We’ve been spending time with our families in southern California last few days. The holidays sneaked up on us this year and we are guilty of doing some things last minute and not even getting to some things we should have (like sending out Christmas cards).
OK, so here’s another last minute project: a video highlighting our major life events in 2009 and season’s greetings to you!
Summary:
After living in TX for almost 5 years, we sold our 4300+ s.f. “McMansion” in May and spent the next 5 months roaming the west coast, from southern CA to Vancouver, B.C.
Being “homeless” put our mobile lifestyle to the test – we put most of our possessions in storage, lived off a couple of suitcases, and worked on our laptops wherever we were. We even rented a mostly unfurnished house for a month in Mountain View while we visited our Silicon Valley friends.
We enjoyed spending time with many of you during our travels, which included several trips to mostly northern and southern CA, ranging from 1-7 weeks, as well as a week-long family boating trip in the Pacific Northwest.
Eventually in November we moved into a rental condo in Scottsdale, Arizona. It has been beautiful in the winter and we love the north Scottsdale area so far.
We hope you had a memorable year 2009 as well and we look forward to making new memories in 2010
Here are some tips and suggestions we have for a productive mobile office.
Internet Access
You really can’t beat the deal at Boingo.com ($10/mo. for unlimited wi-fi access over their large network including all Starbucks, McDonalds, lots of airports and hotels, etc.) I’ve looked at the cellular wifi deals and they’re at least 3x more expensive and want to lock you into a 2-year contract.
Of course, David has a Blackberry so he can read emails pretty much anywhere with cell phone reception and email or text out for emergencies. Tempted to try the iPhone but don’t want to pay for the outrageously expensive phone plans.
Go Paperless!
We just recently got this neat little piece of equipment called ScanSnap (S300) manufactured by Fujitsu. I don’t normally like “uni-taskers” but in this case I was wrong. It is lightweight and does the job really well – scans multiple pages fast and both sides at the same time. Fits easily into a computer bag and has USB power cable as well as data cable so you can go entirely off USB and not travel with a bulkier power adapter.
So, maintaining a paperless office is not too hard with this neat little device. You can share scanned files with services like YouSendIt, or fax over internet (e.g. with a RingCentral account)
Mobile Printing Solution
As much as I would love to go completely paperless, we’re not there yet. For those pesky print jobs on the go (like trying to close real estate deals as we have done many times), here are some things you can try:
Printing at your hotel’s business center. Sometimes it’s free; othertimes they charge an outrageous fee (like $5 plus a per-page fee for each print job)
If your hotel does not have a business center, you can download FedEx Office app to print to one of their stores (for a low cost depending on paper settings and # pages) and pick up after a few hours. Sometimes you can walk in and print right away (per page charge) if the store is not too busy.
Find a “print spot” on printeron.net and you can send your print job to a local “print spot” for free or a low price per page.
So what do you think? Got any more cool ideas I missed here? I’d love to hear from you! Please add your comment to this post.
We shot a 3-min. video today of our short-term rental home in Mountain View, CA.
This will be our home base and office for the next month as we visit with friends in the Bay Area. Let’s meet up if you’re in the area! We’ll be here until 9/18 or so.
BYOC (Bring Your Own Chair) if you come visit us because we’re kind of lacking in furniture as you can see in the video
P.S. You may be wondering why we’re renting a house for a month in the Bay Area. Well, we are pursuing our dream of a mobile lifestyle, inspired by Tim Ferris’ book “The 4 Hour Work Week” (on our book recommendations list). We are so blessed to have the freedom and flexibility to pull it off so far!
Not too long after getting back from 10 days in southern CA in late Feb., we went back to CA for 20 days in April! This was kind of a trial for the “mobile lifestyle” (ref. book “The Four Hour Work Week“) we want to achieve on a full-time basis and we did it!
Enjoy the slide show!
Highlights of the trip:
10 days in Bay Area visiting old school and work friends, as well as business contacts, and eating great ethnic food we miss so much (as usual, our stomachs did not have enough room to hold all the food we wanted to eat)
We toured the Vetrazzo plant in Richmond CA (part of investment due diligence) – love the product (recycled glass countertop that looks like artwork), check it out!
While in Berkeley, we walked around Berkeley campus a bit and visited the marina so I got to relive some college memories.
Went to a MonaVie tasting meeting in the Bay Area, followed by Cashflow 101 game. We came away even more impressed by the product and simple and profitable business model.
4 days in San Diego attending workshops (topics were leverage and time mastery) put up by Maui Millionaires – somehow I managed to survive the 12-16 hour days and still felt energized by the great networking and ideas. I’m finally ready to give up control and look for a personal assistant.
On the way to San Diego, we visited Equastone‘s office for investment due diligence.
Spent about 5 days in Long Beach area with David’s family and friends in the area
We somehow managed to take care of some paperwork remotely for a real estate closing in progress (seems to always happen while we’re on a trip).
