InfoGringo is going to undergo some changes. Originally the site was built to document my family's move to Central America, and hopefully gain a few members along the way. Sadly very few people joined, and there was precious little participation on the site. Just writing for the sake of writing gets boring in a hurry, so I spent less and less time working on the site. In the past few months I completely ignored it, and that is when the spammers moved in and turned this site into a mess of crap.
Well, the crap is all cleaned up, and I have a new motivation to turn this site into a vibrant place for travelers to come and get information and share their stories.
The reason that my family was able to go to Costa Rica to begin with was my wife's disability. I'll cover the details later, but I was in a situation where I had to find a way to make money from home so that I could care for my wife and son. At it's worst, the meds that my wife had to take made her so weak and shake so badly that she could not feed herself, or walk the length of a city block.
So when I was laid off from my chef position, I was able to collect unemployment insurance for a couple of months, and try an idea that I had to make a few bucks online. I hoped to be able to make a couple hundred bucks a month, but I ultimately made much more than that. Within a couple of months I was earning as much as I did as a chef, but I was only able to work a couple of hours a week.
When my online business started to show that it could support us, my wife was accepted for full Social Security Disability Income. For the first time in a long time we were financially in a good place. In order for me to continue working I needed help taking care of my wife and son, so Costa Rica and full time domestic help seemed like a good idea. It was a brilliant idea.
In a year we managed to pay off all of our debt, spend a week as DisneyWorld, and also put aside a solid nest egg. This all happened while the economy in general melted down all around us.
The other major change was my wife. With the help of a Costa Rica Doctor, she completely changed the medications that she took and went a natural route. Looking at her now, it is hard to believe that a year ago she needed help feeding herself, the change is nothing short of miraculous. She is vibrant and alive, and we've learned how to manage her illness without medication that creates new and equally disabling side effects.
Flash forward to more recent history, the advertising techniques that I pioneered have been copied and put into an eBook by others. This has created competition which ultimately had rendered my techniques nearly useless. I have a new plan to work online using everything that I have learned this past year, but I can not be 100% sure that it will work. With a healthier wife and a son that deserves to go to the best school we can afford, we moved to Sunrise, Florida. Schools here are great, and there is a lot of opportunity for an experienced chef here.
In the next couple of months I am going to direct my efforts at promoting travel related websites. Since I already have a travel related website, there is now a financial incentive to make this InfoGringo work.
There are a lot of travel website out there, and many of them are very good. I need to find my own niche, which I have narrowed down to any of the following:
- Traveling and paying for it by working online.
- Traveling without being a tourist. No must see destinations, it's all about the people and the experience.
- Food and Travel, I am a chef after all. I'd love to write about different 'ethnic' foods. It's not really ethnic food if you are living there.
- Long term travel, no one week vacation info. When I travel, I measure my stay in months.
Past that, if you know somebody at the Food Network or Travel Channel, introduce me please. I'd love to visit different parts of the globe and learn how to prepare the food, and document the process. That's right, I'd like to skip the whole breaking into entertainment thing and just get my own show from day one.
So, if you find yourself on this page and have an opinion, please chime in. Maybe you need a good recipe from Costa Rica, and perhaps you need help finding work online to finance a long trip to Vietnam.
Let's just go with all four possibilities above and see which one sticks.
Just don't ask me what to do if you only have a week in another country. I do not understand the allure of spending a week with your own people in a hotel that caters to Americans.
When I travel, I rent a house or apartment because I intend to stay a while. I won't leave until until the neighbors have invited me over for dinner.
I do have one exception, Machu Pichu. That is a one week vacation that I do have planned, and will undoubtedly find myself surrounded by tourists for. I'd rather stay in a home than in a hotel though, so if you have friends in Lima, Peru that would welcome a small family of strangers, please introduce me. I'll cook Italian, French or Indian food for them, but would love to be included in their regular daily meals.
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