
Passive Income 101: How To Travel The World Without Working - maneesh
http://maneeshsethi.com/blog/passive-income-101-how-to-travel-the-world-without-working
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maneesh
Here is a cached copy while my domain host is crashing, COME ON Page.ly :
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/153216/hackernews/Passive-
Income-101...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/153216/hackernews/Passive-
Income-101-How-to-Travel-the-World-Without-Working.html)

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maneesh
Sorry for the ugly doubled stuff and popups, those don't exist on the main
site, it's only cause of the cache

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j45
Nice story, thanks for sharing.

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maneesh
this is a resubmit because my last post disappeared from the front page with
no warning, if I am not following the HN rules please let me know!

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patio11
It likely got flagged by enough people to kill it. I'm suspecting a
combination of "Folks thought you were selling something" plus the seediness
of the Make Money Online niche. The audience here also would not love the
takeover lightbox.

Resubmissions are frowned on, btw.

FWIW, I sort of liked it, and I wish the mean startup understood SEO as well
as you or the costume affiliate site.

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mooism2
In addition to that, I sometimes flag submissions that don't load.

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nirvana
When your server crashes like this... you can easily fix it by going to S3.
just create a bucket with your domain name (Eg: maneeshsethi.com) then load a
static page into that bucket, turn on "web access" in the S3 control panel,
and redirect your DNS to the S3 CName.

Let amazon handle the load for you, and then redirect back later. (for this
reason it might be good to have your DNS set up with a 60 minute timeout.)

PS- I have to laugh that I'm getting down voted for trying to help here.

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ido
How about an even better solution using cloudfront?

Both cheaper _and_ faster than s3 :)

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nirvana
This is almost becoming a cliche, but that's a good thing, because I look
forward to it becoming a massive trend!

I'm dong a similar thing. In 2008, my cofounder and I sold off all of our
stuff, and became full-time nomads. Our reasoning was simple: Our startup was
designed to be build able with just the two of us, and almost anywhere in the
world is cheaper than the West Coast of the USA for costs. So, we could extend
our burn rate and see the world. Win-Win!

Reality is, our burn rate has been extended, but there's another cost to
traveling while doing a startup, and that is time / distractions.

We tend to spend 90 days in each country (the usual visa limit) before moving
on. But the relocations are enough of a hassle that we lose 2-4 weeks in
productivity each time it happens, or about %25 of a year gets "lost". Of
course, much of this "loss" is great experiences-- like the week long layover
we had in Venice Italy. (We saved money on a transatlantic flight by taking
that "sacrifice", even including the marginal increase in our cost of living
from staying near Venice.)

AirBNB is a great thing for this. We almost live full time in AirBNB places,
the exceptions being locations where AirBnB doesn't have great coverage, or
places where the visa lets us stay long enough to get a short term apartment.

We also use a passive income stream approach. Our past products have been on
the AppStore, and the nice thing about that is, even a year or two later, they
still earn. They take periodic maintenance and updates (Which increasingly
becomes a distraction when you want to move from the "lifestyle" business of
iPhone Apps into a more "startup" business, which we're doing now.)

From the beginning we focused on passive income. In fact, we didn't start an
online business or web oriented business because we didn't know if we'd be
able to have internet access when out on the road. I didn't want to have
servers go down and not be able to deal with it.

That's the nice thing about the App Store. It never goes down, and you don't
have to maintain it.

In the interim we discovered that most AirBnB places have internet. The times
we've had to get our own internet have been the most painful.... mobile
broadband is not as convenient or cost effective as I thought it might be...
and that was, it turns out, in a country where its really cheap and readily
available compared to the US!

I can't comment on the specific strategies recommended in this article, but I
can say that it can be done, especially if you're young and willing to live
cheap, cheap, cheap. (we're not either so its a bit harder for us.)

Anyway, I think that over the next decade, the US will continue to deteriorate
some, the infrastructure globally will improve, and more and more people will
discover that they don't need a lot of funding to do a real startup, and thus
real startups can be done on the road.

Outsourcing, or even just having the incredible leverage things like the App
Store give you makes this more and more possible.

The more mobile the workforce becomes, the more integrated the global economy,
and the better for peace and the better for prosperity!

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maneesh
Yes! People think it's impossible, or scammy, but that's only because they
don't understand that passive income is about building something that REALLY
provides value. Do something amazing, help other people do something amazing,
and help connect people with what they want.

Traveling and doing it cheaply is easy. I have a ton of posts coming up about
how I did this. Here is a video where I talk about how I built my first
passive income business--this was featured on Tim Ferriss's blog.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1merER1zVFg>

Live cheap and travel to lower cost countries. I spent less than $400/mo in
India!

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nirvana
How did you get featured on Tim Ferriss's blog? Just from all the kissing up
you do in the video? (probably a good strategy....)

We've been working on doing a video blog, but at this point its just
experiments.. haven't had a chance to fully do it yet.

Impressed that you fit in a 28L backpack. We started off with 55L, and just
recently upgraded given that we weren't' able to carry our bags aboard on some
airlines, so we're planning on checking bags now.

Your automation is impressive. How do you find the writers? I guess this would
take a lot of work to setup like you said.... I think we might be doing things
a bit of a harder way than you are.

