Nora Dunn
Nora Dunn – aka The Professional Hobo – sold everything she owned in 2006 (including a busy financial planning practice) to travel full-time. Seven years and a few dozen countries later, she has perfected the art of travelling full-time financially sustainable way, using techniques like getting free accommodation around the world, hacking frequent flyer miles, and travelling slowly… living around the world rather than passing through it.
She rode 25,000kms of trains in 30 days between Lisbon and Saigon, milked goats in Hawaii, had a pet kangaroo in Australia, survived two natural disasters, had a near-death experience in the Caribbean, and much, much more.
She is an international freelance writer on the topics of travel, personal finance, and lifestyle design, with regular columns on sites like Wise Bread, Credit Walk, and Transitions Abroad.
She has written books on getting free accommodation around the world, living large on a small budget, and working on the road. If you’re interested in this lifestyle, you can sign up for her free 2-week e-course on financially sustainable full-time travel.
You can work pretty much where you want to – on the road, do you find it hard to work or do you just have fun and work when you come back home?
But time management is a precarious thing on the road... I've wrestled with the time-management / life balance / travel lifestyle on and off for years.
Do you feel many people are envious of your lifestyle?
In which countries have people recognised you, even when you thought nobody would?
Once in New Zealand, when I was living and volunteering in trade for my accommodation at Mana Retreat (a place very close to my heart), I picked up a new volunteer who just arrived. She looked at me, dropped her bags, and said "Oh my god. You're the reason I'm here"! She had read my post about Mana Retreat, and booked her trip right away. And she's not the only one; there has been a steady stream of volunteers at Mana Retreat who went there because of reading about my experiences there.
More recently, I'm currently in Peru. The day after I published a post about the magic that brought me to Peru and the place I am staying, a reader booked herself in for a month long stay! (She arrives in two weeks).