Not 100% for me, but probably 50% of the time on the road and in hotels.
I used these years to save as much as I could before changing to a office role.It was amazing as a young man, getting to see the world and being paid to do it, but all the things people envy about travel gets incredibly boring fast.
Lounge access, hotel upgrades, nice rental cars…. Once you’ve done it 10 times, it’s just another day at work.Hotel breakfast will never be something I look forward to again, and that actually makes me a bit sad as it used to be the highlight of vacations.
My advice: if you’re young, save as much as you can as this lifestyle matches poorly with a partner and children. You will be happy you did when you get tired of missing all birthdays and events and swap to anormal hours with (often) less pay.
Otherwise: enjoy it! Traveling us fun, but make sure to set up some «you-time» where you explore and enjoy where you are. Try local food and turn off the brain for a few hours, so your only memory won’t be the office building you visited
- i was very dissatisfied with the amount of lifetime my job in the US was taking from me with so little in return, so when i came across an ad for English teaching that advertised half my hours double my pay i applied, when i was offered the job right away, i accepted, made a bunch of money for 3 years, had savings and plenty of breathing room, invested most of my savings.
- with breathing room, i thought about what i wanted next and how much it cost:
i wanted to never work again unless i wanted to, basically retirement. I had traveled a bit and realized that with 200 countries, i could literally choose my cost of living and cost of retirement. i picked Thailand to start my retirement since i had visited before and knew the costs. i needed $250 USD/month to start($100 month for a hostel, $150 for food and beer).
i had nearly that coming in from investments, so i signed up for a conversational English speaking app and doubled my income to about $500 per month by chatting 5 hours a week. i used the extra money for private places, extra food and beer, renting a moped, museums, etc.
i traveled for a year working up to 5 hours a week, received an offer to open my own school in China, went back and saved money for two years until i had plenty of passive income to lived abroad indefinitely(USD 500+/month), and here i sit 8 years later, on the way to jeju south Korea after a month in Mongolia, Japan next week.
advice: make a change sooner rather than later, time is finite.
…sooo basically the FAQ in the travel community, hahaha.
Wow that sounds like an amazing time! What challenges did you face? Did you have to get a work visa?
yea, esl teachers often need a work visa depending on the country, but schools generally sponsor your visa if they hire you, so that’s all taken care of by the school staff or they’ll walk you through the process. if a school doesn’t offer to sponsor your visa, they’re not worth the trouble.
it was awwwesome and i got to retire very early, so it’s tough to complain about anything.
Really there were no challenges with the job itself, speaking basic english and playing learning activities with a bunch of respectful, dedicated, cute students for 45 minutes at a time(including a 10-minute break), watching them improve and leaps and bounds evey week, get paid USD $35 per class minimum. Rent/food/everything pennies on the dollar. My most expensive apartment was about three hundred and fifty U.S. dollars right in the middle of Beijing, but the studio I rented the longest was $120 a month. 4 classes and my monthly rent and utilities were paid for.
the only challenges were with other administrators after i ended up co-owning the school that hired me, they were pretty bad at business and it was frustrating to see this extremely successful business that was fun to work at run so poorly.
oh, i was in beijing, so the smog was the other main challenge, but it’s such a comfortable and convenient country to live in, I still ended up staying there very happily almost six years altogether, and have great friends that I still talk to and actually just visited last month.
Wayyy more ups and downs.
there are tons of chinese cities that aren’t smoggy, but Beijing was where I started and that was my journey.
$150 for food and beet
How many beet are we talking? Do you have a beet guy in Thailand already or are you lookin for a beet hookup?
Thailand does have a lot of beet farmers. and beat farmers.
thanks.
I found it on LinkedIn. The position I filled turned up dry for three months. Then they expanded the search to the whole European union. I negotiated to keep working remote from the EU.
Acquire a very niche skillset and look for jobs in a small market.
Not me, but I work with people who do (or could do) that.
To cut it short, in my field, software development, there are a lot of consultant companies which enlist regular SW engineers and basically rent them to other companies looking for (mostly) temporary help in their projects.
These consultant companies have lots of connections and I would imagine would be more likely to find you remote only gigs than through regular job channels. At least my company requires some weekly office presence for the permanent employees, but basically has no enforced requirements for the temporary consultants.
I guess it depends also, do you already have a skillset, or are you going to choose a trade based on the remote work opportunities?
Would you tell in which part of the world you are?
I’m living in France and am looking for a gig/job like this (senior expert c++ and a bunch of more) and I’m not very good at navigating this kind of jobs, the companies here take an outrageous part of whatever you earn, and to compensate they treat you like shit 🙂↕️. So I thought a swedish (am swedish) or english speaking company (am fluent) could be interesting…
Yeah this is pretty much smack on.
I’m an IT Consultant that works 99% remote (occasionally in the office, but they are trying to get us in more), temp contractors I see tend to have the highest amount of freedom but lose on the job security, us permanent hires have to seek permission to travel and work, but have our job security.
Then there are the client requirements as well, some demand on site consultants every day, others occasionally, then the majority in my experience are more than happy with pure remote work.
I’m one of those temporary consultant in software development. Working from home 100% since COVID.
Sounds like they would charge you admission instead of paying you for that job.
I’ve got some friends who work in corporate insurance, they get shipped all over the world, though still have to go to the office a couple of times a week when not away somewhere
I’m a software engineer and you can find yourself sent abroad for conferences or to do workshops with other teams in other offices (if you work for an international company). Though they’re being a bit more pushy about getting people in the offices recently, so once again, not going to be necessarily 100% remote in that scenario (though some places manage to make it work)
sent abroad for conferences or to do workshops with other teams in other offices (if you work for an international company)
My employer was like this when I started. It was a growing company that wasn’t too big yet, so it had the culture and perks of a startup, but without the downsides of being too small. Even as regular ICs, we got to travel internationally at least once a year to attend conferences or visit our offices in another country. We were also able to attend training abroad. We were eventually acquired by a very big company with all the bureaucracy and red tape and now all those travel perks are all but gone.
Golf. Or work somewhere that puts plastic on things.
“Lottery winners, how did you win the lottery and what advice can you give?”
This whole idea is basically a myth that pretty much doesn’t actually exist in practice.
Especially now, with jet fuel costs soaring.
Almost nobody is 100% remote.
You may find an expert niche position where you travel often, but basically no one has a 100% remote job.
Unless you want to argue that being an overseas landlord who manages things from your overseas home counts as a ‘100% remote’ job.
EDIT:
Since some almost nobodies have showed up, I guess I need to show my work.
www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statistics
www.apollotechnical.com/statistics-on-remote-workers/
Upwork’s prediction proved accurate: as of 2025, approximately 32.6 million Americans representing 22% of the workforce now work remotely. According to Gallup data, among those with remote-capable jobs, 52% work in hybrid arrangements, 27% work fully remote, and 21% remain exclusively in-office
32.6 * 0.27 = ~8.8 million.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01000000
Total US Labor Force = ~169.5 million.
8.8/169.5 = ~5.2%
So maybe ‘almost no one’ is slightly strong phrasing, but I guess congrats to the top 5% most pampered and privileged workers in the US at least, who actually fully work remote.
If the ‘Almost Nobodies’ here would agree to submit the zipcode that they grew up in, well, I’m reasonably confident it’ll be one that’s historically had a significantly higher median income than those near it.
Oh also submit your age. I would expect that those in this top 5% to be a distribution centered around… well basically the average US home buyer age, 59.
(Yes I realize that’s an unreasonable ask in terms of privacy, but it would make for an interesting study)
((I guess lemmy is surprised to discover its own user base is an example of selection bias))
Yes it’s rare but it exists and I think that was the point of OP, looking for a way to break into it somehow
And my point is that you basically can’t.
100% remote jobs are basically only possible to obtain for a small number of boomers, older gen x.
There’s no path to it now, if you go into the sources I listed further, latest figure was only 11% of jobs listings that indicate they’re remote of any kind are 100% remote.
The corpos want less and less 100% remote jobs, and they’re nearly all for highly experienced people.
Most job listings that list any kind of remote work are actually just lying about that if you read the entire description.
Its an illusion, for anyone under roughly 40.
Even the privileged boomers that replied to me indicated they have no useful advice to give to a younger person.
If you said it’s really difficult and unlikely, ok. But people are telling you that they have these jobs and you also admit they exist.
Hi. Much like passerby, I am also “Almost Nobody”. I haven’t stepped foot in the office since 2014, and I have travelled extensively during that time. At one point all of my clients were in NA so my wife and I would travel in our RV to somewhere in the same timezone and then bum around different lakes and mountains. When the client-base trended to EU we moved to switzerland with the intent of doing the same thing there, but covid forced us to stay in one country for most of our time there.
Don’t kid yourself - There are many of us. We just don’t all have the same experience so giving advice on how to get there is generally a waste of our time.
Almost nobody is 100% remote.
Hi, my name is ‘almost nobody’, and funny enough, that’s the name of every coworker in my company.
I can honestly say I have never even seen my company’s office. At best like half of a few offices and most of a conference room a couple of times.
