How to Create Passive Income To Live Financially Free

Three. Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com and today's guest. I'm really excited about coming to us all the way, I believe from Asia. But yeah, before. But before I talk to our guests, I'd be remiss. I didn't properly introduce my co host. You know him, you love him. Scott Todd from Scott todd.net landmodo.com if you're not automating your Craigslist, your Facebook postings, posting domination.com TheLandgeek Learn anything about anything. Investorninjas.com Scott Todd, how are you? Scott, can you hear me? You kind of froze up there. What? This is interesting.

Mark, you there?

Yeah.

You froze on me.

I don't know what's happening.

I don't know.

How's it going, man?

It's good. It's good. Are you ready for a guest?

I am. Yep. Let's get going.

All right, so if you don't know Johnny FD from johnnyfd.com he was born as Johnny Jen in San Francisco, and he started traveling around the world from Australia, Borneo, all across Southeast Asia to the Caribbean, working as a dive master and scuba Instructor. But in 2011, decided to focus on his second found passion, Muay Thai kickboxing. After six professional fights and years of living as cheaply as possible, he turned 30 and realized he couldn't even afford a plane ticket home if he wanted to. And then he started blogging. And you know, from there, Johnny fd, I'll let you take it from there. Welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, thanks so much. It's really exciting to be here. And what's really funny is I'm in Sri Lanka right now, so exact opposite time zone. And that background, the beach that you have right now is exactly what's right behind me. If this is during the day, no kidding.

So, Johnny, you're just like a professional blogger traveler. Give us what do you. How do I even characterize you? How do I label you?

Yeah, yeah. It's always complicated. I mean, now I'm living off passive income, but which we can get into a little bit later. But my life has really been a series of trial and error. Trying to figure out college and then career corporations, moving to Thailand, doing the scuba diving thing, doing the Muay Thai thing, and then just dipping my toes into Kindle publishing, writing books like travel guides, getting into e commerce and drop shipping, getting into a bit of investing. And now I think I have 14 different streams of Passive income. And that allows me to be able to travel and work in places like Sri Lanka, which I'm sure a lot of people would love to be at, just to go surfing or just go hang out.

Yeah. So you are the. You're like, the human example of what I think most of us want to be. We all want to do what we want, when we want, where we want, with whom we want. And yet we don't want to have to go to a job, put on a tie and a suit, report to someone. And so you kind of crack that code and started creating these passive income streams so you could live exactly the intentional way you wanted to. Am I understanding that correctly?

Yeah. And I'm very, very lucky that I kind of fast track to that, because I think that if I never had the opportunity to work at a big American corporation, I worked for Honeywell right after school, and I had the shirt and tie, the cubicle, the Lexus sedan. I'm seeing clients all the time in the corporate card. If I didn't have that for a few years, I don't think I would have had the guts to say, what else is there? Because I would have worked my whole life just to get to that point. And I think for a lot of people, their first goal is to move somewhere like California. You know, if you grew up in the Midwest, you're like, okay, well, you know, one day I'm gonna move to California, to New York. But because I had already grown up there, and I basically had everything that I was supposed to have. Good university degree, good job at a good corporation, and I still wasn't happy. And that's when I realized there has to be more. And that's when I first moved to Thailand. And I thought, hey, let's give this a shot. I have nothing to lose.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about happiness. What in your life right now truly makes you happy?

Oh, everything. I mean, the fact that it's right now end of February, and I'm not cold. If anything, it's a bit too warm. Sometimes I hate the winter. Even in San Francisco, which most people listening are thinking, California is not that cold. But when you grow up in a house without insulation, without heating, and it's still in the 40s, you're freezing. And I hated the winter, and I just wanted to be able to escape that. Now I wake up every day. It's a sunny 85 or 90. I walk right across the street to the beach, and it's a beautiful surf beach with board, rentals right on the beach for $1.50 an hour. So I just, I show up without anything. I literally just put on my board shorts, I walk across the street, I rent a board for $1.50, I surf for an hour in the morning. And I actually remember this morning thinking, if I don't do anything else, I've already accomplished everything I need. You know, I got some exercise, I got some sun, I got to work on a skill. I got to spend time with friends and be out in nature. I'm good. And this is only 9am and from that point on, the rest of the day is a bonus for me.

Scott, Todd, what are your thoughts?

You know, man, here's the thing is, like, Johnny's living the dream that, you know, like, you and I, we will debate back and forth, right? Like, I mean, we could do this, Mark. Like, you and I are in a situation, we could go and do this.

I don't think so because we've got wives and kids.

But that's awesome people that we have.

To like, drag along with our dream.

Okay, but see, like, here's the thing. Like, okay, so like both my kids and like you have a third child. So, like, you're, you're a little bit below me, but like, in terms of behind me, in terms of age. But like, I'm on the cusp of being like my own version of Johnny fd. But you know what? I'm not sure that I'm gonna swing the, like, the nomadic lifestyle, right? Like, I'm not sure my wife's gonna be like, oh, let's go here and here and here. She's all for the traveling, but we better have our home base right back where it is right here. And then, then, you know, the next stage of life comes along. And so like, Johnny's like, living the dream that I think that we all like, you know, think about, like, how cool would be. He's like that youtuber that you see, like bouncing around and all these other places. Like, he's doing it.

Yeah. So Johnny, I'd be curious what your take is. So you got a guy like Scott maybe a year or two away from being an empty nester, and now he's already cracked the passive income code, so he doesn't have to worry about that. So he can literally live wherever he wants. He can do whatever he wants. Whatever he wants. What would be your argument to his wife to say, okay, maybe keep that house in Tampa, but here's what life could be like, and here's what's going to be great about it, but here's going to be some challenges.

Yeah. And it's definitely not going to be, you know, just completely easy. Once you make the move, you sacrifice something like comfort. Right. And when we have a nice big house that we're used to with all of our stuff, big couch, Netflix, you know, we're ordering food in, life is very easy, and it's very comfortable, and we have a lot of certainty, we have a lot of stability, and that's something that a lot of people value, you know, and I understand why they value it. At the same time, what are you missing? That when you have that much stability is excitement, you know, and this is why most people, when they're working their nine to fives, they have a steady paycheck, steady life. But what are they dreaming about? They dream about going on vacation and dreaming about, you know, going out to Thailand or Sri Lanka or Di. Bali or something. And. But here's the thing is, if you just make the move and you just pop over, it's going to be a little bit too chaotic where you're going to start wishing you had that stability again. I think I finally figured out kind of the hack of the two. For me, I try to stay in places for two to three months at a time. I like to rent an Airbnb or just a nice comfortable place. Here we have a big bed, big natural lighting, we have a big kitchen. And it's just a comfortable place where I don't miss anything from home. I have a tv, I have my Netflix, I have good Internet, and I have it for two months. And that way, if I wanted to, I can go buy some plants and, you know, really make it homey. And it kind of solves that part. And a lot of people forget that when you, like when you're calculating how much money you need to survive and to be able to travel. But you're still paying either a mortgage back home, you're paying your HOAs, you're paying your fixed cost and utilities, it ends up being very expensive. But if you rent out your place or if you just sell the place, return to investment property. And now instead of paying $2,000 a month for your rent or your mortgage, imagine if you have $2,000 coming in from that. That basically covers your entire trip somewhere else. And this has really been demonstrated by a lot of people who've been part of the fire movement, the financial independence, retire early movement, where they say that if they had known how cheap it is to live in places like Thailand, they could have retired five years earlier and had their FI number, their financial pendant number, instead of having it be 1.5 million, which takes a long time to save up to you. Or needing to get their passive income level up to $7,000 a month or $5,000 a month. If they had just calculated the lower cost of living in other amazing places like Thailand or here in Sri Lanka, they could have left a lot earlier and had their youth and their energy to be able to enjoy this. And that's something that's really intangible that people don't realize.

I love it. I love it. So, okay, well, Johnny, because this is the Art of Passive Income podcast. You've got 14 different passive income streams. You talked about Amazon, FBA, you talked about Kindle ebooks. I want to know if you only could choose three, which three are the most lucrative? And if you're for our listeners right now, as of this recording, if somebody was going to start really building passive income, what would you recommend to them?

So all the best ones from my point of view, the ones that are the most lucrative, but also the most hands off, the most stable, those are all investments. Because when you invest in something and that's paying you a monthly dividend or interest or payment, money just continues to make money. Money never needs to take a vacation, money never needs to have a sick day. Money never has to work overtime. And for me, my favorite investments are all the real estate funds, the index funds. I have pretty much anything that is money that makes money. Um, but the, the problem is for a lot of people is to get to that point of having enough investments to be able to pay you, start paying you. And you know, that's why when I started, you know, I didn't have any money to invest. So I started building, you know, e commerce websites. I was drop shipping and I would spend, you know, I would spend $30 to build a website, another hundred bucks to, you know, make a nice logo build, built some graphics, and then just manual labor of just uploading products and just selling things online. And after a year of doing that and making a couple thousand dollars a month, I was able to sell that business for 60 grand. And I thought, wow, this is amazing. I have never made 60 grand a year in my life. I wonder if I can do this every year. So I started doing two or three at a time. And not only would I make two or three grand a month in profit from the profits of the actual e commerce store, the drop shipping store, but then when I would sell the business at the end of the year, I would have a nice big cash flow as well, which then let me buy these investments. So I would say, depending on where everyone is financially right now, if you have the money, go out and invest it and create passive income that way. It's the fastest way. It's the easiest way. It's the most stable. If you don't have any money yet, build something that you can sell or profit from and then use that money to buy investments.

Scott, Ty, what are your thoughts?

You know, man, I think that that's.

That's.

You know, Mark, here's my thought on it. It's almost like what we teach, right? Like, we. We teach a very similar model, which is you got to go create cash. How do you go create cash? Well, in our business, you can go and wholesale land, right? Like, you can go wholesale the land. It creates more cash. What do you do with the cash? So what I did when I got going is I took the cash that I had and I went and I bought properties that I would sell on owner financing the terms to create the passive income, right? So, like, I had one county where, man, I was just flipping out. Remember when I started, Mark, like, I know you remember this. Five years ago, there was 33 people in the Facebook group for your community. Today, there's like 3,800. Okay? Like, big difference in the world in five years in land investing, but 33 people. And guess what? We didn't talk to each other, right? Like, you remember that? No, mum was the word. We didn't talk about counties. We didn't talk about stuff. So it's not like I was gonna go to the. To the people that I was like, you know, like, other land investors say, hey, what you want to buy in this county wholesale? Because that would be like bringing competition to me. And we didn't do that. So, like, what did you do? You went and you found people that wanted to buy the land cheap out in the retail world. You sold it to them, create some cash, and kept on going, right? Like. And that's what it is. I hauled in the cash and junk it, chunked it over to create term sales. And that's what Johnny's doing. He's taking one. One stream of income, taking it, buying more, investing more, and growing the passive income. I think that's the secret is you've got to be committed to growing that passive income.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, Johnny, let's get real here, okay? What's the worst thing about living overseas? You know, sort of being nomadic what do we really need to look out for? I know you talked about the whole comfort thing, but you have to. Yeah, come on. I mean, like, I'll tell you what my first thought is, and you might be able to debunk me. So Scott and I were talking about this last week on the roundtable, and I think it's a big problem in the States is loneliness. So when I grew up, I knew all my neighbors, and I had all these instant friends just in my neighborhood. We'd all hang out. My parents didn't know I was. I knew where to come for dinner. I could go to any neighbor's house at any point in time. They would feed me, they'd take care of me, they would kind of parent me. And it was like this community. My kids don't have that I don't like. We moved to this house. No one came by and didn't introduce themselves. Someone's gonna move in my neighborhood, I'm probably not gonna go by and introduce myself. I know I won't. It's just there's like. We're, like, siloed. And my question is, if I move to another country, will that problem continue or will that problem maybe be solved? I don't know.

You know, logically, it should be harder, you know, because if you can't meet, you know, your neighbors in your own city, you know, you speak the same language, you know, you live next to each other, why would it be any easier in a foreign country? But for. Surprisingly, it is. And I think it's because back home, first of all, we're all so busy, you know, like, you know, we commute to work, we're working all day, then we have bills to pay, we have errands to run on weekends. We don't have time for anyone else. You know, we have time for our friends that we just have known for years, our co workers, and that's it. You're not really going out to meet anyone. But when you're part of this community, you know, whether you're a digital nomad and you're traveling and working like I am, you know, you are constantly wanting to meet other new friends, to travel with, to, you know, to learn from, to share ideas, to hang out with and just do all these interesting things. So a good hack for this is to go to conferences for other people who have shared interests. So, you know, there's another community of people who travel worldwide they call polyglots, people who learn multiple languages. You know, if you want to meet someone who speaks six languages, like you do or is interested in learning, you know, six languages. Go to a polyglot conference. If you're a digital nomad, we have the Nomad Summit. It's a big conference that we do twice a year, once in Thailand and once in another country, whether it's Mexico or Georgia. And what's really cool is we just had our last one in Chiang Mai, Thailand about a month ago and 300 people came. So it was a ton of fun. You meet all these other like minded people who are excited to meet each other, excited to go out to dinner and have meetups because everyone's kind of that same boat. But then what you do is you continue to travel with them. So I just wrote in the, you know, in the Facebook group with the event and said, hey, I'm going to Sri Lanka to surf for two months. Does anyone want to join? And at first, you know, we had one or two people kind of interested. Now we have 80 people in that Facebook group who want to come. And there was about 15 of us here already. And you know, we're meeting up, we're co working together in cafes so we don't have that loneliness. We're going out to dinner, you know, once or twice a week and then over the weekends we go on little trips. So last weekend we actually rented safari jeeps. I kid you not. I mean, we took a day safari and saw, you know, all these amazing animals and it was almost like a mini Africa trip. Like, we didn't even know that Sri Lanka had, you know, like hyenas and like what, you know, these water buffaloes and peacocks and you know, like all these amazing creatures.

Yeah, incredible. But okay, so, so that's not an issue. But is there anything else that we should be aware of that, that just, you know, sort of intrinsically is going to be very hard?

You know, I tell you, the thing I've been stressing out the most about today was that there's no Popeyes Chicken here. I was, you know, like, the food here is amazing, but you know, you sometimes you miss the comforts of home or you miss, you know, you miss the one, the one click Amazon ordering, where you get something the next day in the mail. You know, you miss being able to walk down to Target to Walmart and just buy whatever you want. The nice thing about it is it really forces you to ask yourself, what do you really need? And what I realized is we don't need that much. I've been traveling with Carry On Only Luggage for the last year and basically Just living out of a small, you know, 60 liter bag. And I'm way happier now than I was was when I had a big house in la. I had three cars at one point. You know, I had a house full of stuff and I was buying things in the mail, you know, every day, really, just to try to fill voids in my life. I really, really believe that having less responsibility, less things, having more time and more freedom to be able to do what you love doing. Whether it's learning how to surf like I'm doing now, you know, scuba diving, you know, learning languages, traveling. I think that's what happiness is. It's just learning, growing, and doing the things we want to do and not being forced to pay ridiculous high rents and prices, gas bills, going out to eat. Here I'm literally eating out every single meal, three meals a day. I never do my own laundry. I just drop it off. We have a house cleaner come clean the room. Because we're basically living in a hotel. I have no responsibilities. Our costs of living are ridiculously low. I'm paying $500 a month to live on the beach with a house cleaner. You just can't do that back home.

Scott, Todd, I think we're joining the Digital Nomad group. And I tell you what, I think it'd be fun to watch you fight Johnny FD in Muay Thai. Look, I know I'm not going to.

That probably would be funny, but you know, Mark, like 500 bucks, man, like, I think we could have it all. I think we could have Johnny's life and our lives for 500 bucks. Geez.

I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing any downside here. I think what's gonna be hard is selling the wives. Are you married?

No, but yeah, I was close, but never got to that point.

Okay, so you're, you're just traveling on your own?

Yeah, I mostly travel solo. I happen. I actually just started dating someone a few weeks ago and we were actually sharing the place here in Sri Lanka together. So actually our, my cost is only 250 bucks a month now for the place.

Yeah, See, Sky, I noticed he was saying, he was saying we.

So. Yeah, okay, so let's just Mark now. Mark, he. Johnny brings up a good point, right? Like he, there's something that he's talking about that he's kind of hitting. He's hit it a few times, but I want to, I want to reemphasize it. You see, it's not really about the size of the passive income, right? Like Everybody wants to think, oh man, they got it, 100 grand of passive income a month come in and that's cool, that's a great number to have. I mean, Johnny would love that number too. I mean, maybe John's is higher than that, I don't really know. But I don't think, I don't think it was. I looked at a report. But essentially the thing is, is that it's not, it's not about the revenue coming in. It really is not about the revenue coming in. It's the expenses. Right? You know, so Mark, we've seen people that follow our model that, you know, they keep their expensive expenses to a minimum and by doing so it's the passive income that allows them the freedom to do whatever the heck they want to do and be where they want to be, independent, location dependent or in a location. Right? Like it's not about, it's not about the big house, it's not about the big stuff. It's about get the expenses. And man, look, if, if your living expenses are, you know, like, let's just say that Johnny's living expenses, he just said was 500 for two people. I guess if you're looking at a third of that for your revenue, you could live on $1,500 of income coming in the door if your expenses are right.

Yeah. I love this as an academic fear setting exercise in the sense, and I've talked about this before, where we can take big risks because worst case scenario, I've already figured out how to be homeless. But what I could do, I think is actually edit that and just really just email Johnny and be like, okay Johnny, you know, how do I reset all this? And he was like, okay, move here, you're only gonna, you know, here's your startup costs. He could show me like exactly how I could live on $1,000 a month. Like, like a king. Like before I was gonna go to Newport beach and just live on the beach and then, you know, do all that. But I think this might be better is going overseas.

You know what's funny is I used to live.

You need a ticket?

A one way ticket. I can get you one.

I used to actually live near Newport beach and my rent was, I think I was spending well over $1,000 a month to share a place with two other people. My life is way better here. You know, the water is warm, I never have to wear a wetsuit. You know, there's no traffic, I'm taking taxis every day because it's literally a $50 per ride, I'm eating on every meal. And that just things I couldn't do when I was living in California. It was just too expensive. Not to mention all the tax savings from being on here. But what I wanted to touch on was what Scott had said is it doesn't matter how much money is coming in, it's how much is left over after all your expenses. And a lot of people think if I'm not making 100 grand or 200 grand a year, that's not enough to live. And it's not if you're spending 100 grand or 150 grand a year. But for me, I was on a path of earning over six figures, but my expenses were high and I just had nothing left over. My goal was to try to save $200 a month when I was living in California, and that was hard. Most months I just wouldn't do it. Now, every single month on my blog, I put expenses and income report and just show people how much it costs to live in each place, how much I'm spending on rent and food, all that. And I remember the last two months in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I spent $860 in total. But that's rent, utilities, food, eating out, gym, getting massages. And I was still making four or five thousand dollars a month in passive income. So not only do I had enough to live and continue, I. I gave my parents $1,000 to help with their retirement. I paid their property tax last month just as a Christmas gift. And these are things that I just wouldn't be able to do if I was living an expensive life in Newport beach or even in, you know, whatever the beach in Houston would be.

Yeah, I mean, yeah. I'm sold. Scott, are you sold?

Listen, man, if I had to fly my plane over there, I'm in.

Well, you could Airbnb the plane.

I could, I could.

Don't worry about it.

Or I could just take the long way route, like, you know, up Alaska, around Russia, come back down again. I could get there.

You could do that. All right, well, Johnny, this has been phenomenal and I want to just thank you so much for taking the time in Sri Lanka. I don't. What time is it there? It's like, late.

Yeah, it's about 10pm Now.

10Pm so you stayed up late for us. I really appreciate it. Your mentorship on how to live this amazing lifestyle has been invaluable. But now we're going to ask you for one more tip. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the Auto passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

I would say watch all the recorded videos of the Nomad Summit, the conference where we had experts talk about this. So it's not just my talk, it's me and six others. Go to nomadsummit.com, sign up for the email list, and all the talks will be sent out completely for free. And we would love to see you guys at the next live event, because I really think that when you get your butt there, whether it's Thailand or Georgia or Mexico, and you actually experience it, you meet other people who have been doing it, it really is. It becomes real.

And.

And you talk to people and you're like, you know what? If they can do it, I can do it as well.

Love it. I love it. Scott, Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Mark? I want to keep everybody focused. I want everybody staying focused on the task at hand. So check out this Chrome plugin called Bait Block baitblock. And basically what it will do is it will block the daily distractions. You know, it will block those things that you don't want in your life. But here's the cool thing. You know what TLDR means, right? Too long. Don't read. So essentially, before you click on a link, you can hover over it and it will tell you what's there. So you don't have to go click the link to see. You just can skim over it. Gives you link previews. Highly recommended.

All right. I love it. Well, my tip of the week is have Johnny FD be your digital nomad mentor and just go to johnnyfd.com and follow the journey of this amazing location independent entrepreneur. He's got his books in there, he's got resources, he'll coach you. It's amazing. So check it out. Johnnyfd.com Johnny FD Are we good?

It's good. It's been fun getting some sleep so I can go surf in the morning. I hope you guys enjoy yourselves wherever you are. And thanks for having me on.

Thank you. Scott. Todd, are we good?

We're good, Mark.

I want to thank the listeners and just remind them today's podcast is sponsored by flight school. Learn more. Just go to landgeek.com training and schedule call to find out how in 16 weeks, we can literally transform your life and start earning that passive income. Also, the only way. The only way we're gonna get the quality of guests like a Johnny FD is if you do us three little favors. You gotta subscribe and get a rate. You got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review. To support thelandgeek.com we're going to send you for free the passive income launch kit as well as the latest whole telling course how to double your money 30 days or less. All right, let's do this, Scott. One, two, three.

Let freedom, freedom ring, ring.

Thanks, everybody.