What Is a Digital Nomad?
The definition of a Digital Nomad is fairly broad. Basically, it’s anyone who uses some aspect of the Internet to make a living while not being tied to a particular location.
It can be someone who works from home or someone who has no home.
It can be someone who has a regular job but they do it remotely.
Or, it can be an entrepreneur who creates their own income doing something only made possible thanks to the Internet.
How We Became Digital Nomads
We have done our share of backpacking but in our 70’s the idea of “roughing it” is a Holiday Inn with a black-and-white TV. But that’s not what we’re talking about.
We actually became Digital Nomads before it was a thing, before we had ever even heard the term.
No Facebook, Social Media or High-Speed Internet
No Facebook. No social media. No Internet. This was back in the days of dial-up modems, 5 megabyte hard drives (not a typo – mega not giga) and Netscape was all the rage.
We were living in a small town outside of Toronto, Canada. Geoff had taught himself programming and began working for a company in California. The physical location of the office, or of the employees, didn’t really matter to anyone as long as the code was delivered on time.
After three years, we felt the job was stable enough to risk pushing the envelope a bit. The idea of working from home was still not widely accepted but it was definitely catching on in the programming world.
Working Remotely
We sold our house and began working remotely from the Bahamas. We can walk to the beach and drink Bahama Mamas on the deck while working on the laptop.
OK, that’s sort of a picture-postcard version of our life but it is fairly close to the truth. We still spend most winters in the Bahamas while spending our summers in Canada (we are Canadian citizens).
Over the past 20+ years or so, we have traveled all over the U.S. from Seattle to Florida and New York to California, laptop in hand. Our longest stay was in Phoenix where we lived for three years.
We Love to Travel
Needless to say, we love to travel and, now that we are retired, we can spend as much time as we want going from place to place.
Just recently we’ve been to the UK, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy and more, as well as taking a few TransAtlantic cruises with stops in Madeira, Bermuda, St. Thomas, Turks and Caicos, Colombia, the Panama Canal, Costa Rica and many more destinations.
House/Pet Sitting
We now combine house/pet sitting with our travels not only to reduce the cost of accommodations but also because of our love of pets.
We used to have pets ourselves, but when they passed away we decided not to have any more for a while.
As animal lovers, pet sitting is ideal for us and we’ve had many enjoyable experiences to date, sitting with cats and dogs in locations around the world.
We use a service called Trusted House Sitters to be able to find pet sits around the world!
We Wrote a Book!
We haven’t worked for someone else in many years and we’ve shared the secrets of how you can do the same in our book How to Become a Digital Nomad at Any Age.