Chapter 12: Airbnb Your Way to Victory
“Travel is a creative act – not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding on the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing, and moving on. The best landscapes, apparently dense or featureless, hold surprises if they are studied patiently.” – Paul Theroux
With all the innovation out there, and with the new focus on the “sharing economy,” it’s become easier than ever to achieve true Location Wealth.
At it’s essence, Location Wealth, according to Joseph Campbell, is the idea that “people say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.”
Location Wealth, then, doesn’t need to be an act of perpetual movement, but instead can be the eclectic accumulation of experiences that cause you to feel alive. It’s taking your Emotional Wealth and the ownership of your time gained through Time Wealth to explore the world in whatever capacity you can.
If vagabonding isn’t your style, there are many other options to help you become location rich in the manner you want.
The first option or strategy, which we mentioned previously, is to become a part-time vagabond.
Sure, you don’t need to live life as a street kid or bum to attain all the valuable life experiences gained through perpetual travel. In fact, you can be very strategic in the unique way you become a vagabond.
If total immersion in the vagabonding lifestyle isn’t for you, but you still feel a magic and kinship toward those who vagabond, what might just work for you is what I call an Airbnb vagabond.
This is a beautiful and elegant strategy to experience the best of both worlds: you get to keep your deep sense of home and community, and you also get to feed your appetite for the type of travel gained through vagabonding.
If you’ve been increasing your Principles of Wealth in a strategic and intentional manner, at this point in your journey, you’ll have the emotional framework to pursue any endeavor that fuels your passion, and you’ll have built a life that gives you the time to pursue those endeavors.
You’ll have the emotional strength to step – and think – outside the box, and you’ll have no boss telling you where to sit, or for how long. What a life that would be! In addition, if structured correctly, the group of projects from your Time Wealth should make you the right amount of money needed to pursue your Location Wealth.
Remember what Tim O’Reilly said: “Money is like gasoline on a road trip: you don’t want to run out of gas, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.”
Therefore, although we need to divert our focus from traditional wealth to true Wealth, it’s important to build your life around your Principles of Wealth in such a way that you’re able to fund the lifestyle you want.
So, while being a true vagabond might not cost much, if anything, other than the dedication of your time, the other ways to achieve true Location Wealth might be a little pricier in the traditional sense.
Pricier? Maybe. Attainable? Most definitely so.
Becoming an Airbnb vagabond is as simple as: defining where you want to call home, and ascribing to the fact that your home, although important, won’t give you all the Location Wealth you want.
Combining a set of projects that gives you location independence, find a city that resonates with you. It could be your current city, the city you grew up in, or a city you know nothing about but have been romanticizing about for years. Wherever you think you’ll gain the most value from setting down (momentary) roots is where you should call home.
Find a nice apartment that also resonates with you. For me, I focus on 1-bedroom apartments, because I can afford it, yes, but it also makes it easier to rent out, which I will explain in a second.
Once you’ve found the ideal place for your current home, and have the location independence to travel, test the proverbial waters by planning a two-week trip, and list your apartment on Airbnb.com!
Price it favorably and gauge the demand. If you’ve done your homework regarding where your home is, especially if it’s in a major city, you’ll find that you can rent out your apartment in the new sharing economy within days, and likely for more than the cost of your rent!
Starting with a two-week trip instead of a two-year trip is important because it lets you understand the process-flow of renting out your apartment on the Airbnb platform. To become a successful Airbnb vagabond, and before you can explore the world, you first need to understand:
Through a strategy of learning through practice, you can start by taking multiple smaller trips, maybe no farther than the next city or state, so you understand what it will take to be an Airbnb vagabond.
Treat it like a business, or work project, from your Time Wealth. Where can you outsource parts of the process? What are the single points of failures? How much money can you make off of an average week of renting your apartment?
Once these questions are answered, it’s entirely possible, as many have already done, to leave your home indefinitely, covering the cost of rent through an Airbnb strategy that could even make you money on the side.
Leveraging other sharing economy platforms like Task Rabbit, Home Joy, and My Virtual Assistant, you can legitimately create a business centered on keeping your apartment rented while you travel.
Task Rabbit can be used to ensure your renters receive and return your apartment keys, and can be used to keep your apartment stocked with the necessities (think of for lack of a better example…toilet paper).
Home Joy, a home cleaning service, can be used to clean up after each renter, keeping your future renters happy and your demand high.
Finally, My Virtual Assistant can be used to hire the ever-popular outsourced virtual assistant, who can schedule and manage your Airbnb account for you.
In reality, if built correctly, you can keep your apartment fully rented, make money above and beyond your rent, and not even worry about keeping your apartment rented. The only worry you’ll have is maximizing the value of your travel, and deciding when it makes sense to come home.
As you can see again and again, each Principle of Wealth is incredibly important because they’re all connected, and they all build off each other. While becoming an Airbnb vagabond could actually become one of your work projects, it’s important that to achieve your Location Wealth, you build a set of projects that gives you the type of Time Wealth that affords you the type of Location Wealth you want.
In turn, your Emotional Wealth sparks the initial mindset shift to not only believe that these “unconventional” ways of life are possible, but to actually let you live a life that has more meaning, and is immensely more fun.
While this is all well and good, and might I add that it’s extremely well and good, there’s another way to leverage an Airbnb strategy to achieve the Location Wealth you want.
This strategy is my pet idea, one that I love, and one that is the best of every world: multi-location independence.
Taking elements of the Airbnb strategy above, multi-location independence is a Location Wealth strategy for those of us who love the concept of home, but also love travel too much to pick one place to settle.
With multi-location independence, you’re able to have multiple places to call home, gain valuable experiences from living in each of those homes, yet still have the ability to vagabond when necessary.
As before, this type of Location Wealth strategy might require a little more traditional wealth than being a true vagabond, or even an Airbnb vagabond.
Beginning the same as an Airbnb vagabond, find a single place to call home. For me, this place is San Francisco, which, as I mentioned before, is a large enough city where the demand to rent an apartment on Airbnb never declines.
Start by taking a two-week trip and really understanding the ins-and-outs of Airbnb and what it takes to fill a successful listing. Then, when ready, rent a second apartment in another city you love.
For me, that city is Los Angeles. I’m a huge proponent of experiences that make you grow as well as work projects that, when combined, can make you wealthier than even the most stable career. Because of this, in LA, I’ve been able to create a great business relationship with my DJ friend.
We’ve been scheming for years about creating an entertainment or artist management company that circles his growth as a DJ and producer. To both of us, this is just another fun and exciting project to bring into the fold of our project path.
It’s important to note that it’s taken years of increasing my Emotional Wealth to even see an artist management company as a viable option, not to mention the emotional framework needed to take a risk of that magnitude. It’s also taken years to build a set of projects that would allow me the time to focus on this fun endeavor.
And it’s the combination of both of these Principles of Wealth that’s given me the opportunity to achieve Location Wealth in a way that will further increase my Emotional Wealth and Time Wealth.
So, knowing that I want to move to LA to pursue a business project, but still maintaining a deep love for the city of San Francisco and everything it offers, I’ve decided to pursue a multi-location independent Airbnb strategy.
While still owning the lease on your first apartment (for me, my apartment in the City), rent out a second space in a second city of your choice (for me, LA), and almost immediately Airbnb one of the two apartments.
This way, you’re able to cover the cost of rent for one of your places, leaving you with the traditional, single rent lifestyle. Then, you’re able to decide where you want to live, and when you want to bounce between places.
By leveraging the same strategy with Task Rabbit, Home Joy, and My Virtual Assistant, and if built correctly, all you have to do is let your virtual assistant know what dates you’ll be in one place, and what dates you’ll be in the other. Leave it up to your process to cover the rent through Airbnb renters.
Escape the June gloom of San Francisco by spending the summer in LA. Take advantage of San Francisco’s Indian summer by spending September, October, and November in the City. Create successful projects that fund your lifestyle by living in LA when you need to conduct business development there, and live in San Francisco when you feel the need to maintain relationships with the clients from your original projects.
Spend a month with your friends in Southern California, followed by a month with your friends in Northern California. What do you think that’ll do to your Emotional Wealth?
And it doesn’t have to stop there! Once you get the management of two Airbnb properties under your belt, try for a third! Maybe the East Coast hustle and bustle has always enticed you. Well, there’s no reason why you can’t add a third rent, and rotate between the three.
The experience of living in multiple places will not only increase your Emotional Wealth, but could give you a spark of insight that helps create another project that further grants you Time Wealth. Not to mention the value you extract from living in multiple places maximizes your current Time Wealth.
Then, when you’ve had enough of your “homes,” there’s nothing stopping you from renting out all two or three, and living life as a momentary vagabond.
This is the true power of Wealth. It’s the act of creating Emotional Wealth and Time Wealth, which result in the production of Location Wealth, which is then used to further enrich your Emotional Wealth and Time Wealth.
And although there’s more to life than traditional wealth, I also understand that it may still be important to people. Well, the simple act of perpetually Airbnb-ing your current apartment can literally become a lucrative enough work project to exclusively fund your Location Wealth.
If not, it will at the very least cover rent or basic travel costs. And then your Location Wealth, with immeasurable qualitative returns, can help you build and strengthen your work projects, and make them safer and more lucrative than any traditional job you could imagine.
Oh, and that doesn’t even take into account true Wealth: the maximization of value in your life. Yeah, I think Location Wealth does a good job of achieving that, too.