Beach Commute - Digital Nomad Experts

Grace is currently a certified movement disorder specialist (working with patients who have had strokes), and works in education. 

Unfortunately Grace finds her current occupation to “wear her out”, and it’s resulting in her not living in the physical environment that’s fully pleasing to her. 

Cofounder Marisa Meddin is a career couch who helps clients find their passions and turn them into careers. In Grace’s case, Marisa helped her find potential career paths that allow her to work and travel. 

Marisa helps her explore what she truly loves working on, and how she envisions living her life. 

Her goal is living on a beach (which probably led her to Beach Commute!) where she can swim, run and hike with her son. 

Join Marisa and Grace as they discover, in real time, her true passions and new career path. 

After you listen in, make sure that you check out our Remote Travel Jobs Daily membership! We send out 40 hand-picked remote jobs that are ideal for digital nomads. 

Rachel is a longtime digital nomad and friend of the Beach Commute founders.

A longtime digital nomad, Rachel has been working as a project manager while working and traveling remotely for the past five years.  

Rachel started her journey by joining Wifi Tribe and signing up for six chapters in a row across multiple continents! A seriously aggressive start to the lifestyle. 

And she did all this without telling her employer that she was traveling! She explains how she managed to get through this “gray area” with her employer, and eventually moved into a role where working and traveling was officially accepted. 

Join us to hear Rachel talk about:

After you listen in, make sure that you check out our Remote Travel Jobs Daily membership! We send out 40 hand-picked remote jobs that are ideal for digital nomads. 

Do you ever look at a job listing and think "I'm not 100% qualified to apply for this job, so I'm just going to pass?"

After analyzing the results of our community survey, it turns out that this type thought process is EXTREMELY common. Unless folks feel like they fully satisfy every one of the job listing's "desired qualifications", they won't even apply.

But here is the secret directly from Jeff and Diego who have created job listings, and hired dozens of people: We fully know that the person with these ideal qualifications don’t exist.

When we create a job listing, we are creating the ideal employee (like a build-a-bear) fully knowing that this “ideal” candidate doesn’t exist.

We’re just looking for someone who has SOME of thee skills.

Listen in to learn exactly when it’s appropriate to apply for a job.

We will tell you:

Speaking of finding an ideal job for a new digital nomad, make sure you check out our Remote Travel Jobs Daily! We send out 2 hand-chosen travel jobs per day (40 jobs per month). Cut out the struggle of searching through dozens of job boards and let us help you find the perfect digital nomad job. 

Julie Kornfeld has one of the most interesting backgrounds out of any of the digital nomads we have interviewed.

Julie was a refugee lawyer representing people throughout the globe who were looking for a legal path to finding a place of safety.

She represented people from Burma to Guatemala, Nicaragua, and everywhere in between. She’s quite literally worked with clients throughout the world.

As part of her career path on a trip to Uganda that she caught the travel bug. A spark was lit inside her. She knew that travel had to be a major part of her life.

While working as a refugee lawyer, she put “become a digital nomad” on her bucket list. And Julie is not a person to dwell on things that she wants - she charges forward into life headfirst.

Julie has now been a full-time digital nomad since 2021.

Listen in for more on Julie’s stories about:

Make sure you check out our Remote Travel Jobs Daily membership! We send out 40 hand-picked remote jobs per month that are perfect for becoming a digital nomad!

If you had a chance to live anywhere in the world for one day, one week, one month, one year, and ten years, where would you choose?

Jeff, Marisa and Diego challenged each other with exactly those questions in this week’s episode of the Digital Nomad Experts podcast.

They had no idea which locations each person was going to choose!

They discussed why each location made sense for a short or long-term stay, and provided recommendations to new digital nomads on what to expect.

If you’re an upcoming digital nomad, or just want to get a sense of the top destinations to start your journey, this episode will give you all kinds of ideas!

The locations range from deep South America, to Asia, Europe, and everywhere in between.

After you listen in, make sure that you check out our Remote Travel Jobs Daily membership! We send out 40 hand-picked remote jobs that are ideal for digital nomads.

Get on this exclusive list now before the prices go up!

Meet Colette Williams, a fellow digital nomad and friend of Jeff, Marisa and Diego.

Colette started working remote soon out of college as a sourcing specialist for a sales and marketing company. But at this point she hadn’t started traveling yet.

She worked from her parents’ home for a couple years, then decided she wanted to jump headfirst into a travel lifestyle.

Her very first digital nomad trip was to Bolivia on a Wifi Tribe chapter where she met Jeff, Marisa and Diego for the first time.

Bolivia is no walk in the park for a new digital nomad - the flights are a difficult, the wifi can be spotty, and the altitude can make you sick. It’s traveling on hard mode.

But as Colette describes, her experience with making community and challenging herself on a level she had never challenged herself before flipped a switch in her brain and made her decide that this was the life for her.

Listen in to Coco’s episode to learn about what it's like to live in Istanbul, Florianópolis, and Cape Town.

Coco also talks about how to manage difficult time zone work schedules, and how to stay disciplined when surrounded with friends planning constant outings and events. She also talks about how to maintain a healthy work life while proving to your company that you can be an accountable employee while traveling. 

Listen in to hear Coco talk about some of the top highs and lows of living as a digital nomad, like her scariest adventure involving an ATV flying off a cliff, and an ultimate low when her Airbnb host didn't tell her that the washing machine was going to pour water all over the laundry room. 

Looking for a remote travel job? Make sure you sign up for our newsletter to get access to new remote job listings every week. 

In this week’s episode Jeff interviewed Marisa to lowdown on her wild ride from rising through the ranks of corporate life at Pepsi, to owning a dessert shop, leaving an engagement, and becoming a top career coach and digital nomad having traveled to 75+ countries.

Throughout this episode you’ll learn:

Listen in for Marisa's wild route to becoming a career coach and co-founder of Beach Commute where she works full-time helping people become digital nomads. 

Don’t forget to join our email list so that you get access to our hand-picked remote jobs, sent every week (www.beachcommute.com/email) 

This episode is sponsored by the No Filter App. Check it out here at https://getnofilter.com/ 

Our teachers and our parents hammered it into our heads since we were kids: "You cannot have a gap in your resume!" and "You cannot quit your job without having another job lined up!"

And these beliefs have created deep-seated fears in people and many times prevents them from making career changes in their lives. And that, in turn, prevents them from becoming a digital nomad. 

But are those fears actually justified anymore? Do hiring managers actually care about resumes gaps and "loyalty" anymore? 

We break down each of the five fears:

Marisa uses her years of coaching experience to address each of those five fears. The group then discuss each of the three reasons why it's okay to have a gap in your resume along with plenty of practical advice. 

Both Jeff and Diego have a combined 15+ years hiring, and with that they contribute the reality of hiring to complement Marisa's career coaching advice. 

Make sure you join our email list to get our weekly newsletter, along with 2 handpicked remote jobs every week!

Becoming a digital nomad MIGHT not be for everyone. 

Or...perhaps there are certain "blockers" that make you THINK that the digital nomad life is inaccessible to you, but in reality, those blockers are very easy to overcome. 

The Beach Commute community is very active, and people regularly write into the show with their concerns about why they might not be able to hack it as a digital nomad. 

Jeff and Marisa compiled the top reasons people have told us that they think that becoming a digital nomad won't work for them. Here are a few examples of the comments we have received over the past few months: 

"Living as a digital nomad is probably way too expensive for me." 

"I don't think this lifestyle would be safe enough for me to feel comfortable." 

"If I have a health emergency, I'm too worried that I won't be able to get the care I need while traveling abroad." 

"It seems like there would be way too many logistics that I would have to work out in order to make this work." 

Spoiler alert: You'll probably find that each of these "reasons" are totally manageable!

Listen in as Jeff and Marisa address each of these perfectly reasonable fears, and the specific action items you can take in order to overcome each of these blockers. 

Make sure you join our email list so that you can get Marisa's Remote Job Listings each week! Marisa hand-picks two remote jobs that are perfect for a digital nomad lifestyle and sends them directly to your inbox every week!

Meet Laurie LeDuc, an original digital nomad who got her start back in 2008 when she worked in Australia for Catster, a social network for cats.

From there, Laurie joined Khan Academy (but the role wasn’t fully remote yet).

She then convinced her employers to let her start traveling domestically in the United States to start. (You’ll have to listen in for tips on how Laurie convinced her company to let her work remote and her recommendations for new digital nomads.)

Then she went on a legendary Wifi Tribe trip to Jamaica in which she froze on Blue Mountain in search of the world’s best coffee, and all the toilet seats breaking on the trip.

Curious about what digital nomad communities are like? Laurie breaks down exactly what you can expect with building relationships with some of the most meaningful people in your life.

Laurie also talks about her favorite “pinch me” moment when she blazed her own personal path that were “ridiculous, beautiful, and overwhelmingly good.” She said, “I felt like it was in the right place at the right time.”

Listen in for more tips from one of the most experienced digital nomads we have spoken with.

Links mentioned:

Khan Academy