A few months ago I started a small series to talk about my ongoing goal to make at least $500 a month from this website. You can read How To Make Money From A Travel Blog: Part 1 and Part 2 here. This Month's Results In the month of October I made $709 from this website, which is a 100% improvement over the previous month's revenue of $347. That means I not only hit my goal of making $500/month, but I passed it by over $200. In terms of revenue, here's where it came from for the month of October. Amazon Associates - $349 Last month I predicted that my Amazon revenue would likely go down this ...

If you're a routine flyer around North America, you may have heard today that United Airlines dropped a bombshell on its loyalty program members. But chances are you didn't, because it seems that they chose to release the information at night. You know, during Halloween, when everyone is reading the news. The long and short of it is that many people with accumulated mileage, myself included, are facing a pretty severe devaluation of our mileage. On some international routes on other Star Alliance airlines, it will now take almost twice as many miles for the same flight. Their domestic routes fared ...

I recently sent this out to my newsletter subscribers. For information like this on a periodic basis, sign-up here. I hate SPAM too, so don't worry, I'll only send you great travel tips, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I hope by now most of you have read my free eBook, "The Beginner's Guide to Long-Term Travel and Lifestyle Design". I plan to update it periodically and send a new version to all of you from time to time, so please contact me if you felt there was anything missing or if there is a particular topic you would like addressed. One area I realized I left out was information ...

One of the first orders of business I take card of whenever I land in a new country is to try and get a pre-paid data plan for my phone. Some people chose not to have a working phone when they travel, since it's sometimes a bit of a pain to find the right provider. But I don't see much point in owning a smartphone and not having access to data with it whenever I want. Getting A Pre-paid SIM When You Travel Here are some other reasons why I love having a prepaid data plan with my phone when I travel. I can message friends and family back home using WhatsApp or iMessage whenever I want I can check ...

If you travel outside of North America you'll quickly realize just how different we do things with regards to power. First, power in North America is typically around 110V, but can range from around 100V all the way up to around 125V. In Europe and many other parts of the world, a voltage of around 220V is normal. In the old days, prior to intelligent power adapters, if you plugged a device designed for 110V into a wall socket wired for 220V, you could pretty much kiss that device goodbye as it would likely fry with a puff of smoke. The same goes for razors, hair dryers, curling irons, etc. ...

If you travel outside of North America you'll quickly realize just how different we do things with regards to power. First, power in North America is typically around 110V, but can range from around 100V all the way up to around 125V. In Europe and many other parts of the world, a voltage of around 220V is normal. In the old days, prior to intelligent power adapters, if you plugged a device designed for 110V into a wall socket wired for 220V, you could pretty much kiss that device goodbye as it would likely fry with a puff of smoke. The same goes for razors, hair dryers, curling irons, etc. ...

One of the downsides to always having the latest and greatest iPhone is that most places outside of North America and Europe seriously lag behind in terms of adoption rates. For places like Brazil and Argentina, that's even more true because the cost of picking up a new iPhone is nearly twice as much as we would pay in North America. When I went to Argentina in 2012, I couldn't find a Micro SIM card anywhere, and was forced to buy a normal full-sized SIM card and perform surgery on it to make it fit into a Micro SIM holder. I had to do that twice while travelling around the world with my iPhone ...

Last month I blogged the first part in my ongoing series in how to make money from a travel blog. You can read How to Make Money from a Travel Blog: Part One here. Basically my goal has been to find a way to make a modest amount of money from my website so that I can offset some of the rather large expenses I incur while travelling around the world. While I've become quite adept at finding good deals, airfare and hotels are still expensive. So I set out with a rather modest goal of trying to make an extra $500 per month from this website. This Month's Results In the month of September I made ...

I've been working on a travel eBook for a few months now, mostly on airplanes and during the odd evening. It's been slow going since I have a lot of other things going on right now, but I've managed to make a bit of progress each week. I'm pleased to announce that last night I managed to put the finishing touches on it, and it's now officially available. My travel ebook contains two main topics: how you can make and execute plans for long-term travel (anything more than a week or two), and how you can redesign your life to make traveling easier. There are lots of great resources include, such ...

The following is an excerpt from my FREE Travel Book. If you're like to learn more travel tips like these, sign-up to receive my travel book as soon as it is released. Every time I tell my mom about some of the places I’ve recently visited, she seems to reach as though I just barely escaped being killed or taking hostage due to all negative media that certain parts of the world get on the local news. The truth is though that in much of the world it’s just as safe as it is in your part of the world. But crime does happen from time to time, and many criminals purposefully target tourists. In ...

The following is an excerpt from my FREE Travel Book. If you're like to learn more travel tips like these, sign-up to receive my travel book as soon as it is released. Every time I tell my mom about some of the places I’ve recently visited, she seems to reach as though I just barely escaped being killed or taking hostage due to all negative media that certain parts of the world get on the local news. The truth is though that in much of the world it’s just as safe as it is in your part of the world. But crime does happen from time to time, and many criminals purposefully target tourists. In ...

Many people don't realize that if they are in another country that they will often have to pay for all their medical expenses out of their own pocket. A simple visit to a doctor's office probably won't set you back too far in most countries, but being hospitalized can potentially bankrupt a person in certain parts of the world, such as the United States. I had a friend who got into a scooter accident in Thailand years ago, and only avoided hefty medical bills thanks to the travel health insurance he purchased before leaving Canada. So without a doubt one of the first items that should be on everyone's ...

Many people don't realize that if they are in another country that they will often have to pay for all their medical expenses out of their own pocket. A simple visit to a doctor's office probably won't set you back too far in most countries, but being hospitalized can potentially bankrupt a person in certain parts of the world, such as the United States. I had a friend who got into a scooter accident in Thailand years ago, and only avoided hefty medical bills thanks to the travel health insurance he purchased before leaving Canada. So without a doubt one of the first items that should be on everyone's ...

Rebecca Bollwitt is one of those rare people who doesn't need an introduction. Her Vancouver blog, Miss604.com, is well known in Canada and parts of the United States, and has been voted the #1 Vancouver blog for the last four years. Rebecca has organized several conferences in the Vancouver area, including two WordCamps, several Twestivals, and several blog-until-you-pass-out 24-hour sessions of Blogathons. Not only is Rebecca actively involved with Vancouver and her website, but her and her husband also co-founded a WordPress-centric design and development company called Sixty4Media. She even ...

Anyone who has flown across a few time-zones knows just how inconvenient jet lag can be be. You either arrive in a new destination exhausted, often unable to sleep, or find yourself walking around a new location in the middle the day like a zombie. A Jet Lagged Sea Otter Fundamentally jet lag occurs because your body's internal clock is out of sync with the time in the new location after you arrive. While you can observe jet lag whenever you cross a time zone or two, it's usually more prevalent when flying between continents. The worse jet lag I ever had was coming back to Canada from Ireland ...

Piggy Bank, Photo From 401kCalculator.org While I've tried off and on to make a little money from my website over the years, it's never been something that was really important to me, primarily because I have another full time job that makes me more than enough money. Another reason is that I personally am not a huge fan of most advertising, as I find a lot of it to be intrusive. That said, travelling around the world and writing about it isn't cheap. I likely spend anywhere from $6,000 a year or so on plane tickets, and lots of other money on tourist attractions, subway tickets, bus rides, and ...

After three years of travelling solo and about ten or so of travelling with various businesses, I've become pretty used to booking accommodation online. Hotwire Hotels, Hotels.com, Priceline, HostelWorld - I've done them all. While each of those services listed above has advantages and disadvantages, one service I always go back to faithfully is Hotwire Hotels. Hotwire Hotel Room If you've never used Hotwire, their business model will probably come as a surprise to you. Essentially they offer you extremely discounted hotel rooms in most major cities in the world, which is a great way to save ...

After traveling the world for almost 2.5 years, I've become pretty knowledgable, mostly through trial and error, about which technology is useful to bring along during a trip and which should simply stay at home. It's not always obvious, as evidenced by about 2 pounds worth of technology currently in my suitcase which I haven't made use of in a long time. But one item that I've found practically indispensable is a portable external hard drive, especially since many of the new laptops (such as my Macbook Air) have a limited amount of built-in SSD storage. WD My Passport The best external hard ...

One of the hardest parts of traveling to remote countries is that it is not always easy to find some of the foods you enjoy the most back home. That in itself presents a great opportunity for exploring new foods, but let's face it: sometimes it's nice to have some tried and true comfort food. Homemade Salsa A good example of that for me is mexican food. It's probably my favourite cuisine, and it was pretty rare that we didn't have tacos at least weekly in my household growing up. Unfortunately in many parts of the world I've been in, finding mexican salsa can be a real pain. Even if you can find ...

Not long ago I posted a few of my thoughts with regards to obtaining good travel health insurance for a year long trip. I wanted to clarify a few issues with regards to Canadian travel health insurance. British Columbia's MSP actually is only valid if a person is in the province for more than six months in any given calendar year. If a person is planning on being gone longer, then insurance should be reapplied for upon coming back. Outside of that, a person can make use of a two year exception to the rule once every five years, which is the route I took. But you can only go that route once in ...