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the seven best cities in the world to work from home on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by fresh books. Accounting and bookkeeping mistakes destroy thousands of small businesses every single day. Bookkeeping doesn't have to be hard. Turn to the number one invoicing software for small businesses. Start for free today at serve No master dot com Backslash Fresh book Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire 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. I woke up early this morning. My son was kind enough to wake up at four in the morning, and he loves talking so loud. Before recording this episode, I was looking for some inspiration, some ideas. I had a couple of ideas swirling. I always tried to mix up the topic. I was afraid that I would talk about inspiration two days in a row or motivation two nights in a row or blogging. Today's right. I want to do that. And I saw this really interesting article, what I was doing. Research on depictions, which is very similar. Bustin What's a platform, right? It shows me ideas, and I saw this article call it the 10 Best Cities work from home in and I wrote down some of the cities and the list with Chicago, Austin, Washington See San Francisco, Denver, Dallas in Tampa. I know that's not the complete list, but I didn't want to scroll down more and read the rest of the article. That was enough for me because I used to live in Tampa. I'm very aware of cost of living stuff, and I look at these and I thought Chicago right now has a major murder problem. Their numbers are through the roof. Washington, DC Same thing. Crazy, expensive San Francisco Crazy, Expensive. They listed a bunch of cities that I would never live in because they have big crime problems right now, or they have massive, massive cost of living problems. This list San Francisco's one most expensive cities to live in America right now, when you look at the squalor that people are living in their houses that look like dumps, they're selling for millions of dollars. So I saw this list and I realized that so many reporters are completely out of touch with reality. I can guarantee you that the person who wrote that article and I don't want to say the platform or say the name of the reporter, but I can guarantee that they are an idiot. I don't know any better way to say the cities the recommended, all very expensive, the Caesar recommended would be very tough. One of things I think they looked at, and this is something that is totally different cities where there's a lot of companies and let you work from home. That's what they're really looking. I think committee to flexible hours and stuff like that. When I think of work, I think of you're in charge of your destiny. You could work for a company, but it's completely remote. You never have to come into the office that's work from home for me. So when I look at this list, I said this list is terrible I got to do something better. And here's a list of seven places that I think are way better, and I'll explain why each of them are better in great detail. The main things I look at our cost of living Internet speed and how hard it is to go there. If you're American now, if you're from a different country. No, I haven't English Canadian, Australian followers. I don't have enough time in one of the short represents the list down the visa carpets for every different country. But these are some rough ones. What the things you could do is you could just look on Wikipedia, the list of these requirements for all the different countries and kind of see what's allowed. But I happen to know that their list is very has a lot of the stakes, so it's not totally trustworthy. It's better than go in and check what each country really requires. Some people think of Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but it's not random. People get to write whatever they want, and then it sticks there forever. And one thing I know, having just looked at the visa list ago well, these aren't true. You can look up half the answer, so that tells you when you're thinking about using it as a source, Please don't It's not. It's not a trusted source. It's an opinion site that just happens to have P D. A. And at the end of it. So the first city. When I mentioned the past displaying a Carmen, I recommend listening to that episode the great things on Plato, Carmen. It's in Mexico. It's near Cancun, which means it's your major airport. But it's not Cancun, which means it's not filled with spring breakers. Cancun basically looks like Disneyland. For people that drink too much, it very much feels like you're in an artificial pretend Mexican city where Splenda carbon feels much more real. There's a lot more tourism there from Europe. You're on a beautiful lake. Maybe it's the ocean, but I thought it was like I went out on a boat one day. It was wonderful that want any waves, so that's why I assumed it was a lake. The advantages there is that the it's very fast. It's very close to America. It's easy to job back home. I've talked about playing a Carmen extensively on that episode, so I don't need to spend too long on it today. But it's a great option now. Plato Carmen costs about 90% less than living in Tampa. So right out the gate, you could make a lot less money and live justice. Good. You cut your salary in half and have a better life just by moving south of the border. Also, little Carmen is not one of those cities where you always hear about gang warfare, all the violence in Mexico that's mostly on the border. And that's most in some of the other provinces. So you're distant from many of those problems. It's a low crime area. It's a low crime city. It's much safer than every single city in America. On my previous list, it's far safer than San Francisco. Number two is a great place city called Seebohm. The Philippines. The balls in Seaboard Justus advanced is the malls in America. It's one of the season. The Philippines. It's very logic, advanced inter. It's crazy fast, and the cost of living is very, very cheap. You can get a nice apartment, very nice apartment for $1000 a month, like a four bedroom house. When I say very nice, I mean three or four bedroom house for around $1000 a month. I'm talking luxury two bedroom apartment on top of a condo for around $1000 a month so you can live in a really nice situation compared to what you get for $1000 a month in Tampa, it's night and day. The same time. Apartment in Tampa would be like $5000 a month in Washington, D. C and B 20 to $30,000 a month to give you kind of a field. And the great thing about cities like this is you could just look online and see what real estate costs are. What's available. The great thing about the Philippines and this is one of the places I noticed Wikipedia was totally wrong is that when you first come, you get a 30. Davey isn't, but you can extend that visa every month or every two months for up to three years. So you come here as a tourist and come to the Philippines as a torch in come to Asia. A lot of amazing Asian countries, you come to the Philippines and stay for three years as a tourist. That's amazing. Wikipedia will falsely tell you that you can only stay for 30 days and you can extend once. But that's because Wikipedia, as usual, is wrong. Another great places. The Bahamas, Bahamas. You can show up and stay for eight months. Good Internet island. Low cost of living paradise Now an interesting one. I wasn't sure if I would put this, but you could go to Canada for 180 days. You're gonna show you can't just show up with the driver's license anywhere. I think you have to have a second I D card, but you could just drive across the border. Stay there for six months and one of the advantages of Kanna. There's a couple of really great reasons moved to Canada. The cost of living is not that great. I'll tell you right now, Canada's a little bit more expensive than way more fun than most other choices. But what's great about Canada's You could drive there, so it's very close. Number two universal health care. So if you get sick, you just drive up to the hospital every three very low crime rate because you're just visiting tourist. You're kind of working for yourself. You don't have to do with Canadian tax situation. You have to pay for all the universal health care. You certainly can't go up to Canada and get a job working at a grocery store. Got a lot to do that we're allowed to go up there and work for yourself, and it's okay because you're making money in America. But you're spending money. Canada. You're pumping money into the economy anyways, So you just John over the border for six months at a time. Really easy, really cool. You can show up on Fiji, another Paradise Surfing Island. Come hang out with me, sir, for four months without having to do any paperwork stuff. He just got pretty good Internet. It's getting better and better infrastructure. If you don't like Fiji, perhaps you're like Micronesia. You could drop in Micronesia and stay forever. You show up at the airport, Go. I'm here forever. They go. That's fine. The problem. Micronesia is the Internet is only one megabyte per second. It's a little slow. Long is not doing video. If you're just writing books and doing blog's and stuff, it's kind of okay, but as Faras like doing video work, you'll be a little bit annoyed because it's so slow. But otherwise it's a great option. And my seven choices. Peru, where you can show up at the airport, stay for 183 days. We often hear about Peru as a place of civil war. We always hear about these stories in the news about the Shining Path, this terrorist organization in Peru. But they do a bombing like every 10 years and kill three people. It's not. It's often that the news overestimates the danger and all of these things. So if you actually look at statistics, you're far more likely to be mugged and murdered walking on the streets of Chicago. Then you are be hard in Peru. And, of course, you won't live in the worst neighborhoods. Living and Prue again, I think, proves about 1/7 the cost of living in America. You can go up to Montreux Peachy, which is paradise. You can see one of seven wonders of the world cruise with the place I haven't been to yet, but certainly on my list. I've always wanted to do much peach of NAMI after my kids go with me these air seven cities, you can look at where you could work from home, and you could actually make a lot less money than you do right now. I know I kind of flew through the list. I hate when people have make me lip wait an hour to hear the whole list. When you're looking for places to live abroad, there are a couple things you need to look at. The first is to really understand the visa requirements. As Americans, we think we should be allowed to go anywhere you want to the world and just stay there. But, unfortunately, different country, different rules. It's very, very hard. If you show up at the airport, England say, Hey, I work for myself. I have my own business online. I want to stay here as long as I want. They'll never let you stay. But if you say Hey, I'm a refugee, I have no plans of ever working. I just want to live off the state for the rest of my life. They'll let you right in its very hard, and it's the same thing back and forth. It's part for English people to move to America. For some reason, it's very hard to move from First World. The First World. It's hard to move from industrialized to industrialized. They don't like that. They're always, they say, Oh, we don't want you staying because you might, you know, you might want to use insurance or something like that. You might want to take free money from the state. Right you want might want Jobseeker's allowance. But even if you say Hey, I'll sign a paper says I'll never take a penny from government They won't let you stay so moving to England Very expensive, very difficult right now. It's not a great time. You move there anyways. That's why I don't recommend much of Europe. Europe has a lot of problems. I think you all this stuff going on there. It's very expensive. There's a lot of problems with massive rest refugee resettlement programs, which means there's no room for anyone else and crime is through the roof in all these countries and I think that you may eventually collapse the other England's trying to leave and now they're trying to stop it from leaving. Who wants to be part of all that junk? No thanks. It's too expensive. Too much trouble when you first looking. My first jump to Wikipedia looked at one of those lists, and you want to see how long you can stay, but also what the rules are for extending. There are plenty of countries where you can stay. If you marry someone, you can stay forever. You can stay forever if you buy a certain amount of land or if you start a business. If you really wanted to move to Europe, you go to Belgium. If you start a business, an employee, I think three or five people you can stay forever. You could open up a small shop, play a couple of people minimum wage and you're golden. Every country has different requirements for how they want you to do things and what the system is. It's about doing a little bit of research. The questions You ask yourself to want to live in a city daughter, live on the beach, don't live in the mountains, don't live in the countryside. That's question What question Number two is. Do you need people there to speak a lot of English? Are you willing to learn a second language. Do you speak Spanish? Opens up a lot of the world to you. Are you willing to learn Chinese If you want to move to China, these are a couple of steps we go through is we're figuring out where we want to go with world, most places in the world you could get away with, not speaking the local language. I certainly don't seek a look language while if that's intentional, Sometimes people think that it's because I have this, you know, self important American. But that's not the reason. The reason is, that forces my Children to learn English. If I spoke to the local dialect than my Children wouldn't have to learn English. I know someone on this island, some who lives near me, whose Children don't speak any English at all. They only speak the local dialect. They don't even speak the main dialect of the country. His Children will never be able to find employment in the West if his Children and he wants to move his Children actually back to his home country. I think what your Children screwed because your Children old enough that they're locked into their language, which means they always have an accent, and when you have a have the accent, you're always gonna face a level of discrimination. As much as we want to say it's not true, we hear it a heavy accent. We often assume someone's done, and this is in every language is not English thing. I happen to know that when you speak Japanese with an English accent, they assume you're a little bit dumb. It's totally normal. Every country does this, and it's just in our genetics, so you could really disadvantage your Children doing that. I want my Children growing up to speak for five languages because I don't have that advantage. Sure, I speak a little bit of Japanese, but it's not very good. It's enough to get by. It's certainly not enough to buy a computer over the phone, and I want my Children to be a level beyond that because it opens up more opportunities. But you decide. Oh, this is a country where no one speaks English. This country ever speaks of this. For example, in Thailand, almost nobody speaks very good English. There's a little bit of English, but especially glad to the provinces you won't experience very much of it. Ah, lot of it comes down to the television network of every country. Most countries, in fact, every country shows a lot of American TV shows. They either dubbed them or that shows subtitles and the countries that people speak terrible English. The countries that subtitle People speak pretty good English, and this is perfectly exemplified. If you go around Europe, different European countries make a different decision, and people there speak English or don't speak English totally because of this single decision. Other things you want to look at, our Internet speed and crime and cost of living and infrastructure volatile. Leave the country. Can I? What's the rule of law like? What's the banking system like? You can look at a couple of things. People used to store a lot of money in South America South American banks because the dictators would let them store all their legal gotten gains there, and then the dictator's just stole the money from them. And so we want to be aware of the rule of law in different countries. If you put all of your money into a bank in a country that's destabilized, it could all disappear. So look at these different factors. It doesn't take a lot of work to look at these things, But every single one of the places I've mentioned, I know not all of them were sitting. Some of them are islands. Some of their countries are a massively cheaper and massively better choices than these 10 cities that this moron wrote about these 10 cities that are very expensive, have high crime rates and will be Maur expensive than where you live right now will cost you more money. Why would you want to work from home and then live somewhere expensive? That's completely silly. The best thing about home is you have the ability to live somewhere very cheap. The only thing you really need is a phone, maybe a laptop. Probably be more helpful, but a phone and Internet connections enough. And there's a misconception as well that America is a fast in the world. Please don't think that it's completely untrue. If you are lucky enough to go to Thailand, I'm actually going to town in a couple weeks for conference and you've got time to get off the plane and you see they're selling all these cell phone SIM cards, you know, why don't one of those you put in one of the SIM cards? You be like five or $10. The Internet on your phone will be faster than your home. In most places in America, the cellphone in our infrastructure in Thailand's insane, and there's a lot of countries like that. So South Korea has amazing, has amazing Internet. They have amazing infrastructure. Part of it comes because they have a bit of a socialist past, So infrastructure is part of what the government takes care of, so they're very set in their ways. You want to write a subway with Internet Goto, South Korea. They have that stuff. They're very much into infrastructure. That's part of their paradigm, and it comes from their past. Different countries have different ups and downs and plusses and minuses, but there are plenty of places you could live where if you're making $500 or $1000 a month, you can live awesome. You can live very, very nicely, including where I live. There are plenty of people who live where I live that make foreigners who live on $500,000 a month, and they live like kings compared to how they live back home. For what I spend on my family, where I live right now, I would have to live in a horrible neighborhood in America. My family would have to live across the street from a junk yard or something if I wanted to spend the same amount of money in America. I spent here, and I live in paradise and watching another beautiful sunrise before you decide to move to another city, America, before you make the decision that you never want to travel, Please do yourself the kindness of a little bit of research you can actually get away with making a few $100 a month online, quit your job and still live okay in another country and have time to grow and build your business. That's what's really amazing. See, when we think about quitting our jobs when we think about working for home Well, well, this is what I make right now. I have to make the same amount of money. And when I do the interview with Bob a few months ago now, in one of the early episodes we talked, he talked about all. You have to have two years of saving, saving up in all these things, and that assumes that you're gonna stay where you are right now. But if you're gonna go somewhere much cheaper, you could actually get away with having to set up much less infrastructure. These are some of the things to really think about as you're deciding where to live. I don't want to make this an extra long episode. I just want to give you a few seeds and a few ideas of what you can think about when you're deciding how to move forward with your online business. Part of my success has been making very, very smart decision about where to live. This provides me a lot more breathing room. 90% of my business could collapse, and I could still live on this island and live well. That's what's great. You control your financial situation with two elements. What you make in what you spent. It's far easier to control what you spent making more money. That's hard. I know I'm teach. You gotta do what you have a lot of resources to do it. There's a lot of steps to it, but it's still hard. But when you add in cutting down your cost of living, that's very easy. So many costs that I used to have to deal with monthly car payment, gas, car insurance that all used to be around $500 a month for me. It's going, and you could rent a really nice house on the meat here for that, for just what you're paying in car insurance. So think about what you want from your life. Think about how important is it to stay in America for you or England or wherever you live? And would you like to quit your job right now and live on a Paradise Island? The cost of living on most Paradise Islands It's far less than the cost of living in bad neighborhoods, where you are right now. And if you're in a situation right now where your kids are in school, you're not happy with in your neighborhood. You don't feel that great about you should definitely take about going somewhere else, where the cost of living goes down and something you could afford to educate your kids yourself. Suddenly it's safe. It doesn't get murdered anywhere near me. If you don't get murdered, my island, you'll have that problem. No personal island that's died is someone who decided to get in a gunfight with the police. So unless you make a decision that dumb, you're gonna be totally fine. There's no other crime here. There's no person on person crime. There's no murders here. There's no robberies. That gun points here. There's no drive bys here all the time. You know, we think America is the safest country, but actually we have really high crime rates in a lot of categories, their places around the world that are more dangerous. But there's a lot of places around the world that are safer. So as we make assumptions instead, we want to do research and really investigate things when things I've discovered recently doing more and more research in the pay attention to elections and all those things are on the world is that Ah, lot of times police departments and even the FBI will hide real crime statistics. That's part of the agenda. They want high, different numbers. They put out different numbers. So I really discovered that actually, the crime in America is way lower than I thought it was because they had made a mistake. The CDC had made a mistake and put out a bunch of wrong numbers. So there's a lot of misinformation out there, and it requires a little bit of diligence and live it of research beyond reading an article on a news aggregator beyond just listening to me, Please don't move somewhere based on this podcast. What I want to do instead is inspire you to go out and do actual research and take actual control of your destiny, because this will unlock some amazing things. You can live in paradise. You can live in a safer city. You can live somewhere where you can afford to educate your Children Privately, Private school in other countries is cheaper than public school in America. For the cost of packing your kid a lunch every day for the same price, you could move your kids somewhere safe and put them in a private, elite fancy prep school where they gotta wear uniform every day. If I could break through some of your assumptions about cost of living and where you can make things happen that really afforded the opportunity to change your destiny. So when you're thinking about places to what were you thinking about the blessed places to move the best places to work from home? Please think beyond the borders of your home country. 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. Thank you for Listen to this episode of the serve No master podcast. Follow me at facebook dot com Backslash serve no master.