Hello nomads,

After a long break, I managed to pull myself together and send another newsletter, which makes it the third newsletter ever!

Some personal updates…

I was supposed to go the Ukraine on May, but decided to give up the flight. No one at home was too happy about my trip there since the situation there is quite volatile. This is funny, since I am from Israel and we are always in a mess, but still, crisis is always manageable when at home, while being away in a volatile situation is much more challenging.

In general, I understood that since I am traveling 11 out of 12 months a year, I should take fewer risks than the average traveler. When you travel for 2 weeks a year, statistically taking risks makes sense. When you are full time on traveling mode, statistics will catch up with you, so I personally try to be careful and even paranoid at times. I am writing this newsletter in a coffee shop, while looking suspiciously at the people sitting here as we speak… What might they be planning? Who knows.

So, where have I been since May? I was in Split Croatia for more than a month. It was funny weather for the season (raining in summer??), but it didn’t keep me away from an almost daily swim in the beautiful Adriatic beach. My days looked like this: Wake up at 8:30, go have coffee in a place with view to the sea, go to the office, take a break from the office at 15:00 and go swimming. Get back to the office and work until 21. Buy cheap ice cream on my way home and sleep. Life was good.

After Split, I went to a few days to Istanbul. I started working as a nomadic mobilizer for Elance. If you are into freelancing, you probably know that Elance and Odesk are the biggest platforms for online work. I love those sites, since they allowed me to travel while working in the last 4 years, so giving some talks for them is a great privilege. I believe in the value they create for digital nomads.

If one of you ever want to go for a nomadic lifestyle, working on those platforms or even hiring there makes a lot of sense. If you use this Elancelink, you get benefits as freelancer (10 additional job free applications), and as a client ($50 of credit to hire freelancers). I recommend anyone to dive into Elance, as it is the easiest way to generate money while traveling.

I have to admit that working on my own online businesses (I have two projects I am working on now) is a lot more fun for me than freelancing online, but while developing and creating your business, something has to pay for the next hostel, and Elance is absolutely a great option for that.

Now I am in sunny Sofia, Bulgaria. A super cool city that is affordable and fun. If anyone is around, buy me a coffee.

So let’s switch to our nomadic blog, What’s new in BecomeNomad.com?

I am sad to say that not much… I can’t find the time to write articles, although I have so many ideas for new topics.

However, There is one new article that I posted, that is actually a video recording of a webinar I gave a few months ago when I was in Berlin. Maybe you will find it interesting, as I am explaining about the nomadic lifestyle in detail. Check it out here.

I was approached this month by someone that offered me $100 to publish a guest post on my blog. At first I was really happy, but decided to further investigate, as it sounded too good to be true. It turned out that the article will be about the “advantages of online gambling for travelers and digital nomads”, and that I would personally have to say that online gambling is good for you.

This was a huge dilemma. On one hand, I never thought I could actually make money from the blog, but on the other hand, gambling is bad for you. It’s addictive, the odds are against you, and it will probably make your life miserable. After a long week of sleepless nights I wrote back a very a clear email: “I am sorry. I don’t believe gambling is a good thing. I refuse, and will only reconsider it if you push your offer to $1000”. They never wrote back.

I am proud of myself, but also want to use this opportunity to tell you that if you ever see a post about something that you don’t need (gambling, fancy clothes, or the worst of the worst: A mortgage for a home), know that I got paid big time for it and be happy for me. After all, I am your friend.

By the way, I really love your comments on the blog. Check out the comments in this article in example to see the discussions and questions being posted. I think they might even more interesting than the article (although you have to admit the photo there is super cool).

Sometimes I don’t know if I am not taking a too big of responsibility on me, answering questions from people who want to make a complete change their lives based on my feedback. But then I just remind myself that I give free advice, and free advice shouldn’t necessarily be good, since it is free. This thought is relaxing. Our blog will always be free for this reason exactly. Joy.

Feel free to reply to this email and send me any ideas or questions you might have.

Wishing you happy journeys,

Eli and the Becomenomad team