All The Facts You Need About Working Abroad

Woman working abroad on beach with laptopIf you’re tired of working in the same old office, you might be thinking about travelling abroad for work. This is a great opportunity to see the world. You can travel to anywhere and there are a few possibilities for how you could make this happen.

Working For A Company

If you’re working for a global company that is based somewhere else, the possibility to work there might be open to you. For instance the business you currently work for might be based in Australia. If it is, you could get the chance to work there. Often, there will be a chance for employees to relocate during their career and all they have to do is seize it. You could work over there for up to four years with a work permit visa Australia. You will have to apply for one online, and you will also need to get the backing of your business if you go down this route.

If you’re going to be working over there for the maximum time, you might want to consider investing in property. That way, you’ll have a permanent address and won’t be wasting money on rent. You should have a look at the property market before you decide to move. After four years, you may be able to renew your visa and stay there for longer. This is perhaps the easiest way to work abroad, but there are others.

Freelance

If you freelance, you won’t be working on a fixed contract. That means that you can leave and take another job whenever you want. There’s no reason why you can’t travel while doing this. If you have good qualifications, you can get a lot of experience and years working while continuing to travel. You might also eventually find a permanent contract. At that point you will need a new visa for the country you’re in.

Travel Writing

A lot of people work abroad while making a living by writing about their experiences. They do this by setting up a blog. If you use the right SEO techniques, you can guarantee your blog is seen by a big readership and make money off it. You might also attract the interest of advertisers, earning a bigger income. You won’t have to get a visa to do this. Instead, you can travel to different places, purely for pleasure while working to pay for it.

As A Business Owner

Of course, you might have your own business. However, you still want to work primarily from abroad. But, you don’t want the hassle of relocating your company. You have two options here. You can open a new branch, expanding your business to another country. Or, you can work purely online using a cloud server. Once you have a cloud server setup, you will find you can run your business from anywhere. Everything you need will be at your fingertips.

You see, it’s easy to start travelling the globe and continue to earn a living.

MileIQ Review – Can it Really Track Your Mileage Automatically?

MileIQ App Screen ShotI’ve been testing this app since Sunday, with high hopes. MileIQ promises to catch every drive automatically – no stop or start required. Especially appealing to me right now as the only thing holding up our tax return for 2013 is that I need to add up my mileage from my mileage log, which is very tedious. The idea of having this done for me for 2014 makes my heart sing!

What is my MileIQ review? I really like that you don’t need to open the app for it to work – as long as you have your cell phone with you, it’s supposed to track your mileage. I also like how easy it is to categorize your trips – just open the app and swipe left to categorize the trip as personal, and right to categorize as business. It’s also easy to add tolls or parking fees manually to your trips.

Unfortunately, I can’t give it a thumbs up just yet. While it is amazingly accurate on the drives it catches, for some reason it misses some of my drives, so I still have to keep my paper mileage log. However, my MileIQ review may change as I continue to tweak a few things. The directions indicate the app becomes more accurate with wi-fi turned on, and my wi-fi has been off this week, so my next step is to see if turning it on makes a difference. I also have an older iPhone (4s), so upgrading to a newer model may help. I’m hoping the glitch is not because I drive a Prius; that would be a bit more difficult to fix! I’ll keep you updated.

Give it a try – the MileIQ app is free for up to 40 trips a month. You do have the ability to pause the app – a nice feature to turn on for the weekend, for instance, if you are concerned you will run over 40 trips a month.

Want more time- and sanity-saving tools and strategies for small business owners? Check out my latest recommendations here.

Staying Connected Overseas Without Extravagant Data Charges

I’ve just returned from a fabulous trip to Japan. When I travel, I like to write blog posts as a way of staying connected with family and friends, and to keep a journal so I can remember my journeys. In the past, I’ve sought out internet cafes, but this trip, I brought my iPhone and tried something different.

I’ve read so many horror stories about travelers returning home to thousand dollar bills for international data-roaming charges that I’ve always left my iPhone at home when I travel out of the country. But that would not work well for Japan; I would be in many rural areas where internet cafes would be difficult to find.  I followed the instructions on changing smartphone settings in articles I had saved, and even called  AT&T (my carrier) from the airport before I boarded the plane, just to verify I was doing everything I needed to avert data-roaming charges. (By the way, you do need to make the changes before you take-off; if you wait until you land, you run the risk of your phone automatically downloading data when you turn on your phone to change the settings.)

Here’s the post I wrote on what worked for me in Japan: http://nakasendo2013.blogspot.com/2013/10/on-bullet-train-nagoya-to-kyoto.html . As I mentioned earlier, the blog is written for family and friends, but feel free to read the other posts if you are interested – this was a trip I expected to enjoy, and it still exceeded my expectations!

My Favorite Apps, Part 2

Five more apps that help me savor life – appropriate because two are related to food, two entertain me, and one I find indispensable – and all are free.

iPhone screen with apps

Let’s start with food: Open Table is one of my favorite apps. You use it to make restaurant reservations & you then get 100 points when you keep your reservation. It’s fast, convenient, and totally free – and there is a reward for using it! When you accumulate 2000 points, you get a $20 Open Table check you can use as cash at any Open Table restaurant. I use it for local reservations, but one of my favorite uses is to find good restaurants when I am traveling. These are good quality restaurants, and I have never been disappointed. You don’t even need a smart phone to use it; you can make reservations directly from your computer.

Starbucks has an app I love (and I don’t drink coffee). I do, however, like their pastries. The app works like a gift card on steroids. You add money to a virtual card, then scan your smart phone screen at the register to pay. You can even add the number and pin of an actual card (something I do when I am given a gift card), and it will add to your balance. And the app also offers you a free music download every week. Very cool.

Google: this is an app I use daily. It’s a smartphone version of the search engine. You can either type your search query or speak it. Not sure if I would use it as much if I had Siri, but I find it tremendously useful. The other good feature is that it does not use Safari to do the search; since the Safari app only saves eight web pages, you won’t lose any doing your searching using google.

Shazam: What can I say? It is just FUN to hear a song, hold up your phone to the music, and get almost instant information on song title, artist, and even a link to buy that version. And the music library is incredibly diverse – it works on classical music as well as more recent releases.

Which brings us to the last app on the mind map I showed in Part I: Wait Wait, which is technically a podcast, not an app. It’s an irreverent, and very funny, radio quiz show, with comedians as panelists. I often miss the broadcast, but that’s not a problem, because I subscribe to the podcast, and it downloads the show weekly into iTunes for me. When my mom was ill, it was such a stress-reliever to listen to something that made me laugh when I made the drive up to see her.

I have many more apps on my phone, but these are some of my favorites. What are your favorite apps? Share in the comment box below.

Part I of My Favorite Apps, if you missed that post.