 So I am Cindy Cullen and I am a freelance developer. How many of you guys are freelancers or want to be freelancers? Cool. There's not many of you in here, so this is going to be really informal. So stop me as you have questions or want to know anything. So I guess my story sort of starts when I graduated high school in 1980. So you don't have to do the math. I'm 56. When I graduated my grandparents decided for my graduation to take me on a trip out west. I grew up in West Tennessee and so that was quite an experience to go all the way to California and back. It took us about three weeks. We were on with a group of senior citizens on a tour bus. So it was an experience that I never forgot. But one that gave me a love for travel. I mean I had studied all of these places in school but to see them in person there's no way a photo can do those places justice. So if you've ever been outside your hometown you realize that this world is a beautiful place. It's different than the pictures show you in the books. So it gave me a real passion for travel. But then I got home and I went to school went to college and got the degree. And when I first went to school I didn't know what a computer was except in science fiction. So I dropped out of school went back to school eventually got the degree. And then I started working in corporate and I worked for General Electric and for the American Chemical Society and some other places. And I learned a lot about computer programming. I didn't have websites back then so I didn't do a lot of web stuff but I did learn a lot about computer programming. And then in 1992 I turned 30. And I heard the biological tick of that clock and thought OK I need to have some kids if I'm going to do that. So I got pregnant and I didn't know anything about kids. I thought you know you have a baby you stay home for a couple of weeks you put them in daycare you go back to work and that's that. My life was turned upside down not only because I didn't know which end to put the diaper on but also because he was very sick. And so it was very hard for me to return to work. However I did it and I thought you know I was driving an hour each way. And I was miserable I cried every day and that was also the same time they had the bombing in Kansas City at the daycare. I was I was I was living a life of misery and fear and I wanted to stay home so bad I couldn't stand it. So I got some part time jobs and I did everything I could to pay off all the bills and I finally got to stay home the day my second child was born in 1995. And there's my three lovely children and this is one of them sitting here so that's her in the middle there. It's been a while ago. So I got to stay home with them. We moved to a 300 acre farm in the middle of Princeton Kentucky which is the middle of nowhere basically. I did a lot of part time jobs. I did some teaching. I did a lot of things to just keep staying home with them. I started homeschooling the three of them and just found some part time teaching jobs in between to get to keep staying home. However as they got older I decided to get back into the computer business and this little video here is the story that sort of changed my life. I hope you can. Whoops. Hang on. I hope you can hear it. Let me see if I can get it pulled up. After I graduated from business school. Can you hear it? I decided to take a vacation. I chose a small quiet fishing village where I thought I'd be able to take my mind off of business if only for a few days. Walking along the beach just before sunset I saw a small fishing boat come into shore. Inside the boat were alone fishermen and several beautiful yellow flutes. How long did it take you to catch those fish I asked? Only a couple of hours you replied. Why don't you stay out a bit longer and catch more I asked? Certain that there must be a demand for more fish than the few I saw in the boat. The fisherman smiled. I catch enough to support my family and I live a full and busy life. I rise with the sun, fish a little, play with my daughters, have lunch with my family, and then teach children how to fish before I stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my wife and friends. Listen I said, I have an MBA. I can help you vastly expand your business. If you would simply spend more time fishing you would soon earn enough money to buy a bigger boat. Really question the fisherman. Absolutely. And with a bigger boat you'd soon catch enough fish to buy several boats that a whole fleet. At that point you'd be big enough to sell your fish directly to a processor, cutting out the middleman and greatly increasing your profits. The fisherman raised an eyebrow. Eventually you could open your own cannery and control the product, the processing, and the distribution I added. Then what he asked? You then relocate your operations to the capital. And if all goes well you'd likely find yourself in New York City and control a rapidly expanding empire. How long would all of this take he asked? Clearly following my logic. Oh probably between 10 and 15 years I replied. And then what? Well that's the best part. You would announce an IPO and sell stock to the public. At that point my friend you would be very, very rich. A millionaire many times over. The fisherman paused. Sorry about that. Let's see if we can't get it back. Really? A millionaire? Then what? What do you mean? I answered a bit surprised. I mean what would I do if I were a millionaire? What kind of question is that? Whatever you like of course. I imagine you retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would rise with the sun, fish a little, play with your granddaughters, have lunch with your family, and then teach children how to fish before strolling into the village each evening where you'd sip one and play guitar with your wife and friends. The fisherman smiled. And without saying another word began to build a small fire. We shared a taste of the delicious fish and watched the sun go down over the ocean as the sound of guitars rose from the village nearby. So that little story changed my life. I didn't...still on. I realized that what is life about if it's not family? For me that was the most important thing was to find a way to stay home with my kids. Even after they got older and homeschooling was working for us and I wanted to stay home with them. So I decided that it was time for me to figure out how to do that and make some money so that enough money to provide for us on a daily basis. So back then the web was just coming out. I don't know how many of you remember front page. But that's how I started. I started with front page which then I would study the code since I was a coder and would look to see what's it doing and why is it doing it. But the only thing it created really was HTML. If y'all are familiar with that. So I taught myself HTML, PHP and my sequel and I started building some websites on the side for some of my friends and family. It was mostly just a hobby and I sort of just was playing around with it and it was something to do besides just talk to kids. And back then about the only way I could network being out in the middle of nowhere was with yahoo groups. Anybody remember yahoo groups? That was about the only way we had to communicate. There was no Facebook. So then I started getting serious about it around 2003 and that's when WordPress came out and I looked at it and I thought well this is just a blog. This is not a website tool. But I got familiar with it a little bit and I played around with it. However I was still using HTML and those kind of things and over time that's when I started freelancing and so over time I never forgot number one the traveling and I never forgot how it felt to want to stay home and work and not be able to. And those two things I think have influenced everything I've done since then. So now I am still a self-employed freelancer and I do a lot of custom work for people. I also have a business where I have interns and web developers who work with me and they build websites. I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination. I'm a coder. I'm a programmer. So if I have websites to build I hire other people to build them. I also hire a lot of interns from colleges to help me out because I also found that a lot of people get out of school like I did. It was easy for me to find a job when I got out of school. There were not a lot of computer scientists back then. But nowadays there are so many that they can't find jobs easily without having five to ten years experience. And so I've interned a lot of college kids that are just getting out of school and need to have that experience. So I teach them programming but also teach them WordPress and Laravel's the other framework we use. I also have several subcontractors. I have some that develop websites. I have some that are programmers. And I also teach classes. I teach WordPress classes for beginners for people who don't have enough money to pay for a website but they want to learn WordPress and they want to build their own. So I do that now. I also am a speaker of course and I am a traveler. And this is my home. Full time I live in a 30 foot RV with my wife who's sitting over here. And this is our office on any given day. We travel 365 days a year and we go to some pretty amazing places. And we've been doing that for two years. So 2016 was when we started. So these are a lot of the questions that we get asked as we travel around the world and stay in different places and people say what do you do? And I say well we run a business and a lot of people in the RV community say well how do you make money and do this full time. And so I explain that we have a business building websites and custom development and all kinds of hosting and domains and other computer related stuff. But one of the first questions we get is how do you do that? What's your home base? And if it were up to us we probably wouldn't have a home base because we just like to go wherever we want to go but the government says we need one. So to get a bank account anymore that's the first question they ask you is what's your physical address and if you don't have a physical address they don't look at that very well. So to get a bank account and to get our driver's license and to get the license on the truck and in the camper we have to have a physical address. So since South Dakota, Florida and Texas and I believe Tennessee they don't have income tax. So those are usually the states that RVers are from because it's much cheaper to live in one of those states especially since you're not there a lot of the time. We first chose South Dakota which was nice and for our physical address they let you choose the campground and you have to stay in the campground at least a week I think it was and then you can call that home. So that's what we did for South Dakota. However, South Dakota gets really cold and we love South Dakota we love visiting there but we don't go back that often we don't have a real reason to go back that often. So we now choose Florida because it's warmer in Florida and we go there every year for winter or have for the last two years we go into Orlando because we have a conference down there that my wife speaks at and so we end up there anyway and so that's why we choose Florida and for Florida it was a little trickier getting our license because you need a physical home address and what we finally had to do was to get the truck and the camper licensed with the license plate and then they can use the address on that license plate which it's a little tricky you have to put the cart before the horse we got the license plate which gets the county name as the address and once you have that I guess they think we live in our car so they use that as our physical address I do not own a house in Florida I don't own a house anywhere You don't move at a campground in Florida or anything like that as far as Florida is concerned if you were trucking your RV is my address Patrick, so on the driver's license is the license plate number For real Are you sure I thought it was the county? No I'll show you how much I've looked at my so that's our physical address I think it's one Clay County, Florida I mean you know we have people say how do you get mail if you don't have an address we use a mail forwarding service we used one in South Dakota called the coda post and they were okay and now we use one called SBI or St. Brendan's Isle they do a lot of mail for RVers but also for people who live on boats there's quite a few in Florida that live on boats and just travel that way all the time and you know there's a cost to it I think it's $100 and then you use the postage and when it's up it's up and I think it's $20 a month for the service itself and then you pay them postage and they take it out until it's gone and then they replenish it with a credit card but basically we get our mail there at that address and then every so often when I need mail I just go tell them where I'm at and they forward it to me Do you have a question? So when I see that there's enough mail in there that it warrants the postage for it then I just say okay I'm staying at this campground this week or this is where I'll be by the time the mail gets there and they'll forward it to me That's a good question They scan my mail They scan the envelopes They will just forward you can set it up several different ways They can forward it every week and you just go in and tell them where you're going to be that week or you can set up an address they forward it here until I change it so however you want to do it they're pretty flexible with setting it up the way you want it I pay the little extra to get my mail scanned I get the envelope scanned and then if I want them to scan the inside for like a dollar or a page they'll scan what's in it and I don't have to wait for it to get to me however most of the mail I get in there thank goodness are checks and so when I've got enough checks in there that's worth me getting the mail then I say okay I'm going to be depending on where I am in the country I have to figure out how long it's going to take me to get that mail and it's usually right now we're parked in Alabama and so it takes about two days three maybe so I just have to time it well because we move fairly quickly usually and so we don't stay many places longer than a week so I have to figure out where are we going to be next week you know so it's a little tricky and we've had here's a tip always use priority mail always because you get a tracking number we sat in Page, Arizona for two or three well about a week extra because we were waiting on the mail to get there because they had lost it we never did get it, we finally left and it showed up two or three weeks later they had sent it back to the mail forwarding service they sent it back to us so now we never not use priority mail so the mail's been an interesting thing for us it's been a lot of fun figuring that out yes no go ahead the mail forwarding service doesn't act as an address for you it acts as our mailing address so I really have a physical address it's just like having a P.O. box and banks the forwarding service so when I put that in as my address at the bank they say that's a personal mail box that's like having a UPS box or something they won't let me use that address so to get a bank account is a little trickier there's another similar service down there we live on above but there's another one down in Florida that they are set up where the banks will actually accept it as your physical address oh cool I don't remember which one it is we use a UPS store we've never had an issue at all but where would the bank that accommodates travelers oh well I'd like to talk to you about that bank later that's cool because the banks we've not had luck with banks either so I'll get to that in a minute voting is another it wasn't a problem in South Dakota they let us use the campground so the voter registration card was fairly easy and I thought it was going to be that easy usually the mail forwarding services will take care of all that for you I mean it's a cost but they do it for you we just got a notice from the mail service we use that somebody in Florida is trying to say that if you don't have a physical address then you can't vote and all that stuff so they're going through a lot of legal stuff with that and the good thing about the mail forwarding services is they fight a lot of those battles for us so they don't want to lose their service so they want to keep you voting and keep their customers happy I use mobile deposit for checks and I'll get to banks in a minute but we've had some trouble with that too some banks are not as technically up to date as others and mobile deposits can be a problem if you're not with a bank that does that well so I do use mobile deposit and I currently use capital 1 okay so what do we do specifically from the road is we build WordPress websites like I said my wife builds a lot of websites but I also hire subcontractors to build do the pretty stuff I don't do the pretty and then I build custom plugins and a lot of custom work for a lot of designers that I know and we also well there's the custom development I also do hosting which is an easy thing to do from the road I mean I don't have the servers in the RV I resell this or I have a hosting guy who keeps the servers for me I also like I said I teach a lot I do some training I use a lot of video chat and that kind of thing to train and educate I do a lot of debugging for designers who don't want to know code or don't like code so they'll call me I do a lot of support for clients and designers and we do some edits for some of our clients and we have about 100-200 clients that we take care of while we're on the road also sell domains so we do pretty much a big array of things and like I said I've been doing this for I don't know how many years since 2003 so we've sort of built a lot of things so here is our team at the moment two of them are here with me of course here's my daughter here and my wife that's me in the middle this is the baby that was sick that I stayed home for at the bottom his name is Matthew the guy over here was one of my interns from Austin P and he and I worked so well together that I just hired him and so now he's one of my best programmers and the lady at the top I'm at a networking event in Kentucky and she and I got along and now she's my project manager and I did not set out to build a business I wanted to be a freelancer and I wanted to just make enough money to get by but I also like having time to explore somewhere so it's easier for me to offload that work to other people and let them do the work and that helps them too because now they get paid and we get paid so it works for me I still am not crazy about having a business that's not my goal I don't necessarily want that responsibility however I do like having time and I like helping these people get jobs so this is how my team and I and my clients communicate so we use obviously email and Slack how many of you know what Slack is it's like a messenger thing a communications tool which we really like Zoom, anybody know what Zoom is it's a video chat service and you can have one hundreds of people on it we use that a lot for classes and for clients and contractors I use it for everything and no matter where we are if we get internet then we can use these tools obviously we text each other we use the phone sometimes depending on the cell service where we're at and we do get in person every once in a while since we're traveling I can sometimes land where they're at and we also use a ticketing system called Teamwork for our clients to contact us and to leave us messages how we stay connected to the internet and what you get is how do you keep an internet connection I had this Verizon hotspot which has unlimited data and the bill is only 50 something a month however I had to pay a lot to get the little SIM card because they no longer let you have unlimited data but you can't find it on eBay if you know what to look for so that if we close this out in tight spots we still try to keep that low because Verizon we hear rumors every day that Verizon is going to stop doing that they're going to cut those out but it's worked pretty good for us we don't use it a lot because in the east Verizon doesn't pick up well now in the west we use it a lot but in the east and we've been at the east for quite a while now it doesn't work as well as AT&T so our phones have a 30 gig plan that we use and these we can use these as a hotspot for the computer and we also have an AT&T home base which is made for a landline that you can get for people who live in rural areas they sometimes use it for a landline if they can't get regular service I guess but they had a special going on I get 500 gigabytes of data but it is network managed so if we're in a larger city it's usually really slow and doesn't help us out much but if we're in a rural area then we can usually get pretty good speeds assuming there's a good AT&T signal so we very heavily depend on AT&T and Verizon for our internet occasionally if we're in a campground they might have Wi-Fi but we have to be really careful as to what time because when everybody is on the TV at the same time it gets really slow most campgrounds are not really good with internet now we do not stay I don't think we've ever stayed in a KOA or one of the big commercial campgrounds in our opinion they're overpriced and it's not worth it we don't go for the pool and the kids stuff that's usually in a KOA so we find our best the best places we enjoy are the state parks they show us more of the area more of the culture more of the landscape that's what we enjoy they're usually built around something like water so we like the state parks or city parks there are a lot of good city parks too or national parks obviously the national parks are harder to get into you have to reserve way ahead of time so we haven't stayed in a lot of those but some campgrounds have good Wi-Fi some we do not count on that because most don't and when everything else fails we find the nearest truck stops truck stops are good places for internet usually so we haven't had to do that very often the internet the first time I went out well in the 80s of course there was no internet but when I went the next time with my son it was like once in a blue moon you'd find somewhere with internet so we would try to use the phone for GPS but it just wouldn't happen and you know it would get out of the city and now there are rarely places that don't have something it may not be very fast well that's true but truck stops are usually pretty good and if all else fails and we can't find internet we just say heck with it we're going to go on a hike or we're going to go biking or we're going to do something fun and usually we're staying close to something that's got water or a place to go biking or something for fun and we enjoy doing that anyway I work a holic, I enjoy what I do and so it takes sometimes for the internet to go completely out for me to get away and go play and to keep up with all of this there is a mobile RV growth on the internet and on Facebook that we follow all the time and they tell us what plans what mobile plans are out there and they update it constantly so there's always good information out there and I keep up with all the little deals that come across when Verizon has a good plan or this one has a good plan and sometimes you find a good deal where they don't realize it's such a good deal and so then they'll cut it out but if you're already in contract then you get to stay on it so that's pretty much how I got the 500GB they don't offer that anymore and they only offered it for a very short period of time and then they realized oh my gosh what would we just do all the RVers started calling them they shut it down so this is how we find contractors we use a company called FreeUp has anybody heard of that it's sort of like UpWorks anybody heard of that one except I've found a lot better quality contractors there because they prevent them and I don't have to I still interview them but they check them out first and so they find out if they're in quality before they send them my way I can just yes there's three E's in it so when you go look it up make sure you put the three E's in it pretty much I tell them I want a programmer who knows PHP and MySQL and I want them to work this many hours a week and you know this could be full time it could be just for three weeks I tell them everything I want and within 24 hours they've got me at least one to six and I interview them I get to choose a price range as to how much I want to pay for that and pretty much location if they have to be US based I've found as someone else mentioned this weekend Philippines is the best place to get programmers and developers because they're inexpensive but they have the best work ethic of any of the foreigners that I've worked with much better than the India groups that you can get and much better than them and I hate to say this but sometimes much better than the US workers their work ethic is awesome and they're really good to work with and I've found them to be some of my best contractors unless you find a good one like I found with Todd as an intern we also use social media to get some of our contractors if I need someone to work I just usually put out a message to my friends and I'll get referrals and we also do a lot of networking as we travel we haven't done it as much as I'd like but I want to start going to more word press meetups we've got several word camps on our next couple of months we're going to be stopping at so we do quite a bit of networking we go to a lot of conferences and things and then I have training courses and one of the reasons I do the training which is really selfish but I like working with people I've trained and so a lot of the web implementers I work with it's really hit or miss as to whether they really know what they're doing or not and so I like training them on word press and that way they know what I expect and I know what to expect from them and if they do a good job then I can refer clients to them or hire them myself that seems to work the best for me if I train them plus I just like training and teaching and helping I do hire interns still from Austin P where I graduated my my professor is still there he's now the dean of the college which is hard to believe because that's been on a long time ago but he still sends me interns I'll get two to three every semester and that's a hit or miss sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not so good but and then I do use up work occasionally but I've not had very much luck there so the tools we use we use accounting software I personally use fresh books I know there's a quick quick books and a lot of other things fresh books has worked best for me because it allows me to do all those things I can do invoicing and I can do recurring invoicing and I can put all of our expenses in there we can get all the reports from there it makes it very easy at tax time Mallory just pulls the reports and I take them to the accountant and it's pretty much done for customer relationships we pretty much keep that in fresh books as well we don't we're trying to expand and make that better because I'm not real happy with what they do but for now that's what we're using we also use last pass to keep up with all our passwords because we have a lot and that lets us share them with the people we want to share them with without having to remember them or having to make ABC123 is the password all the time we use project management software we went through several we use Trello for a while I'm familiar with Trello that worked well for us in some areas but it did not work well with keeping up with time so how much time is the contractor spending and how much do I need to build the clients and how much do I need to pay the contractors so we now use active collab active collab something like that which keeps up with the time on the contractors it also keeps up with the invoicing however I don't like how they do invoicing so I still use fresh books for that but we put the invoice first there and then I move it to fresh books but it keeps up with the projects it keeps up with who's doing what it keeps up with the task list so it's currently working okay for us we've been through several we also use infinite WP anybody familiar with that or manage WP is another one it lets us monitor and manage several WordPress websites at the same time so we can go in once a day and click update all the WordPress sites at once instead of having to go into each one and update all of them so we use Mallory uses that every day I think to do the updates any questions so far on any of those tools how we find clients well we go to networking events like this one we go to retreats and campgrounds we found several of them we just parked somewhere and people say so what do you guys do you travel all the time how do you know that and we'll say well we build websites oh I need a website it's that easy so just campgrounds we run into all kinds of people and a lot of them another reason I like to do the training I found that not only is it women who want to stay at home or college graduates who can't get jobs but there's a whole group of volunteers out there who want to find a way to do it full time and or they may be doing it full time and just don't have as much income coming in so teaching has become one of our biggest income goals here we also go to a lot of conferences we go to some mental health conferences and we speak there and that's another area that we're trying to hit mental health issues that either can't find a job or they're afraid they'll lose their job because of their diagnosis and so they want to find ways to make money and thank God for WordPress I mean I'm so thankful that it's a way for people who don't know anything about code to start a career and build websites that's just if I had that back when my kids were born I would have been a happy camper but most of our business does come from word of mouth we've been doing this for so long that most people know what we do they're most of our friends do and so we get a lot of referrals and a lot of word of mouth business especially on social media that's our tool of choice nowadays Facebook usually because that's how we keep up with friends and family and everybody that we work with is pretty much on social media a lot of business on Craigslist but not so much anymore it's changed a lot it's not as good use of my time but everywhere we go we're talking websites and talking about what we do and talking about who we are and it just seems to come up in the conversation which is not such a bad thing because it makes most everything we do tax deductible so how we get paid I get paid through PayPal my goal is to meet them where they're at if they want to pay by PayPal then I'll take PayPal if they want to pay by credit card then I take Stripe if they want to pay by a check then I'll take a check however they want to pay me I'm pretty much going to take it but I have PayPal and Stripe and my FreshBooks uses WePay I don't know if you've heard of that one but it's like the others on daily settlements I don't know if you're aware of these but if you have any of those processors you can set them up on daily settlements so I don't have to go in and withdraw money it automatically puts the money from my PayPal account or my Stripe account into my bank account every day now I think it takes two days to get there but every day it does what it calls a settlement and anything I've paid out comes out and anything that has come in is pretty easy I don't have to mess with it and then we do take checks and I talked about how we get those and then I use mobile deposit to deposit them in the bank time management can be a big thing if you work from home I know the lady that spoke before me talked a lot about her time a big thing for us is time zones we've parked in some places where the time from the back of the camper to the front of the camper changes holding her phone, I'm holding my phone and they both have different times on them and when we were in Arizona they even had the Indian reservation time in the middle of that so we had one time at the beginning of the camper one time here but if you wanted to go to an Indian reservation event then it was a totally different time so time zones have become a big deal for us and we have to constantly be aware of which time zone we're in and which time zone clients are in and who have contractors it can get pretty tricky some days when we travel I have to work in the truck which is not really a big deal but it's just a self-discipline thing it's much easier to watch everything as we go by but you have to manage your time and it's more I don't think you can manage time you manage yourself and so for me I'm having to constantly make myself do the work or be looking out the window or playing but we so we try to set aside some days that we just go exploring we'll say okay there's one day this week we're just gonna go somewhere and visit a state park or whatever so that we can not be so distracted on those days we're supposed to be working it helps me to set up routines and as many people have mentioned this weekend to have those processes in place that I can have those days to go exploring and to do the things we want to do some of the tools I use to keep up with the time we talked about the active co-lab for the project management but I also used to-doist I don't know if y'all are familiar with that one but that's a great personal task list manager for me to keep up with all those recurring tasks and all the projects that I personally need to keep up with keep up with contractor stuff and my rule of thumb is when I get a new task in to run it through this and if it can be eliminated get rid of it and if it can be automated do that so that then it becomes a recurring task and if it can be delegated do that that was a hard one for me to learn because delegating my stuff was one of the best things and the hardest things I've ever had to do if it can be procrastinated or put off till later do that I have to do everything right now that was another hard one for me to learn and then if all else fails then concentrate on it get it done, get it out the door send it on so that takes a lot of self-motivation some days when you're in a pretty place and a lot of self-discipline to get the work done money management so I heard from Nathan I think it was in Atlanta he told me about the book profit first how many of you have read that book awesome book and I suggest you read it if you haven't and it talks about putting your profit first and I was very guilty of not making a profit because I left it to last and so now putting that first has really helped and bank accounts I first had an account with simple how many of you have heard of simple it's an online bank that I really liked but as soon as they found out I lived in an RV they said that's it and they cut me off they would not do business with me at all I didn't even dream they would do that so I'm very careful about who I tell that I'm in an RV full time anymore because I need to have a bank account so now we use capital one I've been very pleased with them they've been really good about us moving around we had a local bank and still have a local bank where we lived last in Kentucky but the problem has been that every time we move they want us to call them and tell them where we're at so they don't think somebody's stolen our card and it's fraud and it's too much trouble I don't want to have to call them every time we move we move every week so that's not feasible for us so capital one has been very good to let us move wherever we want to but to also sort of keep things in check and they call me every once in a while and say did you make this payment and I'll say yes you know it's all cool but it can get tricky so and we have an accountant who's still in Kentucky but he can keep up with us wherever we go thank goodness and he's been really good to work with us no matter where we are and of course the fresh books I talked about with it health insurance has been a real sticky one for us because we don't have any and so we're pretty much self insured thank goodness we're both healthy and we rarely go to the doctor but I haven't had health insurance in years and it's not been that big a deal now it's a big deal tax time because I have to pay the fee but the fee is still cheaper for me than getting health insurance because the health insurance one's $14-$1500 a month to cover both of us and my penalty is $1400 a month or so I mean a year at the end of the year so it's cheaper for me to just pay the penalty and I don't think this is really right but when I go to the doctor and I tell them this is self pay that price comes way down so it's cheaper because our deductible if we get insurance is like $7-$8000 if we don't go to the doctor but once a year it's really not worth it for us so we don't have insurance and good good yeah it's not realistic yeah it's crazy it's worth it to me I would much rather have my freedom than to go get a job just to have health insurance as you can I've got full insurance and I do that too I still shop around the cash price first because beyond what I would have to pay if I said to the doctor let's say I don't have any insurance what's the cash price for this and 30% of whatever I would be paying being my deductible first right so like I said before much of our lifestyle is tax deductible since everywhere we go we're marketing and everywhere we go we're selling websites and everywhere we go we're meeting with a client then a lot of it can be tax deductible so it definitely helps us at tax time except for the healthcare the legal I'm just going to breeze through this they've talked about legal all weekend we do have some contracts I usually make the clients come up with contracts if they want them we don't have any regular lawyers but we would like to find one I am a sole proprietor I don't have a business entity I tried that route and I didn't like all the fees that came with it and like I said I'm not really trying to build a business I just want to be a sole proprietor and that works for us so my advice is to give more value than you're paid for and don't tick people off so they won't sue you probably if you're good people and you work with good people then you don't have to worry about it as much I am I base my life on no fear I'm not going to live in fear and if I'm afraid of those kind of things I'm not going to do my best work so the question I keep asking myself is how much am I willing to lose and what do I need to protect and then I go do that so if I need protection for those then I get that kind of protection with a lawyer so how much does it cost us to do this we spend almost exactly the same amount of money we did when we rented a house our campground fees and the RV payment replaces a rent we were paying pretty much right on the money and then our truck fuel which is probably what we spend the most on and the propane they replaced the utility bills that we had in a house so it's pretty much a wash it doesn't cost us any more or any less to live in an RV as it did to live in a rented house so here are some of the pros and cons and you can decide whether it's a pro or a con to you for me I like to be my own boss I don't like people telling me what to do that also becomes a big responsibility if I'm the boss I get a lot of decisions which I also don't like to do I get a lot of time freedom I love going to Walmart when everybody else is out of there or to the grocery store when there's nobody there I get to decide when I work and when I don't I also have some financial freedom nobody tells me what my salary is except me I get to decide how much money we're going to make or whether we're going to sit and enjoy it or whether we're going to try to build a business or not you do have to work alone I'm an introvert and I like that kind of world some people don't but we get out when we get tired of it we can work from wherever we want that can be a good thing or a bad thing especially if there's not internet we get to set our own prices we get to choose who we work with we get taxes that's a con I can't think of a pro with that one benefits I don't have the benefits that I would get if I worked for a company but do I need them I have enough benefits otherwise that I don't really miss the vacation I can take a vacation whenever I want to so I'm not really worried about benefits you do get to work in your pajamas however I don't because I like getting dressed in the morning and I feel like I'm doing my better work so there is lower overhead so I have a lot of these things that I'm not going to get to you just tell me I had two minutes so here's some of the things we've learned about travel let's let you read those I do have the slides up on slide share and I also have them up on my website which I'll get to in a minute so that's some of the things we've learned about travel I think I talked about most of these and I think most everybody's covered most of these this weekend so I'm just going to sort of slide through is anybody have any questions while I'm doing this on slide share it's under cgcullen I have my that's my twitter but it's also most everywhere else but if you'll go let me go to the end here and you'll see the yeah there is the page I made for this word camp all right any other questions I'll be here for a little while if anybody has questions yeah yeah we're going to go back to Fort Payne for a little while she's working a temporary job there for a little bit mentoring and then we're going to Florida for the winter Orlando there's a city got to