Why I Took The Big Leap Of Faith And Became A Digital Nomad (Guest Post)

I have known Sharon Gourlay for almost a year now, and it’s been exciting following her digital nomad journey! Last year she departed from her ‘typical’ life in Australia with her husband and children and since then has been on a mission to help others do the same.

Rewind a year.

I was at home in Melbourne, Australia working part time as a graduate high school teacher and being a wife and mum of two young kids. My life was terrible.

Although my job was supposedly part time, I was working 50+ hours a week. I felt like a terrible mum. I was stressed, worn out, continuously anxious and feeling like I was a failure. Something had to give.

In May, I worked up the courage to quit my job and start working online full time. I already had a travel blog and a blog about working online. I decided to focus on them and try to build them up to the point that they were making decent money.

I was still working hard, but the satisfaction and flexibility that working for myself provided was awesome. I could choose what hours I worked, what impact that would have on the kids and basically what I worked on and how I structured my life. It was amazing.

The next step was to convince my husband to do the same. Australia is expensive so we had no choice but to have him working outside of the home most of the time. Earning enough money online to support us in Australia was a big task. This combined with the fact that we love to travel led us to an obvious choice – we should become digital nomads!

We packed up our house and left for Asia at the end of 2014. It was scary at times and there were many times that we questioned our decision. However, we quickly realized that all these questions were coming from our lazy side as it would have been easier in the short term to keep our life going the way it always had. It certainly would not have been better though.

Currently, we are in based in Malaysia and it has been amazing so far. We are close to earning enough to support ourselves already with a much better lifestyle than we had at home.

My husband gets to spend more time with the kids and they just love travelling and Malaysia. We live in a big house, we have a cleaner, the kids go to preschool, we eat delicious food whenever we want and we travel as much as we want. We will move on when we feel the need. We still work hard, but our work is enjoyable and we choose how to fit it in to our lives.

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It is not that hard to make an online income work and I actually don’t understand why more people don’t do it. In the age of the internet, there are just so many possibilities – I actually wrote a list of 50 ways to make money online here.

In the end, we figured the worst case scenario of taking this leap of faith was that we went away for six months and couldn’t make enough money to stay longer so we came home. Given that would still be 6 months of awesome experiences as a family, it sounded far better than the alternative scenario of staying at home. If you are at all considering packing up and being a digital nomad then do it!

What is the worst that could happen?

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You can check out more information from Sharon at Work / Home / Life – guaranteed to help inspire and motivate you to start working online. You can also follow her on Facebook and Twitter.