Courtesy of Stephanie Smolders
Smolders and her partner.
- Stephanie Smolders is a marketing and business coach as well as a writer, traveler, and digital nomad alongside her partner Peter Beukering.
- Before their journey began four years ago, Smolders saved up $13,500 and Peter saved up $25,000 to have a financial safety net while traveling.
- They made money while traveling by using previous their job experiences to find work online, from teaching English and taking on copywriting gigs to offering virtual management consultations and working in social media management.
- Smolders and Beukering also grew their travel website and social media presence and began to develop partnership deals with hotels, allowing them to cut back on living costs.
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When my boyfriend and I first met, I told him that I had always planned to travel and not live in one place. And as fate would have it, he had similar ambitions.
Peter is from the Netherlands and I'm from Belgium, so we soon set off for a destination nearby (the south of France), with no return ticket and no set plan. People thought we would be back in a heartbeat. Yet here we are, four years later. Most people at our ages (I am 29 and Peter is 30) would be eager to settle down, but we're still going strong searching for that next bargain flight.
Many say that we must have racked up quite some savings, and we did: approximately $38,500, which had required a lot of hustle and strategic planning, as well as selling most of our things. Looking back, we know we could have made it work with a fraction of those savings, as most of it went towards building our business.
We took the jobs we had done in the past and found a way to execute them on a remote, freelance basis. The new roles were maybe not as well-paid as what we were earning before, but it was a start. Peter was able to occasionally work with management consulting clients. I already had a handful of social media management clients and copywriting gigs, and I supplemented this with online teaching, earning on average about $14 per hour. I was also able to use the platform Italki to teach Dutch, as I have a bachelor's in education.