If you don’t have the right skills or desire to do a mobile or remote job, one option is to work part of the year at home in order to finance travel during the rest of the year, or part of it. We know one person who used to be a fulltime accountant who now works only during the tax season, cranking out tax returns for four months in order to finance his lifestyle for the rest of the year. He contracts with accountant friends for work and gets paid for each completed tax return and works like a dog to make as much as he can in those four months.
If you have skills which lend themselves to short term consulting work, such as programming or IT skills, you can search for these types of jobs on job search websites, like Monster, Indeed, and craigslist. Actually you can find temporary jobs in a wide variety of fields. A quick search on Indeed for temporary jobs in our area, for example, yielded positions including paralegal, customer service, editing, project coordinator, recruiter, data entry, administrative assistant, office help, medical claims examiner, material handler, proofreader, drafter, QA inspector, receptionist, test technician, loan processor, and many more.
If you have teaching skills, you could work as a substitute teacher for the months you need to work and travel when you don’t.
There are many seasonal jobs which are in high demand for a limited time each year, such as retail jobs which peak during the Fall and ending after the new year, or agricultural, forestry, and recreational jobs which are in higher demand during the warmer months.
The flip side of this is to use your travels to gather source material which you can work on and make money from when you return home. For example, you can buy items which sell for little in the countries you are visiting which can be sold for large markup back in the USA, either at shows, on eBay, or to local shops. If you are a photographer, you can use your travels to produce a huge collection of travel images which you can catalog and market as stock photography when you return home, or use for creating postcards, calendars, photo books, or prints for sale when you return home. These are just a few examples, but you get the idea.
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