Mithun Divakaran – GTFOutcast

Episode 11 – Financial planning while traveling and how to cut costs

Your front row seat for conversations with two computer hackers turned travel hackers – living globally, financially independent and semi-retired, both following their dreams and helping you to do the same. You can also find us on iTunes, YouTube or however you listen to podcasts, and we love getting your 5-star reviews. Follow the conversation with us on Twitter @GTFOutcast and stop into the blog often to read the latest and give us comments and feedback.

On the December 19 episode of the GTFOutcast, Beau and Taylor discuss the many ways to cut down on your monthly expenses — whether it is while you are traveling, or to save up more at home before setting off on your travels.

Watch GTFOutcast Episode 11:

0:15 – Taylor is finally ready to move out of his house after putting it up on the market.

1:24 – Taylor talks about how his RV risked being towed away

4:34 – Beau segues into the topic of geo-arbitrage — basically a concept of “3rd world budget; 1st world income,” which has worked out (unsurprisingly) really well for him. Taylor talks about how life on the road in an RV isn’t as cheap as people think it could be.

7:30 – Beau breaks down his monthly expenses living in Mexico City:

$1200 /mo for all housing and utilities for a 2 bedroom house on a short-term lease
$800-1000 /mo for food, drinks, coffee etc.
$1000 /mo for travel

9:52 – Taylor guesstimates his expenses:

$800/mo for RV slip+all utilities to park at nice RV camp
food / drinks TBD as Taylor plans to cook a lot more to save money
travel in the RV so far gives 8mi/g (!!!) and $.45/mi just in gas

14:00 – Taylor suggest many ways reduce food/drink costs, like, stop drinking coffee from Starbucks! Consuming less alcohol is also a no-brainer. Cut back on Coke/soda by buying your own fizzy water/soda maker, like a Sodastream machine. How about getting a filling meal from a sandwich shop versus eating at fine dining restaurant. Granted, these are some things one cannot always do when traveling.

16:09 – Taylor talks about how he cut costs on coffee bought from outside by getting a coffee maker and an AeroPress.

18:43 – Beau talks about how he eliminated all his monthly auto-billed costs like cable subscriptions. Beau also cut back on discretionary expenses such as toys. As in, expensive ‘man toys’.

25:00 – Beau recommends thought exercises to be more aware of what you’re spending on. Like, $4 on a cup of coffee, or what else the same amount of money could buy at a beach in Costa Rica? Both Beau and Taylor highly recommend mint.com for financial planning.

28:29 – Beau wraps up the show.

Save $100 on your monthly cable bill TODAY and when you’re traveling. Find how in the next episode of the GTFOutcast.

Episode 10 – Falling sick and how to deal with medication when traveling

On the November 17 episode of the GTFOutcast, Beau and Taylor discuss travel medication and how to go about buying and carrying medicines when traveling to foreign countries.

Watch GTFOutcast Episode 10:

0:44 – Beau kicks things off with some “under the weather” talk.

2:00 – Taylor asks Beau about how to manage medications when traveling. Beau brings up the important fact that some household drugs in America are known by different brands in other countries.

5:18 – Beau often describes the symptoms to the local pharmacist. But be careful as getting the wrong drugs in exchange can be dangerous for your health. That said, doctors and pharmacists are often well-educated people and may speak English compared to the average local.

9:25 – Beau recommends getting some booster shots before setting off on travels, like vaccinations for hepatitis A and hepatitis B — which are always recommended when going to tropical nations.

11:56 – Taylor brings up antibiotics and carrying your prescribed essential medications. Beau also advices on carrying medications with your name mentioned on the casing, just to be safe when passing through security.

16:56 – Taylor recommends carrying alcohol wipes, for cleaning cuts. Depending on where you are going, it’s also important to keep all of your pills and your medications in its original packaging. Penalties in some foreign countries for (or perceived) drug peddling are sometimes death.

20:55 – Beau talks about travel insurance and the perks of having it. Taylor talks about DAN — the Diver’s Alert Network.

24:20 – As an expat, Beau doesn’t need to apply for ‘Obamacare’ — most of the plans doesn’t cover Americans internationally

26:35 – Taylor wraps up the show

Episode 09 – Traveling alone vs. traveling with a group — which is better?

On the November 1 episode of the GTFOutcast, Beau Woods and Taylor Banks talk about their experiences traveling solo versus traveling with a group. From the advantages to the disadvantages, traveling alone or with someone else makes for an interesting discussion. Which do you prefer, and why? Let us know in the comments.

Watch GTFOutcast Episode 09:

0:36 – Taylor asks Beau about his solo trip to Costa Rica and Nicaragua

2:27 – Beau shares his experience traveling around by bus — which cost him a *shocking* $50 for 10 days!

4:17 – Taylor dives into the topic of contrasting solo travel to that of traveling with a group or a partner. Taylor has rarely traveled alone, while Beau has largely traveled by himself, and gives his reasons as to why traveling solo is great.

5:48 – Taylor explains his heightened sense of security and acclimating when traveling with his wife.

9:30 – Clearly there costs benefits to traveling in a group versus going alone. Like sharing accommodation costs, eating out, shared transportation, etc.

10:57 – Taylor shares his thoughts on traveling with a loving partner and how traveling together has been a great bonding experience. The situations a couple faces when traveling together can help learn more about each other — which could end up in a break up, or evolve into a better relationship.

13:53 – Taylor now talks about the upside and the downsides to group travel. Safety and security issues are fairly non-existent, but deciding where to eat can be annoying when you are in a group!

15:15 – Beau brings up the theories mentioned in the book 16:30 – Taylor talks about the fun involved in doing the research yourself and getting a chance to be adventurous when traveling solo or as a couple. Something that’s hard to do when traveling in a group.

20:30 – Taylor mentions the Get Lost guides — which are not written by your typical travel writer, and how the guides helped him go the off-the-beaten path in Amsterdam.

23:37 – Beau talks more about the positives and the sense of accomplishment traveling solo provides.

26:08 – Taylor wraps up the episode.

Episode 08 – Why carrying a GPS device is more helpful than a smartphone

On the October 8 episode of the GTFOutcast, Beau Woods and Taylor Banks talk about their upcoming travels, discuss what traveling in an RV is like, before closing out the show with the usefulness of GPS devices when traveling to parts of the world where internet connectivity may not always be available for your smartphone.

Watch GTFOutcast Episode 08:

0:21 – Beau kicks off the show with some molé, a type of sauce commonly used in a lot of Mexican dishes, from pastry to salads. Taylor asks about the availability of a gluten-free food in Mexico City.

2:38 – The duo then dive into the topics. Taylor describes his first big trip in his RV, from Atlanta to Louisville (in Kentucky). A 7-hour drive full of lessons learned about riding and parking a 13,500 pound RV. Taylor talks about how the living conditions were for four people inside the RV.

10:18 – Beau brings up the issue of bringing only the essentials when staying in a confined space. Learning how to live with only the things you really need when traveling in an RV.

12:40 – Taylor asks Beau about his next trip to Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

14:16 – Beau then takes the discussion into how a traveler could better plan for a trip to a part of the world where information on getting around, where to stay, etc., isn’t easily put up online by the local population.

16:58 – Taylor interjects with the important fact the prices quoted online are often far higher than what may be charged if you were to contact the hotel directly.

20:15 – Taylor questions Beau about the safety of hostels, especially when traveling with expensive electronics and safety for women in general.

24:27 – Guidebooks can be outdated because it was written once from one visit, which implies they aren’t updated as much. Beau points out this can be an issue for a rapidly developing country and why sometimes relying on travel forums is a better option.

25:32 – Travelers have become quite reliant on their smartphones when traveling, but in regions where you may not even get internet connectivity on-the-go, Taylor recommends carrying a Garmin or TomTom GPS device. He recalls his time in Costa Rica when a refurbished GPS device came in handy when riding towards a volcanic spot.

How to Setup Your Mailbox While Traveling

No, we’re not talking e-mail or your office mails. We’re talking about how you can receive your physical mail (letters and bills) and other packages while being away from home for extended periods of time. Like when you are traveling or away on a long vacation.

Mail forwarding services

Did you know the US Postal Service has a mail-forwarding service? For a weekly fee, USPS will hold your mail, package it up, and reship it to you at a given address each week by Priority Mail. The Premium Forwarding Service costs $15 to enroll and is a temporary service that can be used from 15 days up to 1 year. This way, you can continue to receive your bills, and avoid incurring late fees and penalties for non-payments.

Did you know you can even use your local UPS or Fedex stores as a mailing address? In addition to the privacy you get in not putting your home address out there, the secondary benefit comes when packages delivered need a signature. Often times, packages are not delivered when the person to whom the parcel was specifically addressed to was not home to sign for it. This means having to physically visit the UPS store or call the delivery guy to come back to your house. Something you can do only once you have returned from your travels.

Using a UPS or Fedex store as your mailing address, which are legally authorized to offer such services, they will receive the package and even sign for it on your behalf. The downside is, once they receive the package, it remains with them until you personally go and collect it from the store. UPS will not forward the package again.

Then there’s Pak Mail, who offer mailbox rentals, mail forwarding, faxes, and even notary services.

If you are an RV owner, there are several region–specific operators and RV clubs that offer mailbox rentals at RV parks and mail forwarding services to your next destination. They can even receive faxes on your behalf.

Receive it, Scan it, E-mail it

What if you wish to read or see the contents of you mail/letters as soon as you get them? For that there are services like Earth Class Mail. They will accept your mail, open it, scan the letter and make the contents available to you online. This is a service that comes in very handy for receiving important letters in paper format and need them scanned and e-mailed to you. For physical goods and other packages, Earth Class Mail have forwarding options where by they will then send the package to any location you desire.

Virtual Post Mail is a service where, for as little as $5 a month, users get a US-based virtual mailbox that’s secure, reliable, and easy to use. Virtual Post Mail receives the member’s mail and makes hi-res scans of its content to the member. Members can view their mail and packages in high resolution images online using only either their browser or mobile phone. Virtual Post Mail users claim they receive fewer junk mail and none of those unsolicited mails. Virtual Post Mail can even physically send all your mails and goods in bulk. If not, they will even shred all your mails on request.

As much as we love these services, GTOutcast still advice our listeners to move as many of their bills and statements to e-bills wherever possible. This way you get your bills delivered via e-mail, which can be accessed anywhere you go — and you save on trashing paper. And while you can set up many of these services even after you have left home, it’s best you do all necessary paper work and reassurances before setting off on your journey.

Selling foreign goods to fund your vacation? It’s possible

One of the joys of walking around street markets of the world is coming across beautiful, artsy pieces of cultural artifacts and other souvenirs unique to that particular country. Silk clothing in East Asia, clog shoes in Netherlands, ornately designed lamp shades in Istanbul. We could go on, but you get the idea. Ever wondered about buying and selling these pieces back home to raise money and fund your vacation(s)?

It’s one of the ways we like to think a traveler can make money while still on vacation. It’s something we at GTFOutcast have thought about a lot and even done at a few occasions. Buy high quality, authentic goods from local markets in Latin America or Asia, and then sell them on eBay or through a vendor back home.

Take for example if you plan to sell your foreign merchandise back in the United States. As an American tourist, we are allowed to bring in anywhere from $200 – $1000 worth of foreign merchandise, all depending on the country* we bought the goods from. That is unless you managed to sneak in much more through customs without suspicion. Not that we endorse you do that. (Ahem)

Even if you did have to pay customs duty, it is generally less than 10% of the total bill amount you paid (converted to US$). Not to worry, this additional value on top of the price you paid for the goods is negligible if you find buyers still. Say if you bought trinkets from Thailand at $2 a piece, and you find buyers back in America are willing to pay up to $10 or more for something exotic, and definitely an item not easily found in America. Now imagine you bought a 100 pieces of trinkets at $2 a piece and sold them at $10 a piece. At an 80% mark-up, the profits alone come to $800. Sell 200 pieces and you could cover an entire travel budget. Beau Woods is currently in Mexico City and he has been trying to find how to get fresh designs on shirts in Mexico City, ship them back to the US and sell for a profit.

Selling goods in your home country back from your vacation is one thing, but how can one sell these goods while they are traveling? By using third party fulfillment for arbitrage to simplify the process. You handle the shipping of goods to a third party vendor, and the partner handles the sales process. You can even do this online by partnering with the right vendor on eBay or via Amazon Marketplace. The third party vendor will charge a fee, but it still saves you money and the headaches of handling sales transactions while on the go. And as per the stipulated agreement, the vendor simply wire transfers the money you are owed.

If online isn’t your thing, try contacting your local consignment stores. Just ship the goods via a postal service (or even the expensive courier services) to the consignment store, and they display the goods at their store and act as an agent to conduct the sale.

If the foreign country you are in allows it, you could even set up a small booth or a spot at a local flea market to sell your own goods. For example, hippies who came to Goa (in India) used to be famous for selling their creations and unused valuables in a bid to raise money to fund their stay — or even a ticket back home. That’s how the famous Anjuna Flea Market got its start!

However you sell the goods — by yourself or online using a third party — you really need to be sure of the demand for such goods. To be safe, for starters, only pick products you know can be easily sold through your network of friends back home. Like all businesses, there is some risk involved. What you find cool, others back home may not. You really don’t want to have a backlog of unsold inventory of goods that have no takers. On the flip side, if in the case you are unable to meet demand, or you end up working with an unreliable third party vendor, that’s a lot of dissatisfied customers. A situation hard to handle when you are in the middle of travel.

But if successful, this a great way to make use of your time in a foreign land productively and a means of earning an income while vacationing. Our only advice is you refrain from selling common souvenirs (like fridge magnets, figurines of popular attractions, etc.) that bear the names of a city or country. That’s simply cheating the travel experience for many.

Useful resources:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection – Duty-free exemption, Gifts
Learn more about Amazon Marketplace

Episode 07 – Learning languages and absorbing local culture

On the September 20 episode of the GTFOutcast, Beau and Taylor discuss how learning local languages helps break the ice in a foreign country and makes immersing oneself in the local culture easier.

Watch GTFOutcast Episode 07:

0: 30 – Beau and Taylor talk about how they plan to meet in Louisville and do an episode of GTFOutcast together in person.

2:00 – While Taylor was cooking his Loco-Moco burger, Beau segues into the topic for the day, which is about how to best immerse yourself in the local culture as soon as you arrive. And how food is often a good gateway into understanding foreign culture.

6:35 – Taylor talks about his experience teaching in Amsterdam and how at the end of the class, the whole group would cook together.

9:34 – Beau talks about DuoLingo, a free language education website; Taylor talks about TripLingo, a language service he found useful.

11:48 – Beau insists learning new languages helps greatly and asking for directions when traveling — or even how it can make you new friends.

15:52 – Taylor brings up his experience of speaking broken Spanish in Barcelona, where the dialect spoken was different.

20:30 – Beau ends the session with his experience in South Korea attending a security conference there and how it helped network with locals

22:20 – Taylor plugs his upcoming blog with his girlfriend called thelearningbanks.com, which will chronicle their journey as they travel across the United States in their RV.

Episode 06 – Making money while traveling, and mail-forwarding services

In this episode of GTFOutcast, Beau Woods and Taylor Banks chat about how one can make money selling goods bought cheap from their travels abroad. The discussion then moves on to the important topic of how travelers can ensure their mails are received securely and forwarded while away from home.

Watch GTFOutcast Episode 06:

0:54 – Taylor talks about the process of selling his house and clearing out furnishings, old electronics and computers using a combination of Craigslist, eBay and donations to locals charities. All in a bid to raise funds for the upcoming journey.

3:40 – Taylor gives us a brief tour of his 34-feet long new mobile home, nick-named the “Snuffleupagus”

6:29 – Beau gets in to the topic of how a traveler can make money while on vacation, and using funds from those sales to continue paying for his/her vacation.

8:48 – Taylor brings up the possibility of using an online marketplace to simplify the arbitrage process of selling goods on your behalf.

11:19 – Beau talks about building relationships with distributors you meet while on your travels, where by you find a reliable local partners to ship the goods over and paying them online for doing so. Taylor brings up consignment shops and using them as agents to conduct the sale for you.

12:56 – Taylor discusses ways to set up your mail in order to receive packages while on the move

15:05 – Taylor talks about Earth Class Mail, a service that accepts your mail, opens it, scans it and makes it available online. If you are an RV owner, there are several operators and RV clubs that offer mailbox rental and mail forwarding services.

16:54 – Beau shares how he solves his mail-forwarding problems using a service called Virtual Post Mail. A service, from his personal experience, is best set up while still in the US.

21:50 – Taylor and Beau bring up the concerns of identity theft and how to be sure third parties who receive your mail aren’t snooping around, invading your privacy, or even misusing your packages.

Episode 05 – How to establish an online brand and attract customers

On the August 29, 2013 episode of the GTFOutcast, Beau and Taylor discuss the process of building a brand online and how to attract customers to your website. From SEO, advertising and online promotions, Taylor shares his experiences setting up AceHackware.com.

Watch GTFOutcast Episode 05:

2:29 – Taylor talks about the DerbyCon security conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

4:42 – The guys dive into the topic of building a brand. Taylor talks about how to build an audience for a brand, event or product — and working backwards can often help attract the right user.

8:11 – Taylor talks about creating ads on search engines using the right keywords. Apply the logic of targeting specific buyers and not the casual audience and the widest reach. Also, it’s important to tweak a campaign based on the initial feedback. This will help cater to the right demographic.

Website

13:39 – Taylor talks about using Google Analytics and Facebook Advertising to better learn about the incoming audience. Using social media can help you understand your demographic — especially if you are not keen on grabbing a user data using cookies.

16:50 – How do you determine your budget and resources for buying your audience? SEO, advertising and other mean of internet marketing — learn a bit of everything is Taylor’s advice. At the end of the day though, customer acquisition expenses will come down when you succeed in attracting the right audience and serve them well.

20:00 – Taylor talks about where his early investments were made in customer acquisition. From spending way too much at the beginning to finally learning from his mistakes.

21:40 – Beau asks Taylor about how to identify the initial keywords when using Google AdSense. Taylor’s answer to that is to draw inspiration from successful social media techniques in grabbing people’s attention.

24:40 – Taylor wraps up with the lessons he learned and how he ultimately built a better website. Paid traffic was used to learn from, and that paved way to growing organic traffic.

Episode 04 – How to find apartments on rent when traveling to a foreign country

On the August 25 episode of the GTFOutcast, Beau and Taylor talk about the process of find a place to stay in a foreign country. We’re not talking hotels here. Instead, long term accommodation like apartments and houses you can stay on rent, and yet, get that truly local experience that you seek.

Watch GTFOutcast Episode 04:

0:21 – Beau checks in from Mexico City and kicks things of by talking about the talk he and Taylor gave at the BSidesLV conference.

4:31 – The two talk about the manner in which they put the slides together for their presentation.

6:12 – Beau talks about how much he’s enjoying Mexico City, and the exhausting process of looking for a place to live. Turns out Craigslist in Mexico City has just as many scammers as anywhere else. Beau eventually ended up using AirBnB.

11:17 – Taylor asks Beau about his learnings on how to make it easier or better to find a place in a new country. Beau suggests AirBnB for your stay upon arrival, but use this time to learn more about rental policies and prices. Taylor recommends VRBO if AirBnB isn’t an option.

15:36 – Taylor ask Beau about the rent in Mexico City and if he got a place worth the price. Beau talks about how his rent covers everything, from maintenance to utilities.

17:57 – Taylor asks Beau about how his AirBnB experience went. For Taylor, he was quite “burned” the last time he used AirBnB.

22:24 – Beau concludes his AirBnB experience by saying one of the best perks of using AirBnB has been connect with locals. Taylor then asks Beau about how the transportation facilities in Mexico City are and how cheap and convenient it is.

26:54 – Taylor wraps up the episode.