SNM022: Living the Island Lifestyle

speaker 0: 0:00 make your island dreams a reality on today's episode of Serve No Master. Today's episode is brought to you by a Weber. Email is perfect for connecting your brand to your audience. Whether they make a purchase reader block or meet you in person. Email automation begins with a conversation left off to see how a Weber can help your business and get your first month free. Go to serve. No master dot com BACKSLASH. Are you tired of dealing with your boss?

Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, choir your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Three years ago, my girlfriend and I were living in a dirty city with lots of pollution, very crowded, limited options. We decided to go on vacation, and I did a lot of research online to find some interesting islands. Somewhere tropical. We could go and have a really great time. I found this island that I'd never heard of before. That was an up and coming tourist destination. Not very crowded, not very popular, Not very expensive. And we decided to come and try for a month.

Three years later, we now live on that island. A little idea. Little trip. Once we got a taste we knew was the island life. When people first hear that I live on a tropical island, they make a host of assumptions, all of them dramatically wrong. They assume that I'm spending 2030 $50,000 a month to live here. They think the cost of living is super high. They think that I have no electricity, no water, no access to health care, all of his different issues.

In the next episode, we're gonna talk all about deals. Medical issues abroad will go into detail there. But I can tell you that all these assumptions were wrong. Where I live is much cheaper than annual. I've ever lived in America, anywhere ever lived in Europe, have access to everything First world I could ever want. I could order stuff online, and they delivered to my house all the time. There's no transportation problems. I have high speed Internet have all the technology I need.

Everything is first world in all the areas of infrastructure. The number one reason people don't live on tropical islands is lack of information To find out how much it costs to live anywhere in the world requires about 30 seconds of Google. Search 30 seconds of efforts all it takes to find out how much better your life could be if you decided to enjoy the island lifestyle. There are dozens of amazing islands around the world that are all wonderful for different reasons.

When I was 30 I went on vacation to Hawaii for my birthday was in my mom's basement of the time. I saved up some money. I stayed on my friend's couch there. I didn't have enough money to rent a hotel for a month or anything like that. But spending time with someone who actually lived there, I discovered it's not that expensive. There are all these assumptions people make that wise crazy, expensive because most people are foolish tourists. They stay in five star hotels.

They stay in the tourist area and they pay tourist prices go to tourist bars. When you trap yourself in that circle, they're always gonna charge you twice what any male space. In fact, if you live in Hawaii, you get a little I D card. And when you go to the grocery store, you pay a lower price than anyone doesn't have the I. D card. You have a lower price for everything for residents.

If you moved a why, rather than visiting immediately, the prices drop in many areas, it's lack of research, lack of information and honestly, it's pure laziness on the part of most people to not understand what it costs to live in different places. But I know you're in action taker, and we're gonna go through together a couple of things that you want to check as you're deciding where to move now, the island lifestyle might not be the right answer for you.

Maybe want to live in an amazing super event city in South America, maybe wanna live in Europe, maybe want to live in Asia. There's options all over the world where you want to live in the mountains. Whether you want to live in a big city, there are places where you can move that will cut your costs by 70 to 90%. My house where I live right now is more than twice as big as the apartment that I used to live in.

Last time I was in America when I lived in Florida twice as big for less money in that apartment, I was sharing with a roommate. So if we include the total price of that apartment, if I include his rent as well as mine, that apartment was much more expensive than this one. And where I live now, it's on the beach. It's paradise. It's cheaper. The Internets cheaper electricity's cheaper water shipper foods cheaper. Everything's cheaper.

A little bit of research can change your life when you're considering where to move. The first thing to consider is taxes. If you're an American, anywhere in the world, you go. The United States wants to tax you. There are only two countries in the world, the tax you, no matter where you live, the United States and Eritrea. You probably haven't heard of Eritrea because no one's allowed to leave. It's considered to be one of the worst countries in the world.

That's the reason people flee, and they want to chase anyone who actually escapes and try to get money from them by forcing them to pay taxes where they live. United States has the same policy, unfortunately, but if you live abroad but most of your time outside the country, the 1st 100 the 1st $100,000 you make every year his personal income is not taxed. If you make anything less than that, if you make $80,000 a year $36,000 or $50,000 a year.

If you move to another country, make that same out of money. Your tax obligations disappear Every penny of your money that goes to taxes you would get back. The average American pays around 30% in taxes. This means you would get instant 30% pay raise just by moving to another country. Now, if you're from anywhere in Europe, we shouldn't even be having this conversation because if you move to another country, you could make millions of dollars and pay no taxes.

This is why billionaires often change their nations of residents, change their passports because that tax obligations dropped through the floor. And if you're from Europe, you don't have to pay any taxes, no matter how much money making that's amazing. For tax reasons alone, moving abroad is amazing, so there's only benefits as faras taxes. Now you do wantto. If you're American like me, you want to fire taxes every year.

I have an American bookkeeper that keeps track of everything for me, for that very reason to make sure I'm always on the up and up. I track everything taxes. Every year you're from somewhere else. You don't do any of that. It's amazing. The second consideration, if you have Children like me, is possibly education. You're worried about educating. Your Children were going to send them to school. This is something I think about ah lot now that I'm here.

Most people in America consider education other countries to be terrible, even though as far as industrialized nations, America is considered a have close to the worst education available, there is no excuse for being pretentious. In the next episode will talk about America's rank as faras healthcare, but I'll give you a little morning. It's also terrible. We have a great deal of Hooper's in the United States when we shouldn't have any. Our educational system is pretty close to abysmal right now.

They're around 30 million Americans who are functionally illiterate. Many people can only read a 10 year olds level. The majority of our population can only read as good as a 10 year old. That's a problem. It's not a sign they have a great education system, making the assumption that education, other systems will be terrible starts with assuming that education America's great, which it's not. I personally am a big believer in home education.

Now the more I've studied education, why write about education, my books, having been a teacher for more than a decade, Having seen how that system works, I would never subject my Children to it. My plan with my Children's old enough is to hire full time tutor. That tutor will cost me probably $500 a month for full time Western college educated tutor to teach my Children. It will cost me less than sending my Children to public school every day in American.

Paying for their lunch is the cost of transportation, the costs of school lunches, the cost of the basic things outside of school, paying for books. That's more than it would cost me here to send my kids to school and have a private tutor. Have someone amazing. Teach them. If you become proactive, you can find ways to educate your Children. You can home school your Children and give them more advanced education. The majority of what I learned in school is useless.

The majority of what I learned in College of my master's program was useless because it doesn't teach you how to live in the real world. How to make money, how to deal with people, how to run a business, how to take care of your family had a handle. Finance. None of that's covered in school. Instead, I learned advanced physics. I learned advanced history. I learned advanced mathematics. When's the last time trigonometry came up for me, let alone algebra calculus?

None of those things ever affect my life. Instead, math in high school should really cover bookkeeping That would have changed my life. There are so many subjects we learned in high school that are a waste of time. Most people, when they think about school, they're so caught up in the debate about whether they should teach our kids evolution or teach them creative design. Who cares? That's so irrelevant.

It will not affect your Children's ability to make money if they believe in evolution or if they believe in creative design. Whichever side of that are you? You're on. It's so irrelevant you're arguing about and you're focusing on something that will not affect your Children. Lawyers who believe in evolution do not make more money than lawyers who believe in creationism. We're caught up in the wrong debates.

We should beam or interested in teaching our Children skills that will give them that ability to compete internationally, bring back manufacturing jobs to America and increase their income. That's all I care about for my Children. I want my Children to be able to make enough money to self support, have a nice life. That's what I care about. You call me a capitalist or a mercenary. I just want my Children have a good life and I focus with my efficiency.

Just like we talked about in the previous episode. We talked about the importance of using your time Well, I would rather use school time. Well, when I was in school, my time was mostly wasted. The first couple of schools I went to were too low for me. According to intelligence s that I took as a child, I'm in the 99 point 9/7 percentile. If you put in a room with 1000 people, three people be as smart or smarter than make order those tests.

These days there are loads of scientists, lawyers, doctors that are all smarter than me. As far as I'm concerned, I think those tests are really only measuring ability. But according to them, was the smartest kid in school. I would be in school sitting. These classes finished my homework. Before the day was up, I would come home from school. All my homework completed. I was so far ahead of where the other students were.

Teacher with 30 kids in the room cannot effectively teach to each person in the room. There'll be kids at the beginning and kids at the end. The smartest kids get ahead, get bored, get into trouble. The slowest kids can't keep up. Feel like they're left behind, lose interest, get into trouble.

It doesn't matter if you were smart or slow, your teacher often was unable to meet your needs because of ratio problems, because there were too many students and they're not allowed to move students in America into groups based on how smart you are, where you on the class. It's considered unfair in our educational system to teach to the smartest students you have to teach to the slowest student. And then you have all of these problems because the other kids get bored. The slow student feels isolated.

I don't want my Children to go through that. I don't know if my Children be really smart or if they're gonna struggle, but I want them to have that personal touch that lets them learn their own rate. I want their time to used efficiently. It's a waste of time for a smart student to sit in classroom and to listen to a lesson that they understood in the 1st 5 minutes.

But it is also a waste of time for a student who was at the back of the classroom, the body, the rankings to listen to a lesson that they don't understand because they didn't understand yesterday's lesson. Both students time get wasted and you know I hate time waste so I have a plan for education, for my Children and pretty much anywhere in the world. You go, you can find amazing Western teachers, Western education, whatever you're looking for for far less.

Then the price will be in America. There is no excuse in the Education Department now. I would never put my kids in public school and a foreign country. That's not something I believe in. I think that's also silly. You need to cut corners that hard. I do want my Children have the best advantages, so don't go that far. Don't go crazy. Don't go Comparing public education between different countries. I don't trust American public education, and I don't trust Chinese public education.

When I was a teacher at University in London, I had many students from China who had no idea what World War to us. They had no idea who was the head of their country. In 1920 they have no knowledge of anything pre around 1940 or 1945 The end of World War Two is where they think history began, and plenty of other countries educational systems. Terrible. That's been my experience. I don't trust anyone else to teach my kids. I want to be heavily involved in their education.

That's my personal belief system, and that's what I'm enacting. The next thing to look at is rule of law. One of the ways the United States government and many Western governments try to keep you trapped is by fear. They convince you that other countries of Wild Wild West. When my father heard about where I was living, he often asked me about beheadings and gunfights there. Murder rate, where my father lives is about 50 times higher than here.

Anywhere in America has a much higher murder rate than most other places. It's often about where you live. There's dangerous neighborhoods and safe neighborhoods in every country. There's places you don't want to go. Brazil has safe and dangerous places. America safe in dangerous places. Canada, even as dangerous neighborhoods, making the assumption that the entire country is dangerous is often based on false information because you can look up the murder and crime statistics for every country in the world again.

The only reason you have false information is because you never type to search into the Internet. You can type in the name of any country murder rate and pop up with the statistics, you can see how safer, dangerous it is. You'll discover that most of the country's air much safer now. The rule of law question is a little bit beyond that. That's more about how corrupt is the government. How corrupt are the police where I live? There's not very much rule of law in that department.

Everyone is for sale. The police, judges, the government. If you get into trouble, you can buy your way out of it. That doesn't really bother me. That means if I get falsely accused of a crime, at least I can bribe my way to freedom. I prefer that to a system where I get false. Accuser crime. There's nothing. Aiken. D'oh! I've never really had problems with the police here. I've never had a negative interaction where I live. I've never had a bad problem with politicians.

I've only paid one bribe while I was here and it wasn't too bad. It was four traffic violation and I was guilty. I had made the mistake, little thing, paper out of it. No big deal. Looking in another country, you want to pay attention to exactly how the rule of law operates.

There are certain countries in Europe that I would never want to live in, because what you don't want is a country where the Mafia and the rule of law are connected with the Mafia owns the police here. Whoever pays owns him. Whoever pays can get out of trouble. That's fine. That's at least a fairer system. But there's certain country, especially if you go further and further east in Europe, where the police will shake you down, the police will kill you.

There's a lot of scary stuff, and again, I have friends who live in those countries, and it's not so bad for them. But you have to really have a deep understanding of how to adapt to that society, and then you won't have any problems. It's only the people that don't do any research there. Run into these problems.

Find out the balance of how much rule of law you need Now, if you make the assumption that living United States air living in England, you have a great deal of rule of law again, your promise complete and total ignorance. If you do a little research you'll discover that in America they passed a law a few years ago that says the police can arrest your money when they pull you over, they could pull you over.

Say you're not guilty of a crime, but I don't like the way the money or while it's looking at me. Your money is under arrest and they'll take your money and then they will buy prizes for the other police officers. And it's considered civil forfeiture. It's not illegal. They found a way in America to bypass reality and steal from people whenever they want to. If you go to court to fight against the civil forfeiture, there's no judge. There's just the d A.

The D A sits in the judge's chair so I can give you back your money. He's one of stolen. Every country has different ups and downs. There's plenty of problems with the police in America. There's probably problems with the police and lots of other places. And as far as I'm concerned, it's an infrastructure problem, an individual problem. Most people join the police because they want to make a country a better place. The problem is the laws, the structure, they're told.

They have to write a certain number. Tickets have to do all these different things. It's an infrastructure problem. It's top down, in my opinion. But I pay attention to the way things are structured where I live. Right now. The local police are very corrupt, but only to a certain extent, because if they go too far, the National police show up and the national police here are very serious. So there is a barrier to how crazy the local police can get.

There's a little bit of looseness with rule of law, but it's not too bad. It's not too crazy. When you're looking at a country, you're gonna move to you. Just check with the balances and see how you feel about that. Most of the information you'll get from news websites will be wrong. The best thing to do is go to an expat form of form or foreigners from your country, live in the country or thinking about and see what they say.

You can post questions and find out what the good and bad is. Find out exactly what the challenges and benefits are. You can get information from people actually living there the horse's mouth, and that's the purest form of information. You also want to look at infrastructure. What's the electricity like? What's the water situation like? What's the current situation like? What about the mail? The mail where I live is 100% untrustworthy. If you mail me a letter, it probably won't arrive. The mailman will probably steal it.

However, if you send me any type of package, it will always arrive. All of the delivery service is even the national male. If it's any type of package, sometimes the order stuff from other countries and it comes in the mail, they always bring it cause you have to pay the import duty. I've never had a problem with that, but anything as far as regular mail totally unreliable here. It's not a problem, cause when's the last time I wanted a letter?

Anyways, I learned about the infrastructure, found a way to adapt and realize it's not a problem for me. Most of the mail you get America's bills. Anyways, it's not happy Electricity, where I lived, Power goes out about once a week for a little while. That's why I live somewhere that has a strong generator power goes out. They fired the general. Everything's fine. Every little problem has a solution Now. When I was here three years ago, sometimes power got for 345 days.

We go out for a long time. That was a problem. That's why I waited three years to move here. I needed to do some major changes to my business. To be able to live somewhere and pays the power go out for days at a time doesn't happen anymore. Now the longest. It goes out for eight or 12 hours. So his generators running. I'm fine. My laptop has batteries. Anyways, I could do most of my work looking at water here.

The water out of the tap is undrinkable. So everywhere their service is that deliver those five gallon barrels of water that you put in the little water machine upside down. I have two of those water machines in my house, and the price around here is a dollar a barrel. So five gallons of pure water costs a dollar.

My family, including all the people that work for us and at the house all the time, goes through about five of those a month so my water cost is between five and $10 a month. Even if we go through 50 gallons of water drinking, it's nothing. $10. It's not that expensive. And the tap water works fine for showering and everything else. I've never gotten sick from brushing my teeth. It's none of those problems. There's another problem for brushing your teeth, that's all. Just like imagination.

Internet here I have to high speed Internet connections. Now. What I don't have is a cable connection. So playing online video games, sometimes it's hard. But that's because of my set up, my neighbor who used to be a professional and hopefully I'm really hoping we could do an interview with him. I used to play internationally. Traveling the world is a Tier one video game player. He has a whole set up next to me on the same Internet connections.

Me where his connections three times faster because he set up some extra wires outside and has a little bit different set up. He plays all my video games all the time. Super fast, very competitively. I only plan PlayStation, so I have some problems playing online. Sometimes I can sometimes I can't. But on his PC on his computer, he plays all the time super fast. Here there are now two Internet connections.

I have high speed connection once 25 megabyte download and 17 So they're both pretty fast and the each cost me on $50 a month. So for $100 what most people in America pay for basic Internet and TV package. I have a high speed connection and a backup connection, and my phone can dial America anytime I want. I combine minutes and it sounds just like I'm in America. People can't tell where I am, the signals so good. So these pieces of infrastructure I did the research.

Everything's great when you're looking in other countries, check out the infrastructure. See how things operate at these questions. Read the forms by expats who live, and you could discover exactly what it's like. A little bit of research will show you that the cost of living isn't as bad as you thought. The cost of living where I live is very low. You can live here like a king for less than most people make in America, and you can live like a champion.

If you're doing all right, there's a lot of opportunity in different countries. There's amazing countries all over the world islands, cities, mountains, whatever you want to live that are way cheaper. The cost of living is lower. When you're choosing an island, you can look for the different things that you want. I personally I want to serve. If I didn't want to surf, I would probably consider some different islands, to be honest with you, to be completely open.

But where I live has so many amazing surf spots and in love, watersports. I love surfing, kayaking, stand up, paddling, surfing on a stand up paddleboard. All of these amazing things swimming in the ocean. I love serving those with my kids. I mean, those shows, my dog, have take my dog for kayak trips. All these amazing things. I love being in the ocean. That was a big factor in choosing this island.

If I wanted a lot of infrastructure, I would possibly choose another country nearby or possibly choose another island that has even faster Internet. My decision making calculus included deciding how important that outdoor aspect is, and I love that I love the weather. I looked at that as an element for you. If you hate water sports and you really like infrastructure and you want to go to really nice restaurants than you might choose a different island. My island has no good restaurants.

There's nowhere here that I go out to eat. There's one hotel restaurant that order lunch from every once in a while, and it's pretty good. But that's it. There's no restaurant I go out to because we can cook better in the house. Some of my friends who really need five star restaurants, they live on other islands for that exact reason they need the five star experience. It's what they want.

So find the balance of what's important to you, the type of sports you want to deal with, the type of culture you want, the type of living situation. There's other places that are more developed and more crowded than have much nicer houses, much more sophistication. You know, your own house with a nice pool in a bunch of flat screen TVs and speakers inside of the pool and all those things. We don't have it here. It's not that fancy here.

It's not futuristic, but it's really good, and it's enough for me. I'm very happy here. Finding what you want just takes a little bit of research, and it's not as expensive as you think. One of the challenges leaving people behind dealing with that depends on your situation for me, ever to my family. I text with them all the time. We text back and forth pictures of all of our different kids. There's no longer the difficulty of international phone calls. International phone calls cost nothing.

You could do Skype to Skype for free call. Ever in your family with video chat for free doesn't cost a single penny. All that becomes available figuring out how important things aren't. He was how you decide about leaving people behind. For me, living in paradise and having kids where I want to raise my kids is very important to me. So I made the decision to distance myself from people. My family, never my family live where they want to live.

When I was younger, all of my friends would always complain about where we live. They always say, I want to leave. I just want to get out of here and ever I've ever moved. Everyone says that on this tropical Paradise Island. Sometimes I meet people that grew up here, and all they want to do is leave. But they don't. And there's no reason. Even if you're struggling, even if you are making minimum wage working at McDonald's, you can work the exact same job and why.

And suddenly you're on a tropical island. There are poor people everywhere, So even when you're struggling and I've been poor, I know what it's like When I was younger. I want time. Didn't have any money for food for an entire week. So I really have experienced lack. I know that experience. There's still no excuse. There's homeless people everywhere. Might as well be homeless somewhere nice. That's why homes people go to Miami. At least they get to be somewhere warm.

I understand that Don't create excuses, don't create barriers if you want to live somewhere better. If you wanna live somewhere amazing, you can shopping everywhere in the world. Now you can order stuff online and we get to your house. No problem. Anything I want, I can order over here within two weeks. If I want something really fast. I can have it here within 48 hours by order, stuff all the time. When I wanted a brand new iPhone, I ordered it showed up in the mail.

No problems. Yes, the regular mail is sketchy here, but any package delivery always works, and it's wonderful. All of these things are available, so 90% of the American amenities are available where I live and they're available most places in the world. One of my favorite things about where I live is how much I helped the local economy when I was talking about hate mail.

In a previous episode, I mentioned that someone complained that I consider the seamstress who I pay a dollar to make a pair of shorts for me to be a tailor instead of a seamstress, that it's not homemade because she lives across the street instead of in my house.

The assumption that hangs over $5000 for a suit is the same as paying a dollar for a pair of shorts is ridiculous, But I hire this woman, and sometimes we give her enough work to keep her sewing for an entire week. I go to the neighboring island myself. I buy a bunch of fabric. I carry it back myself. Bring everything to this lady, and she has full time work for a week. She doesn't have to worry about having anything to work on.

She makes dozens of pairs of shorts and shirts and all these clothes for me and my kids. That's so fun. I'm wearing a pair of shorts that she built for me right now. Wonderful. We pour money into her business and help the local economy. All the people that work for me, I love supporting them. I recently got a message from someone who accused me of taking advantage of locals. I found it interesting because it's someone who lives on the same island. Maybe doesn't hire anyone.

When my family moved here, the first thing we did is find out the average wage on the island. We found out what other people pay for nannies. Where other people pay for different service is I pay double for almost every single person who works for me. One of my nanny's ran into trouble with a loan shark recently showed up at her house, started threatening her kids.

We paid him off one of my nanny's was having problems with her kids because she did have a TV in the house. The kids had nothing to do all day. They were going to the neighbor's house, getting in trouble. So we bought a TV, were able to do little things because of how hard I work because of the payoff for my hard labor. I'm able to help out the people who work for me and I care for them greatly.

I pay them at least 50% more than anyone else with a similar job makes on the island. We give them raises and prizes all the time. So when someone accused me of being a bad boss, that's horrible. We support large families and we pay more than anyone else. There are people who live within 100 yards of me who have employees have nannies, that they pay half what I pay. I pay the most because I want to pump the money into the economy.

I want to take care of these people. I know they support their families. I know they support their kids, so we always pay more than everyone else. It's a way of giving back and you can do that when you move somewhere else. The more money you pump into the economy, the better. Many people they go to Jamaica or other countries. They stay in a five star resort, and they imagine that the money would trickle down to the economy.

But it doesn't because they're owned by international corporations. All the money you spend when you're staying on cruise ships or nice hotels is often it goes right back to America. The money doesn't even stay in the country. I help a lot of people around me, and it means a lot to me, and it means a lot to them. If you ask any of the people who work for me, they would say how happy they are and grateful they are to have a job.

Some of the women who work for me out of work for more than a year before they got a job with me and their families were having problems. Now, if their kids are sick, we help them. If they need money, we help them. They have work, they have employment and there are about 70 or 80 people who directly live off of the money that I put into the local economy. If you move to another country, you could really help other people.

You can make a difference if you move to a country where everyone makes $50 a month and you pay everyone $200 a month. You're helping lives, one step at a time. You're providing new opportunities for them to grow and learn skills and improve their chances in life. Those are all good and wonderful things. They're not selfish things. One of the best things about leaving where you live behind is escaping all the politics and the stress.

Every time I look at the news from America, I'm so glad I'm gone. I don't have to deal with any of that stress, and it's so nice. Moving to a tropical island of moving to another country has loads of benefits. If you just do a little bit of research, you'll discover it's not nearly as expensive as you initially thought.

And most of the reasons you haven't moved yet are based on misinformation, a little bit of research, developing a little bit of a strategy following the financial plans we put together in previous episodes, you can make a nice income and actually give yourself a raise just by leaving behind all of your tax burdens. You can live in paradise, make more money, spend less money. How about the local economy and live your dreams. That's why I love living the island lifestyle.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow.

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