteed. These days I have to go out of my way to sit down and enjoy a good videogame. I've been too busy being a grown up to properly enjoy a videogame. I'm hoping that after leaving the 9-5 I can enjoy games like I used to. However, I'm not going to do 12 hour sessions again...I swear =).

We were going to jump into traveling on our first year of FI, but we've decided to first hang loose in the US. We still plan to do at least one year of travel to get the wanderlust out of our system. I have a feeling we will reach the same conclusion you and Jacob have reached, but we'll have to see for ourselves what our limits are. Will we want to settle down after six months, a year, two years? We'll see.

akratic wrote:I was hoping that traveling would be more eye-opening, would be more difficult, would be more of a catalyst for change and self improvement. *Maybe* if we went to rural Africa or Saudi Arabia or something that might be true, but where we've been it's just not the case (and back in Ecuador I thought moving to the other side of the world like Thailand would be enough!). So basically it seems that almost all problems (food, transpiration, housing, etc) can just be solved by trading money for the solution. How boring!

I'm not the best traveled of people, but I've put in some serious time in a variety of countries and cultures and I generally agree. There are certainly differences between groups of people, but they exist in ways that aren't easy to observe when traveling as a tourist. I do enjoy some of the things about living in a different country, especially when it means a different work environment, but I'm pretty sure once I reach FI I'll stop traveling (making me the reverse of a typical retiree).

akratic wrote:With video games though it's entirely up to my individual effort, and so entirely in my control, and thus immensely gratifying, although, unfortunately, totally pointless in the long term.

In the truly long term, you're dead. You won't be given any points for the number of useful things you can do, either, so if you're accomplishing what you need to and working on yourself, I say time spent doing something you enjoy is time well spent.

akratic wrote:But then I wonder, maybe I am a trust fund kid in some ways. I wasn't given a trust fund, but I was given all the tools I needed to build one: born to a strong, stable family in a rich country; steered into a top university and a top major within that university; born with extremely strong earning potential and little in the way of needs or dependents. It's like if the rat race could be modeled as a 26.2 mile marathon, and I got to start at the 20 mile mark. Sure I ran the last 6.2 miles on my own! Don't compare me to the people who had finance independence before they were even born! But then, is running that last 6.2 miles really that impressive when other people had to run 20.0 miles on their own just to catch up with what I lucked into?

I dunno. I do know I started out weird and ERE has made me even weirder.

I think it's good for all of us to acknowledge this kind of thing, but no need to undercut your accomplishments. If I can alter your metaphor, you ran a marathon, just on a good road, with plenty of water, and after being driven to the event. Some people have to run across the city first, uphill part of the way, or are given the wrong directions to the starting line.

@everyone, thanks for the comments! Chiang Mai air is supposed to get bad in March, so we'll see. I haven't noticed the Mosquitos much; they're worse in Maine.

@jacob

jacob wrote:I think would be a bigger journey [in terms of personal development] for a tech professional to work at McDonalds for a year or picking apples in an orchard while living in a tent with five other people than to jump on a plane and be a tech freelancer in another country. Other journeys in unusual dimensions could be joining a political campaign (especially one on the other side); busking for money; working in a field that's entirely different e.g. personal care vs software; even living with 37 possessions in a yurt; ...

Yeah, exactly!

Sometimes I wonder about being a greeter at an Apple Store, one of those people that needs to say "Hello!" to everyone that walks in. I think that would be a good challenge for me. Joining the opposite party political campaign would probably be even better...

Granted, the move from Chiang Mai to Ho Chi Minh City will provoke/require some adaptations that are similar to those that would be provoked/required by moving from, say, a job as a programmer to a greeter at the Apple Store. There are other adaptations only available to the former.

Does one need to go 6000 miles to gain them when something similar may be available just down the street? Perhaps not. That does not change the fact that part of the tempering of certain forms of travel stem from dealing with not knowing where one will sleep tonight or if they will find something to eat (see the animal's writing: http://animaltreks.wordpress.com/). Coping with disorientation can be hard. Is the purpose of Nimmanhaemin to eliminate this form of discomfort?

Just imagine the adaptations that would be required of the programmer who walked from Chiang Mai to Ho Chi Minh City. They would be a heck of a lot different than those required when I walk from home to the Apple store.

These comments are very interesting to me. My view of travel, as Ego exemplified, is completely different than the popular perception. As an example, I think there's a huge difference between something like paddling around in a kayak to view a destination versus take a cruise to see the sights from the ship. In the latter case, there is no hardship or challenge which makes the viewing of these sights or locations somewhat ordinary. There are no "real" emotional or physical highs or lows related to the experience.

Maybe this relates to what My Brain Gets Itchy was talking about a few months ago with regards to creating your own friction. From what I read on here it seems like most people get tired or burned out on traditional means of travel by their early 30s. However, in the adventurer/outdoor community, many adventure/take expeditions into their later years. Would creating your own friction make traditional travel more rewarding?