https://www.johnnyfd.com/2014/03/how-ive-been-able-to-afford-my-life-of.html

Start from 2007









July 2007









I moved into a $3,000 a month house near all of the bars in Hollywood, spent $85 a week in gas in my Lexus so I could drive to Melrose and buy clothes that I didn't need. Also wasted money going to clubs, driving fast cars, and throwing house parties thinking it was what would make me happy or cool, when in fact it did neither.

October 2008

November 2008

December 2008





January 2009

March 2009

May 2009













June 2009





November 2009

March 2010

July 2010

My room and motorbike on Koh Tao

November 2010





January 2011

July 2011 -





Phuket Top Team had just opened up so even though I had a great time at Tiger Muay Thai, I decided to try out the all new gym. I lived at the gym in one of their cheap budget rooms with a shared bathroom, and eventually tried living in the $100 a month bamboo hut. I really enjoyed my time there but I was torn between my two passions, Muay Thai which I loved and Scuba Diving which I enjoyed doing and actually paid.









January 2012 -













July 2012









I traveled a bit to the Philippines and back to the U.S. for a few months to see friends and family. I ended up living in San Diego for a few months and was tempted to stay and get a job there. I started doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu properly and even bought a Gi. I got myself a second hand beach cruiser and a membership to Car2Go which is a shared electric car membership. Life was great in Pacific Beach but I realized that I would be settling for being comfortable if I stayed.





So I booked a one way ticket back to Thailand.

















November 2012 -

My latest fight in Chiang Mai

January 2013 -

February 2013 -

April 2013 -

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June 2013 -

My sales from July to December 2013

February 2014 -

Read the Thai Millionaire Article here:

http://www.johnnyfd.com/2014/02/goldwatch.html

March 2014 -

Recommended Resources:









2016 Update:





















Ending Balance: It's almost hard to believe but I've been travelling now for almost 5 years, having fun, seeing cool stuff, and having great experiences, and somehow I've been able to build a real business, and save up $64,608 in cash that I can actually spend.

























Start your own business:





2018 Update:





A lot friends back home say they wish they could do what I do, or that they wish they had enoughortoand live the life that they've always fantasized about while stuck at work. But here's the thing, they can, anyone can do it and it's actually much easier than we often make it out to be. To save you even more time, headache and money, I've made it easier by doing it first and making all of the mistakes, and paving the way on what to and not to do.Here is my journey, not necessarily the smoothest but it's what I did and it worked for me and it can work for you as well if you want to follow along, see how it all started, and do it yourself regardless of where you want to go or travel to in the world. This mega post has been updated for 2018 and I will continue to add it to every year as I learn, grow and travel.I'm breaking down each month, or year depending on significant events that happened during that time. Prior to 2007 I wrote about my childhood and all of the random phases I went through in my " Who is the Real Johnny " post here.Just added for 2018 is a new highlight reel of what I've been doing these past 10 years of traveling the world full time without living back in America for more than a few months at a time since. Take a look for some quick inspiration before I break down the journey month by month and talk about how I've been able to save up, work, and afford this life of travel.Went to Thailand on a 3 week vacation with my cousins Larry and Jacob. Quickly realized how amazing day to day life is in Thailand. Thinking I only had 3 weeks before going back to my stressful life and job back in Los Angeles, I spent $1,000 a week on expensive hotels, 3 massages a day, over tipping and eating at the hotel restaurant.I also did every tour imaginable, including a Discover Scuba Dive which instantly made me fall in love with being underwater. I did my Open Water Certification straight away.Starting bank balance: $8,300Round Trip Flight: $1,300Travel Expenses: $3,000Remaining bank balance $4,000Decided to move to Thailand. Back in LA I sold/gave away everything I owned including my furniture, car and clothes yet stupidly kept my now worthless DVD collection. I booked a one way flight back to Thailand, got a triple entry tourist visa and sold my car.Total bank balance after selling my stuff and my car: $9,000The start of my 5 and a half year life living in Thailand and traveling abroad. I figured $9k would last me 5 months or so, and then I would have to either figure something out or go home and start working again. Turns out it would last, much, much longer. I originally budgeted $800 a month for an apartment on Koh Tao, Thailand aka Turtle Island. Quickly realized that 25,000 baht for a place wasn't necessary and I ended up moving into a bamboo bungalow in a coconut field just minutes from the beach for 5,500 baht a month. ($180US)Stated my Dive Master Training Course. Paid $1,000US. Did the course with a small shop, Scuba-Junction.Went back to the U.S. for a month to show my family I was still alive, and to do a pick of work at my old job that was having a busy month. Saved up $2,000 working.Did the longest DMT (Dive Master Trainee) course ever as I took my time, took a few months off in between and didn't sign off my paperwork until I was offered a job.Worked as a Divemaster for 150 baht ($5) per tank and most divers use two tanks, giving me 300 baht per diver, with an average of 3 or 4 divers per day. The average rate was Loved working on Koh Tao as a DM and looking back it was a fantastic experience.The pay wasn't great but it was more than enough to live and even save a bit if you were smart on your budget.Moved to Koh Lanta to start the diving season there. Heard how amazing the scuba diving was compared to Koh Tao from a German couple, and they were right. Saw my first turtle, whale shark, manta ray, it was beautiful. It wasn't easy to find a job as I was an english only speaking divemaster without that much experience but I stuck in there and kept asking around and meeting people until I found some work. The pay here was 1,000 baht a day flat ($33US) and included breakfast and lunch on the boat.Best diving in Thailand but a really really quite island to live on. Great for couples but even then it's still easy to get bored here.Decided to move to Utila, Honduras to become a Scuba Diving Instructor. Read a bunch of reviews of Utila Dive Centre and though it was the best place in the world to do the Instructor Development Course (IDC).Spent the rest of my savings flying out there only to find out there are no jobs on the island as they train more far more instructors than the island can support.Lesson learned: The grass isn't greener on the other side of the world.$1,500Moved back to Koh Tao, hoping to find work as a dive instructor. Had a really difficult time finding a job as a new instructor with no experience but after hanging around for a month I found a job since I happened to speak Mandarin, Chinese. If it wasn't for that, I would have been devastated.Do your IDC course somewhere in the world that doesn't teach 10+ new instructors every month. Do it somewhere that you don't have to pay to intern at afterwards as you'll need the experience.: As a full time dive instructor on Koh Tao I earned a percentage of all the courses I taught. I can't remember what the actual amount was but it was something around 15% of what the customer spent on the course. All I remember is that I was making around $2,000 US per month when I was teaching full time, which is a really good wage in SE Asia as my monthly expeneses were between $600-$800 at the time.I had saved up a bunch of money from teaching diving on Koh Tao and spending next to nothing. My room was 4,000 baht a month ($135US) and I bought and sold my motorbike for 10,000 baht ($333US) making it free.: $4,000I moved back to Phuket to train Muay Thai full time at Tiger Muay Thai and MMA. I lived at the gym in an extremely basic room with a shared bathroom and dedicated my time to training full time.I started the blog, www.MyFightCamp.com where I documented was it was like living at a Muay Thai gym and training for a fight.Went back to Koh Tao to teach more scuba diving and save up a bit of money. All while my heart was focused on doing Muay Thai and getting back to training.Saved up a few thousand dollars.After a few months of doing MMA and Muay Thai, I got offered a great job at a fantastic dive shop in Borneo. My savings were running low from doing Muay Thai full time so I decided to sign a six month contract with Scuba Junkie and work on their resort in Mabul, Malaysia.I lived in the staff house at the resort which was an extremely basic, run down room that I had to share with a 50 year old man, but it was free so I didn't complain. Everything was included including three meals a day, my room and water, so I had no bills. The pay wasn't very good but since I had no expenses and didn't drink much alcohol, I still managed to save up $600US a month while being there.I also got to dive at some of the best dive sites in the world. The fish life there was incredible. The only downside was the sheer amount of garbage in the ocean from the locals. But even with that and often working up to 14 days in a row and being a bit burnt out, it was the best dive company and the best diving I've experienced.: $4,000USAs much as I enjoyed scuba diving and was glad I got to see a bit of the world and get paid to dive in some of the best places on the planet, I realized that becoming a Scuba Instructor made me slowly start to hate diving. Teaching new students who often come totally unprepared and sometimes unable to even swim was a very frustrating and stressful job.I would highly recommend to people that love diving to become a divemaster and work at that level but not become an instructor. Even though I got paid a lot more, it wasn't worth it in the long run, and if I had never went to Utila to do my IDC, I would have saved $5,000 in the course fees, books, random other fees, and flying across the world.I also realized I was getting older and that if I were to give Muay Thai a fair shot, it would have to be this year as I was already 31 at the time. I moved to Chiang Mai and decided to train full time until my money ran out.Life as a Muay Thai fighter wasn't paying the bills. I had officially ran out of money. I only had a few hundred dollars in my bank, didn't have any source of income, didn't want to go back to teaching scuba diving and didn't even have a return flight back to America.My options were to borrow money from my family for a flight back to the U.S., move back in with my parents and get a regular 9-5 job again, or to figure out a way to make money from Thailand that didn't involve scuba diving.$200I figured it out, well, at least it was the best I could think of at the time. I published a book going into detail about the previous 4 years of my life that you all just read the cliff notes on. The book originally sold for $37 and was aimed towards guys that wanted to quit their jobs back home and move to Thailand to train Muay Thai and MMA full time.$600 a month from book sales.I messed it all up. I decided that the book was more of a "how I lived the 4-hour workweek book/a Guide to Thailand" than a book about Muay Thai, so I rebranded the book and put it on Amazon which forced me to lower the price from $37 to $9.99. I thought it would be a wise move as it would reach more people, but I still made the same 16 sales a month, but instead of making $585 from those sales, I started making $112 a month. I made another $50 or so a month from monetizing my blogs with advertising including google adsense and amazon and product affiliate links to things like supplements and whey protein.I was living on a strict budget in Chiang Mai at the time and was paying 3,500 baht ($116US) a month for my room in an old Thai building.$200I was broke once again. I had around 10,000 thai baht ($300US) in cash left after paying my apartment for the month and around bit over $170 in my bank account. I knew this was it, I had to make something happen or I would have to crawl home and go back to a life that I didn't love, working for a boss that I didn't like, just to get by.Luckily around that same time, I had started learning about dropshipping and eCommerce. I had signed up for Anton's Method training course and I wanted to live the drop ship lifestyle. I had met Anton in Chiang Mai a few months prior to that and saw how successful he was with his online stores. I spent the next two months working on building up my own online store and becoming an authorized dealer for some name brands.I started making enough sales in August which was about 2 months after I started to replace my normal 9-5 income and give me between $1,500 to $5,000 in profit per month for every successful store I opened.A lot more than $200.I decided that I really enjoyed living in Chiang Mai and that it was a fantastic place to meet other entrepreneurs and location dependent business owners. My eCommerce stores were now optimized and didn't require more than an hour a day of my time as I hired a full time gal to answer my customer service calls for me.With my newfound free time and financial freedom, I started exploring other hobbies, interests and business ideas. I started the Travel Like a Boss Podcast as a fun way to sit down with other entrepreneurs and talk about how they manage their online businesses while traveling. Anton overheard me teaching another one of his students how I optimized my store for sales and conversions and encouraged me to create the info product, Optimize Like a Boss which teaches eCommerce store owners how to get more sales.I also started traveling more and took up scuba diving again, but this time as a guest at the resorts instead of as an employee.$30,000I'm currently on vacation in Koh Lanta after spending a week rock climbing in Krabi with my girlfriend. I'm still working 1-2 hours a day while i'm out here, but I usually do it before breakfast or late at night instead of watching TV. I actually really enjoy my "job" as I don't have boss, and whatever sales I make from my eCommerce stores, my book, advertising from my podcast, or sales of my Optimize info product goes straight to me.Taking that first initial leap of faith and moving to Thailand with little more than what cash I got from selling my car has allowed me to create the ideal life that I previously thought was impossible. If you aren't 100% happy with your job and don't want to wait until you're 65 to retire and hopefully move to somewhere like Thailand, do something about it now. Life really is short, and we really can have it all. 12 Weeks in Thailand : The Good Life on the Cheap, if you enjoyed this blog post you'll really love all of the details of how I quit my job, breakdowns of the cost of living and what it was like living in Thailand for four years which includes some wild adventures.If you want to know how I became a digital nomad and started working online, read my 2nd book: Life Changes Quick : 7 Steps to Get Everything You've Ever Wanted. This is the follow up on how I went from a "good life" to a "great life." It includes a peek into the underground world of location independent entrepreneurs, six figure online businesses and how to set and achieve your goals. Travel Like a Boss Podcast for inspiration and ideas from successful entrepreneurs that I've met while traveling.I had no idea what I was doing when I started out. If it wasn't for meeting a guy from New York named Anton and taking his Drop Shipping training course , I never would have come this far, been able to keep traveling, or had saved up nearly this much money. I know it works because I am friends now with enough fellow course members who also make a full time living from their stores, and recently started a store with my girlfriend who is already making a full time income from her store.Get started today and start living the life you've always dreamed of. You can read my original review of Anton's dropshipping course here but trust me, it's the best thing I ever signed up for, and it continues to work today even in 2018.A lot has changed from when I first wrote this post in 2014. From my goal of going from $1,000 in total networth to saving up my first $30,000 as I wrote about in Life Changes Quick , I've now grown enough businesses and sold enough dropshipping stores to be worth over $600,000 now in total net worth and even took a 6 month early retirement last year to try it out just to realize that not doing anything wasn't for me.In this video below, I wrap up what I did these past 12 months, how much money I made, from what sources and where I traveled.If you want to know more about how I make money from blogging check out my Income Boss course where I show you the backend dashboards on everything you need to know about starting, building and monetizing your personal brand, website or blog.Keep in touch on facebook or twitter and feel free to ask me any questions, I'm happy to help you get started in your own journey.Warm Regards and best wishes,Johnny