#111: How Kevin Casey Uses His Freelance Income to Travel Five Months a Year

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there.

Thank you for joining me for episode 111 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a quick reminder, you can find details, show notes for this episode by going to b2b launcher.com Episode 11 if I had to guess, I would say that most of us view freelancing as a way to make a living. And by that I mean that we think of it as a way to kind of pay our bills. Sure, it's doing work we enjoy and doing it on our own schedule and our own terms and. But that's pretty much where it ends. Not for everybody, but for many of us. There's nothing wrong with that. But there are some professionals out there, some solo professionals who look at freelancing a little differently. They see it as a means to fund exciting adventures or deep seated passions. They choose this work model because it enables them to travel the world and create life changing experiences or do something very specific. And it's all based on this whole idea or this other thing that they're really trying to accomplish or do or impact. These folks don't live to work. They really do work to live. And you can tell, you can tell this and you can see that and you can hear it when, when they talk. You can just feel it. You just know it's a little different from maybe the way some of us approach the work. My guest this week is a great example of this mindset and approach to freelancing. His name is Kevin Casey. He is a freelance copywriter based in Australia who travels four to five months every year. You heard that right. This guy is out traveling four to five months out of the year away from home and he uses his freelance income to fund every dollar of these experiences. I think it's just a, it's a slightly different approach from the way many other people travel and the world. And I think you'll notice that difference in, in, in why it's so important when you listen to Kevin speak. So listen, whether you enjoy traveling the world or not, I think you'll find Kevin's approach to work in leisure inspiring and thought provoking. So let's go right to that conversation. Kevin, welcome to the show. So great to have you here.

Thank you, Ed.

So this has been a really hot topic and obviously it's a hot topic among freelance writers, copywriters, people who kind of got into this because they wanted to create a location independent business. I mean, maybe that wasn't the sole reason, but that was definitely something that attracted them to the idea and whether that meant, hey, I just want to be able to go up to the mountains an hour north of here occasionally or I want to travel the world, world. It was definitely an attractive idea and that's something you've done really, really well and I can't wait to dive into that. But before we get into, into that, why don't you tell us about yourself, the work you do, the kind of clients you work with, a little bit about your background.

Sure, Ed. Well, basically I, I was born in, in the States, so I, I immigrated to Australia in 1991 and I currently live or am based in Brisbane in Queensland in the east coast of Australia. It's a lovely place to be. My background's a little bit different I think from many freelancers because I actually started out as a self publisher of my own books back in 1992 and I wrote four print books and it was very sporadic. I didn't, you know, it was like six years between books, you know, it wasn't, I wasn't doing it full time or anything like that. It was kind of a, kind of a hobby. And then fast forward to about late 2013. I was just working, working in a camping shop. I wasn't really writing at all. And I was just thinking, you know, I really should put this writing skill that I have to use and give this whole freelance writing thing a shot. So I just, yeah, started my own business right away. And the reason I did it, the main reason, actually it's kind of funny because I have this hobby where I traipse around the planet and I explore really remote rivers. And I've been doing this since I was in my late 20s. And it's a really fun hobby, but it's darn expensive. Costs a lot of money to go to Gabon, West Africa and hang out with the pygmies for a month or go to Borneo and film orangutans or whatever it is. So that, believe it or not, was my reason, my goal for starting the freelance writing business because I wanted something that would give me consistent earnings and be completely location independent and basically pay for all these cool trips that I wanted to go on.

Wow. So yeah, this is, we're not talking about the, the typical, hey, I want to you know, go to the, the Hamptons, you know, for a buck. You're, you're going, you're going remote.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I could just, just to, to talk about, I guess a typical year for me there, There really is no such thing as a typical year for me. But what I got up to just in the last 12, 12, 15 months I guess. This time last year I was in the jungles of Bolivia for a month. I was tracking jaguars and mountain lions along riverbanks. And then in, let's see, October, I was swimming and snorkeling with manta rays on the Great Barrier Reef for a week. Then in January I had a couple of weeks driving around Tasmania. What was next? Let me think. Hard to keep track sometimes. Oh yeah, May. I was in, I do digital nomading, but I do it in a kind of a part time way. I'm not, you know, I have a base in Australia here, but I, I can take off and go pretty much wherever I want, whenever I want for as long as I want, which is the cool thing about what I do. But I went to, to play digital nomad in a place called Cordoba in Argentina and I did that for five weeks and that was pretty fun. Just got an Airbnb apartment set up there. I had, I think the, the whole cost of the trip was a little over $4,000, but I actually invoiced nearly $7,000 worth of work. So I had a lovely five week holiday and actually made a profit and had a wonderful time in Argentina. And then I think the last trip I did, I only just got back about a month and a half ago from Spain, the southern coast of Portugal which is amazingly beautiful and a little bit of time in Milan, Italy. So that's my travels during the past 12 months.

Yeah, that is fantastic. So what I'm hearing here is there's really no necessarily a pattern or. Right. You're just tell us what goes into making these decisions and then how long you will go for. How do you make that decision?

Sure. Well, it all, all depends on the work that I have going. I can, I have some. So I'm very lucky. I have some, some excellent clients who are quite understanding and they understand that I, I do like to just take off for a month at a time. And you know, not all clients as you know are quite that cooperative. They, they don't necessarily let you do that. But I have some, some really excellent clients who you know, I just give them a couple of months notice. I say, you know, I'll Be gone for all of June or, or, you know, part of January and a bit of February and I'll be back and you can, you know, hit me up with, with double the work if you like. So, so, you know, it keeps them happy, but lets me do the things that I want to do. And essentially, you know, we all have our, our priorities of what we're trying to get out of freelance writing or copywriting. And for me, like, I always like to use the legendary Bob Lie as a good example of, you know, here's a guy who has been working, I think by his own admission, something like five hours a day, five days a week, 12 hours a day for something like 34 years now. He's a bit of a workaholic and he does amazing work and he loves what he does. Obviously he loves writing. But for me that's not, you know, really what I want to do. I don't want to work as hard as Bob Bly does and, and be just all about the work and the money. For me, I have to have a lot of variety in my life, as you've heard. And I like the idea of using copywriting as a, I call it a means to an end profession because it's really something that no matter what your lifestyle is, if you're a stay at home parent and you can only work an hour and a half a day or something, you know, that's fine. If you want to really crank out the work and make a six figure income or work toward that, that's cool. For me, the main priority is to make enough money to do all the really crazy trips that I'd like to do during the course of the year. So that's my thing. So if I make a lot of people ask, is a six figure income what you're working for? And for me, I say, well, no, not really. I just want to make enough to pay for my trips, to do good work, to keep clients happy. Not all of my trips are hardcore extreme wilderness expeditions. I do normal touristy things like everybody else. But I guess the difference with me is that instead of having one two week vacation a year or something like that, I can have half a dozen vacations a year, plus a couple of river trips and maybe weekends away, and then fit all of that into my existing client base and the work that I have.

So on average, what would you say? And I'm sure it varies year to year, but do you have a goal that you try to meet in terms.

Of how many weeks off at the moment? I'm probably working seven to eight months out of the year and traveling four to five months. But having said that, sometimes I will take the laptop with me when I go overseas. As I went to Argentina, that was. I probably worked just as hard in Argentina as what I do at home. And then when I went to Spain and Portugal, I was starting my new blog, the Jet Setting Copywriter, and working there. But, you know, when you go to places like the Cook Islands in the middle of Pacific or Bolivia, there's not much point in taking your laptop with you. You're just really going to do what you want to do and forgetting about writing for a while, which is also, you know, I think it's important A lot of people, they work a bit too hard at it, I think. And it's, you know, for me, it's important to get away from it and just clear my brain of writing entirely for three or four weeks at a time.

So walk me through and we're going to get into the nuts and bolts of how you do that, how you make it happen, especially when you do take your laptop with you. And, you know, you're going to have to do some work out there. But give me an idea of how you make travel decisions, destination decisions. So walk me through, you know, how you were kind of collecting ideas of places you'd like to visit. Do you do this kind of at the end of the year and planning for next year? Is it very ad hoc? Walk us through that process.

Okay. Well, I basically have, I guess, three different types of trips that I do during the year. I have like what I call playing digital nomad, where I will just pick a city usually. And there are certain cities that digital nomads like more than others because they're inexpensive to stay in. You know, there's like Chiang Mai in Thailand is just huge at the moment. It seems like half the digital nomads on the planet are living in Thailand at the moment. But I tend to go for different sort of places that are not, I guess, digital nomad hotspots as such. But so I have digital nomad cities basically that I go to just to test it out. And it's just usually a matter of getting an apartment for a month or a month and a half, setting up, making sure you've got decent WI fi and, you know, doing a bit of work because, you know, it's just you can do work pretty much anywhere in the country as long as you've got your laptop. You've got a PayPal account, so people can pay you You've got some semi reliable WI fi working. You can, you can make money, so it doesn't really matter. So there's those scripts.

By the way, I never heard of that term digital nomad. That's, that's.

Oh really? Okay, well that's, that's been a huge thing for I guess, 10 years. It's getting more and more popular. It's, it's basically, it's another term for location independence. But I think there's a, there's a fairly distinct difference between, between the two. A lot of people who call themselves digital nomads actually don't make a huge amount of money. They only make just enough money to stay in only the cheapest destinations on earth. And these are places, places where you find a lot of these people. Thailand, the Philippines, Prague is fairly inexpensive. Certain parts of Central and South America where you can manage to find cheap accommodation, decent WI fi and everything like that. But yeah, I mean there's a lot of different terms for, for what people like myself do. Location. Independent entrepreneur is one. There's, you know, half a dozen different labels and none of them really are completely adequate, I guess. Yeah. Because especially for, you know, somebody like me, there's no label for what I do. It's just totally different from, from anything. But I also have perfectly normal vacations like, like everybody else. That's my other type of trip. Like when I went to Spain and Portugal. Just got back end of last month actually. And then I have my hardcore serious remote river expeditions now. I've been doing this for a quarter of a century and I've been to, oh boy, everywhere. I've been to Africa, Borneo, South America numerous times. Probably explored seven or eight rivers in British Columbia, Canada. Just a few years ago I went by helicopter to a very remote area in northern Australia to explore a river that was so remote you, you couldn't get in there any other way except by chopper. And the river was completely unknown. Like it, it didn't even have a name. That's how, that's how in the middle of nowhere it was. So, so those are my three. Yeah, three types of trips that I do and I try to balance it out.