Advice From a Former Digital Nomad

By J.A. Jernay

Forget the outdated concept of the deferred-life plan and postponing travel until retirement. With the revolution in remote technology, you don't need to wait until old age to hobble around the world, not anymore.

 

Advice from a Former Digital Nomad is the result of an obsessive three-year-long international journey that began during the covid-19 pandemic. Moving from Europe to the Caribbean to Latin America, from huge cities to mountain villages to stunning beaches, J.A. Jernay fixated on one life-changing question:

 

What is the best version of myself that I can be?

 

Whether your dream is to park yourself on a beach, explore a foreign city, or stay on the move, Advice from a Former Digital Nomad offers the blueprint you need.

 

This step-by-step guide to working while traveling teaches: 

• What to consider when making the decision to launch
• How to manage your food, housing, exercise, and money
• What to ask when choosing support infrastructure
• What emotional obstacles you may encounter in yourself and in others
• Which regions of the world offer the best advantages for digital nomads

Those are the mechanics. This book also explains how embarking on a career as a digital nomad can offer life-changing benefits:

• A lower cost of living
• An improved dating life
• A sense of fulfillment
• A healthier perspective on conflict

Find out how to switch up your surroundings, change your mentality, and challenge yourself to find your very best life.

 

Read Advice from a Former Digital Nomad today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Plotworks Publishing
• Release date: Apr 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781960936004

J.A. Jernay

After leaving the foreign desk of the Washington Post, J.A. Jernay travelled across North and South America for nearly twelve months in search of adventure. A finalist in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centennial Short Story Contest, Jernay has a keen eye for detail and a deep interest in foreign languages, local traditions, and, of course, gemstones.

Book preview

1

Introduction

From 2020 to 2023, I spent three years working remotely while traveling the world. The experience has been a huge positive in my life. I wouldn’t trade it for the world, which I’ve now seen a lot more of.

This book was written to show you why I did it, how I did it, and how you can do it effectively.

Here are some facts:

During this period, the longest time I spent in any single place was three months.

The shortest time I spent in any single place was one night.

The most typical amount of time I spent in a place was four to six weeks.

I lived in or visited twelve different countries and twenty-three different cities, plus rural areas.

My average nightly cost for lodging was approximately $60.

I should also confess that this wasn’t exactly my first rodeo. In 2014, I’d spent three months living and traveling in South America. After that, I’d done monthlong trips whenever possible, adding in a small amount of work while abroad, as technology made it more feasible. Then, in 2020, I threw my hat into the ring and launched on a complete digital nomad lifestyle.

I thought the experience would last eight or nine months, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Once you get on the treadmill of worldwide travel, if things are going well, it’s not that easy to stop.

This book will explain it all.

This is a book of real advice, written by a real person (me) who has a lot of boots-on-the-ground experience. At the same time, it’s also a travelogue of sorts. I’ve picked up some stories, anecdotes, and observations along the way that I will share.

But the most important thing I gained during my travels: a new wife. She’s creative, beautiful, intelligent, responsible, sweet, and funny. Maybe we met by accident, maybe by the hand of a higher power. I’ll never know. But I do know that I never would’ve met her if I hadn’t decided to become a digital nomad during a global pandemic. This alone should sell the decision to you.

I’m not technically done yet either. As of this writing, I won’t return to live in the United States until 2024, depending on how fast her green card process goes.

Here’s how I did it, and how you can do it too.

First, a quick background.

2

The Leadup

I’ve lived my life by the rule that a man shouldn’t define himself by how he looks, but rather by what he can do.

The best things I can do are write, edit, publish, educate, and travel.

Travel has defined me as much as the others, especially as I’ve grown older. In that sense, I’ve been living in reverse. Men are expected to grow more anchored with age, more closed to experience, more stoic, less reactive. Be the oak tree, they say.

I don’t agree.

For the last few years, I’ve been floating like a plastic bag in a windstorm. It’s been fun.

The travel itch arrived early in my life. My family took a lot of vacations: Southern California, Alabama, Quebec. I recall living for several weeks in a dormitory at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Mostly, though, we traveled up to the broad blue waters of Lake Huron in the summer. To me, even today, the Great Lakes are the best summer vacation destination in the world. Sixty million people per year can’t be wrong.

Later, I spent five years in Washington, D.C. earning a pair of college degrees while trying to become an adult. I also had my first experience abroad, alone, as a student at Oxford University, which you can read about it The Oxford Diaries (available wherever ebooks are sold).

A little while later, when I was twenty-four, I spent four months driving around the United States. I’d saved all my shekels the previous year by working two jobs and living cheaply. A similar-minded girl I knew had just finished her master’s degree, and together we launched on a classic Road Trip Out West, inspired by a thousand movies and mythologies. One guy, one girl, a pocket full of cash, the open road. The only thing missing was a red convertible. I had my grandfather’s gray Oldsmobile sedan, and it didn’t win any beauty contests.

During that summer, I visited 39 states, drove 15,000 miles, and slept on at least forty different beds, couches, carpets, and pieces of dirt. I avoided packs of wild javelinas roaming through my campground in west Texas, swam naked across the Rio Grande, clambered up mountains in Utah, sought out geodesic domes in the Arizona desert, partied with socialists in rural Oregon, toured cattle farms in Iowa, and gorged myself on clams in Maine. At one point, I didn’t shower for a week.

There were lowlights too, such as finding myself a literal inch away from being arrested for international arms smuggling at the Canadian border. My car had been searched by border authorities because we looked suspicious, and it was only through an act of God that they missed the Smith & Wesson pistol that the guy riding in my backseat had secretly stowed in my jumper cable box in my trunk without telling me. He’d been a friend of a friend, and I wanted to strangle him.

(The lesson: Don’t travel internationally with self-destructive strangers carrying unresolved daddy issues.)

After that, I settled in southern California for a long time. Following my 30 th birthday, with a decent income secured, I began looking outside the United States for travel opportunities. Together with my new blonde bride, who had some talent for Spanish—I was the mouth, she was the ears—we turned to Latin America. We undertook trips to Argentina, Uruguay, Puerto Rico. There was a honeymoon in Spain, a road trip through Portugal. She was a spiteful hellcat, but at least our travels planted the seeds for my Ainsley Walker Gemstone Travel Mystery series.

After the marriage was put out of its misery, I headed back to South America, traveling alone in a foreign language for the first time. I beelined for the place that all single men undergoing a divorce should go: Colombia. There, I spent my first extended period outside the Anglosphere, and it was life-changing in ways that travel hadn’t been before. Emotionally, linguistically, sexually, physically, you name it. My confidence had taken a hit in the prior couple of years. The experience of moving alone through a foreign culture, and surviving it, helped me redefine myself. I was nearly forty years old. I was also learning to see myself as a competent international traveler.

Back in the US, I relocated to Chicago. There, I promptly met an attractive workaholic from Spain who had been in the US for a few years on a work visa. She laughed at my South American version of her language. She refused to use the word papi, hated reggaeton, and promised to teach me the right version of Spanish. In fact, over the next five years, she elevated my intermediate Spanish to full fluency. I am very grateful to her for that.

Meanwhile, I’d begun working as a ghostwriter, doing a new project every six weeks, and averaging half a million words a year. You can read about it here. Together, the workaholic and I continued exploring the world whenever we could squeeze weeks off from our respective careers. There were trips to see her family and friends in Barcelona, or to eat and travel in the north of Spain. There was a Thanksgiving spent in Iceland, the most expensive week of my life. There were trips to Chile, Bolivia, the coffee region in Colombia. With her, I spoke Spanish less often—she was quick to answer people first—but I listened to conversations a lot more. My skills improved by leaps and bounds.

Unfortunately, by 2019, I knew the relationship wasn’t going to last. What I didn’t know, however, was that my life was going to change so fast.

3

The Breakup

She was respectful, responsible, diligent, and pretty. She was a practical choice for a life partner, on paper.

The problem was that she routinely worked sixty to seventy hours per week. It left almost zero time for us as a couple, and she didn’t particularly care. I registered my displeasure, but there was no saving the relationship. She didn’t want to save it. She just wanted to be left alone to work, period.

The workaholic had also decided to purchase a new condo. She invited me to give up my apartment and move into her place, which was a sign of sunnier skies ahead. So I rolled the dice, trusting in her usually good judgment. I downsized, selling more than half of my furniture on Facebook Marketplace.

In retrospect, selling most of my furniture was an excellent decision. I had also sold my car the year before (in Chicago, they’re not necessary), another good decision. Both of these decisions accidentally smoothed the path towards for digital nomadism.

So, in May of 2020, I found myself living in a Tribeca-style open-floor-plan loft in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. It was the start of the pandemic, and we were living and working together in a single large room. In other words, we were on