BB Design Skills Course: Module 3

BB Design Skills Course: Module 3

by | May 10, 2017 | Digital Nomad Skills

BB Design Skills Course: Module 3

I am enjoying BB’s Design Skills Course more and more every module! This one is all about creative briefs and mood boards. If you’ve ever wondered how designers go from getting hired to figuring out what their clients really want in a design, this gives you an inside look and a blueprint for your own initial client interactions!

The module contains 4 videos 10-15 minutes long, adding up to almost a full hour of instruction. You start out by being introduced creative briefs – a survey-like document you send to your client to fill out about their tastes and preferences. Cassie suggests using a shared Google Doc for this so you don’t have to keep emailing back and forth, and the course gives you a creative brief template you can customize for your own business!

You then learn how to analyze the creative brief, and then move to creative research – which is super fun since it’s done on Pinterest! Cassie walks you through setting up a secret board on Pinterest for the project. I was a bit concerned about copyright issues with using Pinterest images, but since the mood board is only supposed to be a reference point for both you and the client, not something you publish and make money from, it seems to fall under fair use (according to what I’ve gleaned online, I’m not giving legal advice). I do like that you can keep the project board to help track down the source of the images if you need to later (like if a client loves a particular texture and wants to use that exact one).

After using the words from the creative brief to pin a number of images to your board, you look for similarities, save the best images, and arrange them artistically in Photoshop. Cassie provides a tutorial on how to do this, then it’s your turn! Students are given a creative brief from a fictional company, and tasked to create a mood board that meets the company’s requested aesthetic.

The mood board I created had pops of fuchsia and teal mixed with gold and white. Cassie gave students 3 mood board templates to choose from, so you just had to place embedded images and create clipping masks, as well as pull colors from the images for your palette. That made the project simple enough for beginners and reinforced commonly-used Photoshop tools, but since the images and arrangements are your own, the project wasn’t cookie-cutter. I had seen several mood boards within the Facebook groups for the same fictional client before reaching this module, and mine was able to be its own thing.

I finished the module excited about doing design work in the future and even wanting to figure out how to create my own mood board template!

 

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

GGB Challenge Day 1 – Reasons Why

GGB Challenge Day 1 – Reasons Why

by | May 9, 2017 | Digital Nomad Skills, My Tech and Travel Journey

GGB Challenge Day 1 – Reasons Why

It’s so serendipitous how this worked out – yesterday I listed all my obstacles to becoming a digital nomad. Today, Globetrotting Girl Bosses (update: now Bucketlist Bombshells Tribe) started their 7-day challenge asking us to write down the reasons why we want to work online! So I am sharing that with you here! (Also, the order suits my personality – I always want to get the bad stuff out of the way first so I can focus on the positive! So you might think I’m a pessimist if you only talk to me for a few minutes or read the first part of a blog post, but I’m really not!)

Freedom to Travel

This is the biggest reason why I want to become a digital nomad – I got bit by the travel bug 2 1/2 years ago, and one trip a year is not enough! I used to think that I need to wait to travel until I was married, or had a lot of money, or had a big group of friends going. Now I know I can figure out most curveballs travel throws my way, and in fall 2017 I’ll get the chance to try a new challenge – solo travel in a country where English is not the primary language! I always try to see far too much in my limited time traveling – I want the freedom to linger. I want to spend 1-2 weeks (or more) in a city, not 1-2 days.

Freedom to Set My Own Schedule

I am not a morning person. My brain just doesn’t work well in the mornings – no matter how much sleep I’ve had the night before. I hate working 8-5 (though I know others have even earlier schedules), and I live for Friday and Saturday nights where I can stay up being creative (if I haven’t deprived myself of too much sleep during the week). My ideal schedule would be staying up till 4am and sleeping in till noon (I’ve even worked second shift before and done this). But I also want to be able to spend time with family and friends some evenings.

Freedom to Be Creative

While my job does allow for some creativity now that I’ve studied FileMaker and can do some development work, most of my tasks are boring and repetitive. I do know that there will still be some repetition in any job, but if I am my own boss I can outsource and automate any tasks I don’t want to do over and over. I can say no to projects. I can set things aside and come back to them fresh. I can figure out new and better ways of doing things.

Freedom of Unlimited Earning Potential

As a solopreneur, I will be in charge of how much money I make. I won’t be at the mercy of working a year or more before I get a couple more cents an hour. If I don’t have enough clients, I can hustle and find some. If I have too much work, I can raise my rates. I can develop products that earn me money while I’m out exploring castles and dreaming of ways to expand my business. And I can help others earn money as well – whether cross-promotion, team-ups, long-term partnerships, or even employees.

Freedom to Foster Community

I love how supportive people can be in the tech/design community and in the travel community. I want to have more time to build and grow that community. I’m the type of person who sees a request for help or advice, and if I know anything related to the topic, it’s like catnip and I can’t help but try to assist them! I’ve spent hours researching problems and solutions for others for free. I want that to be part of my day-to-day workflow without feeling guilty about not doing “real work”. It will be my real work.

Freedom to Be Me – Confidently

I’m not the most confident person. I am always second-guessing myself and thinking that others are better than me. Building a business will give me something to look and say, “I did that!” whenever doubts come in. And I can create it my way, building on my strengths and eliminating the things that tear me down. I can spend my time working with and for the people who bring out the best in me. I can wander through new cities and build new friendships based on who I am at that moment and find more to like about myself every single day.

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

Digital Nomad Obstacles

Digital Nomad Obstacles

by | May 8, 2017 | My Tech and Travel Journey

Digital Nomad Obstacles

It’s really easy to get discouraged when you are pursuing a dream – especially when you don’t have a clear picture of what that dream is and what steps you need to take to reach it.

I have loved the idea of moving to Europe and/or becoming a digital nomad with frequent stays in Europe for years now. But it always seemed impossible. And wouldn’t I find the guy of my dreams sometime soon? Better not make any concrete plans, since Prince Charming would find me soon and we’d travel the world together.

Well, Charming is still MIA, and I realized I could do this travel thing myself. I also realized two weeks of vacation a year is not nearly enough for all the travel I want to do, and I was spending 25-30% of my budget just getting to Europe, plus the days of jet lag. So I started taking courses to up my digital skills to help make a nomad life possible.

But I still have many obstacles in my way.

Money

I know I will need a solid buffer of cash before I will feel comfortable leaving my fulltime job. But I am also making far less than I’m worth at the company, and a discussion about salary hasn’t happened 2 months after requesting it. Coupled with depleting my savings to help my sister buy a car (she’ll pay me back eventually), my upcoming 2-week trip to Europe, and spending money on training, and my finances, while not terrible, should be healthier. Once my trip happens in early September, I can start putting aside that money for a much longer trip!

Housing and Belongings

I just signed a year lease. My sister and I moved to a new place so that a good friend could move in with us (and we could potentially add a 4th person later on). That makes my rent actually quite reasonable, but still something I would have to pay, even if I’m not here. At the end of the lease I would still need somewhere to put my stuff if I wasn’t living here. I can see getting rid of some things, but I don’t think I can pare down my 75ish boxes and furniture to a couple boxes in someone’s basement. Having a home base here in the States wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it would drain my money faster.

Family

One of the reasons why I can see myself keeping a home base here is that most of my family is in the area. I have 8 younger siblings, and my parents and all but two are in the area – and it would be especially hard to leave my two nieces. So I can see myself splitting my time between here and Europe – coming home for a month or two at a time would be much nicer if I had my own place. But still, money – for keeping a room in an apartment and plane tickets back and forth.

Visas

Depending on where I want to live in Europe, it may be impossible to work there legally. Most digital nomads aren’t in one place for long enough to worry about that, and just stay on tourist visas (but moving from place to place can be a lot more expensive). I was thinking this would kill my dream outright, until I found out about a freelancer work visa in Germany that is difficult, but not impossible to get. While living in the UK or Ireland would have been preferable (hello, English language!), Germany is a great alternate choice for me, for several reasons. One, since most of my ancestry is German (various branches of my family immigrated to North America between 1700 and 1900), I’ve always been interested in the country and culture. Two, due to this, I’ve actually been studying German, so this would help both my comfort level in the country and improve my skills with the language. Three, it is very centrally located for exploring the rest of Europe. Four, I love castles, and Germany has many beautiful ones to visit!

Current Job

I’ve been with my company for three years now and my skills have improved greatly during that time. I also have a casual dress code, short commute, and great coworkers. While my salary and vacation time is lacking, this job does give me more time and emotional freedom to pursue freelancing on the side that a stressful new job with a longer commute would not. It would be great to work for my company remotely in the future, and they have approved my trip to Europe, so I am reluctant to leave, even for a job that may pay a bit better and help me save money.

Business Under Construction

I have not officially launched my freelance business and have therefore earned $0 with my new skills. Will I be able to make a living as a freelancer? The last freelance money I earned was writing for a magazine 4+ years ago, and that was just a couple hundred extra a month. I will want to be fully established with several clients before I can even think of moving it to fulltime, not to mention the needed money buffer.

Conclusion

All of this points to it being at least a year until I make the leap to digital nomad. But here are some steps I will be taking:

  1. Launch my business so I can start earning money and paying myself from it
  2. Start saving more every month
  3. Get rid of more stuff
  4. Use my trip to evaluate where I would want to live in Europe

What obstacles to becoming a digital nomad do you face?

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BB Design Skills Course: Module 2

BB Design Skills Course: Module 2

by | May 7, 2017 | Digital Nomad Skills

BB Design Skills Course: Module 2

This module of the Bucketlist Bombshells’ Design Skills Course introduces students to Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. I was very much looking forward to this module, and it did not disappoint!

Like the previous module, this one consisted of three videos and nothing else (actual projects will begin later in the course). However, each of these videos last a half hour or longer, giving more than 100 minutes of instruction total!

InDesign

The first tutorial was InDesign, which I though was odd because most instruction usually starts with Photoshop as it’s the most popular. But, Cassie explains that as a designer, she primarily uses InDesign and Illustrator, and only occasionally uses Photoshop. I didn’t mind starting with InDesign as I had really enjoyed using it within Skillcrush’s Visual Designer Blueprint. As someone who has tried to create newsletters and other projects in Microsoft Word, the ease of formatting with InDesign is amazing and a great time-saver.

Cassie gave a basic overview of the toolbars and layout in InDesign and many of the tools. Even with my previous introduction to InDesign, I learned a lot. Her teaching style, while a bit repetitive when teaching from a slide deck like in the previous module, really shines in these tutorials. She makes using these programs seem fun and easy, and my mind was churning with different ways I could apply the uses of the different tools to my own projects.

Illustrator

Next was Illustrator. I hated Illustrator while using it in Skillcrush – the bezier curves were pure evil and I could never get my drawings to look clean and smooth. As someone who was never good at drawing realistic images, I was hoping it would be easier on the computer, but the Skillcrush Blueprint made me think that wasn’t the case. I don’t think I’ve opened Illustrator since finishing that class.

But Cassie makes Illustrator seem effortless and fun to use. She showed different ways to create and smooth out a design, and introduced Adobe’s library of brushes and other cool tools to use when creating images. I’m excited to try some of them out!

I did notice that Cassie seem to refer to opacity in opposite terms – when an item becomes more opaque, it becomes less see-through, not more. But since you generally only mess with opacity when you are decreasing it for a project, it’s easy to misunderstand the meaning. This is my only criticism on her teaching for the entire module, which says a lot! Very impressed by this module.

Photoshop

The last video was all about Photoshop, with which I am most familiar out of Adobe’s products. Cassie did a run-through of almost every tool in the regular toolbar, explaining their differences and similarities, and saying why you might use one over another. She showed their effects on one image, and gave a bunch of examples of different cases where you might need to use each tool. It was also helpful to see speed vs. accuracy with using different tools over the other, depending on the contrast in an image.

Cassie only briefly touched on layers and organizing your workspace, which was something the Skillcrush Blueprint spent a lot of time on. Since I am taking both, this is giving me a more well-rounded education in Photoshop. I do think Cassie’s design approach fits my style more – I like jumping in with both feet, playing around with a project, and looking up stuff when I get stuck.

This module excites me a lot for the rest of the course. I can’t wait to start working on actual projects!

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

BB Design Skills Course: Module 1

BB Design Skills Course: Module 1

by | May 6, 2017 | Digital Nomad Skills

BB Design Skills Course: Module 1

This module of the Bucketlist Bombshells‘ Design Skills Course consists of 3 video lessons – Color, Typography, and Layout. The videos are 12-18 minutes long, so you end up with a good 45 minutes’ worth of instruction. It is a very basic introduction to these principles.

I didn’t really learn anything new with this module, but considering that I’ve taken an online college course on Visual Communication as well as Skillcrush’s Visual Designer Blueprint, I expected that at least the first few modules would be mostly review for me.

I did wish that the Color video had some real-life examples to illustrate the principles being taught – especially for the different moods the different types of color schemes invoke. The other two videos did include a few examples, but would have appreciated more.

There were no exercises, tasks, or worksheets with this module. I feel like other students would appreciate at least a cheat sheet for the various things taught, that they could keep close by as they work through the other modules.

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

Stockpiling Resources

Stockpiling Resources

by | May 5, 2017 | Resources

Stockpiling Resources

I have a hoarding problem.

During my past two moves, I got rid of SO MUCH STUFF. A friend took a van load to donate. My little brother made two trips. And I took bags and bags out to the garbage. And I still had around 75 boxes I moved to the new place – not counting kitchen and living room stuff like dishes and food and DVDs. (To be fair, some of the boxes were very small – and about 30-40 were solely books.)

Not good for an aspiring digital nomad. Though aside from Avon products (since I sell Avon) all but a handful of boxes contain stuff obtained 5 years ago or more.

During my last move, I analyzed why I was holding onto so much stuff. Several boxes hadn’t been opened in the years between moves, yet I still felt a deep urge to hold onto the contents. There were 2 reasons:

1. Nostalgia. As an INFP, my primary and third functions, Feeling and Sensing, are both internal. My memory connects powerful emotions to things I can see and touch. If I throw away the thing, it feels like I am throwing away the memory.

2. Fear. Growing up in a large family, there was no allowance and very little money to be earned doing extra chores. If something broke or I needed a gift for someone (8 younger siblings = lots of needed gifts), it generally had to come from the stuff I already had. Handcrafted presents and regifted items were the norm. In my twenties, during times of unemployment or tight finances, I had to delve into my resources again. Selling things online sometimes made the difference between a positive and a negative bank account balance.

Realizing those emotions and improved finances helped me to get rid of more during the move. If the memories brought up by an item made me feel frustrated or blah, I let go of the item. If I didn’t see myself using a resource item in the next year or two, I donated it.

Digital Hoarding

Within the last few years, I’ve transitioned to stockpiling digital resources instead of physical ones. Amazon started it, with digital downloads of TV seasons for $5 and ebooks for 99 cents or free. And entering the world of social media, tech, and design brought me a huge range of valuable digital products at all price points.

Unlike physical items, there generally is not a nostalgia component. And while they are resources that I am hoarding, it isn’t due to fear. I see them as building blocks for the life I want to live.

There are other downsides to stockpiling digital items, however, so keep these in mind:

Organization. How do you find what you need when you need it? Right now, I keep everything in folders based on the source of the item (which will also make checking license permissions for fonts, images, etc. easier in the future). But the more you have, the harder things are to find.

Money. While some digital items are free (like Creative Market’s weekly downloadables), others range from cheap ebooks to thousand-dollar courses. If I am not going to use the digital item or service now, my rule of thumb is that it needs to be steeply discounted to outweigh the costs of maybe never using it. AppSumo is excellent at this – offering lifetime deals at unbeatable prices, usually for tech startups’ services.

Procrastination. I am prone to this. Acquiring instead of practicing. Learning instead of doing. One of the key parts of a great career is to keep learning new things, but that knowledge will remain superficial until you start to use it in your work.

What resources do you tend to stockpile?

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

Unreachable Dreams

Unreachable Dreams

by | May 4, 2017 | My Tech and Travel Journey

Unreachable Dreams

It’s been one of those days.

A day where everything seems to go wrong, but not badly enough that you have excuse to hide away or rage at the world. A day filled with pointlessly doing and undoing and redoing. A day connected to so many inefficient systems that make you want to scream at the committee who came up with them. A day where you’ve felt overlooked and unappreciated and stuck.

On a day like today, my dream of having the freedom to travel the world and create seems impossibly far away.

At this moment, I’ve not made a penny with the new skills I’ve paid hundreds of dollars to learn. How can I possibly build a business that will let me leave my day job? And if I do, will it be so stressful and full of repetition and angry clients that I will beg my old boss to take me back?

Yes, I’ve made my dream trip to the UK happen, and I’m going to Europe again this fall. But two weeks abroad every two years is just a taste of the life I want, with no time to befriend locals and fellow travelers, experience the culture, or to just be. And every day I’m just one step further in a lifetime of waiting for my real life to start.

Sometimes I wonder what my real life is supposed to look like. I surely thought there would be a significant other by now, but he hasn’t shown up, or if he has, he’s doing a great job of being a barely-there casual friend. I thought we would travel the world together, but instead I’ll be going to Paris alone. I thought I would be a mom, but every day my chances for that lessen and I can barely support myself alone – my cash for travel and online learning comes from living with roommates. I thought I would be a writer, but I’ve reviewed enough novels to know that mine are half-baked and not fit for public consumption. I thought I would have a tight-knit group of friends, but almost all are married and off living their own lives.

I really hope tomorrow isn’t one of those days.

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

BB Skills Course: Module 0

BB Skills Course: Module 0

by | May 3, 2017 | Digital Nomad Skills

BB Skills Course: Module 0

It’s a good thing my experience with their Facebook group was so positive, because my first lesson in Bucketlist Bombshells’ Design Skills course was plagued with technical difficulties. I think I hate Asana now, and I’ve definitely learned what not to do when including PDF worksheet downloads on my site!

Module 0 (from what I can tell, it’s identical for both the Design and Tech Skills courses) at least had good, thought-provoking content. It was all about setting goals for the course and your future business. The first video lesson had a worksheet to download and fill out as you followed along. And that is where my troubles began.

This PDF Wasn’t Made For Editing

The ideal practice might have been to print it out and handwrite all your brainstorming. But as much as I love putting pen to paper, my printer is still packed away after my move, and I frankly wasn’t keen to waste ink, especially if future lessons had worksheets as well. Best to just download and save in a folder I created especially for the course. I opened it from the downloads bar in Chrome and started typing merrily away.

I had filled out the first page and was about to head to bed to continue thinking of ideas for the next section, when I had a realization – what if this was one of those awful unable-to-save fillable forms? I hit save, left the form open in Chrome, and tried opening it again in Reader. None of my changes showed up. I made a copy and played around a bit until realized I could edit and the changes would save in Reader. But what about my already-started Chrome version? I went to copy and paste my responses into the Reader copy, only to find out I couldn’t copy from the PDF! After Googling around for alternate keyboard shortcuts, I figured out I could print the Chrome version to PDF, open the printed version in Reader, and copy/paste between the two versions from there. And Reader is not multi-document friendly.

I did some research and it does look like you can save PDFs correctly in Chrome if the PDF is uploaded with the correct permissions. If it’s a read-only copy, expect the same fiery torture above. As a comparison, Skillcrush used Google Docs for their worksheets – you would click the link, and it would invite you to save a copy to your Google Drive. You had to remove the “Copy of” in the filename every single time (which was super annoying), but other than that, it worked very smoothly.

Goals, Sorted

Next snag was realizing all my brainstormed goals now needed to be distributed among 4 time periods – which meant a LOT of copying and pasting (which at least actually worked in Reader). I’d made about 30 goals over 4 different types, and had to scroll over 4 PDF pages, redistributing them over the 4 time periods – on a laptop that isn’t so great with the scrolling.

Then it was onto assigning monthly focuses – which didn’t line up well with either of the two previous sorts and the type of goals I had set. The action step breakdown was more than I wanted to do at the moment, and seemed designed for printing multiple copies instead of filling out on the computer. So I moved on to the second video lesson.

Asana Don’t Wanna

Shay provided a quick run-through of how to set up lists and boards in Asana, and had you put your lesson tasks in a list and your goals in a board and set due dates. Simple, right? Try mindnumbingly dull and repetitive. With more snags.

First, I accidentally set up an organization instead of a workspace since I put in my business email in addition to my personal one. I had already created my projects when I realized this, and while it didn’t take too long to figure out how to add a workspace, apparently there is no easy way to copy or move a project from one to the other.

Second, I had to copy each individual goal into a separate board task from the PDF. So the 30 goals I had already copied once, I had to copy again one by one. Only later on did I realize I could have just copied them all into a list and it wouldd have separated them out for me, then I could have selected all and dragged them to the board, though I would have still had to divvy them up into the 4 time periods.

Third, while I did find site that would help me transfer a project from organization to workspace, it changed my board into a list while doing so. So then I had to divvy up the goals for the THIRD freaking time.

And I don’t even want to think about trying to go through every module and list out the tasks ahead of time and assign due dates. That doesn’t even make any sense. How am I supposed to know how long these will take me at the beginning of the course?

I’m hoping the other modules will be an improvement over this one. As it is, this is a very bad first impression for the courses.

Some Fixes

My suggestions to Cassie and Shay for improving Module 0:

1. Provide better options for saving and editing the worksheets, or at least clearly explain how to open the download in a way where people’s information won’t get lost. I can’t imagine being someone who had filled it out completely, hit save, and then opened it later to realize nothing’s there.

2. Instead of forcing your students to go through every module in the course and manually add the tasks to Asana – why not provide a list they can copy and paste right into their workspace? They can then customize, break down tasks into action items, and add deadlines as much as they need to. It would show Asana’s strengths and eliminate meaningless busywork.

3. Speaking of Asana’s strengths – one of them seems to be dragging and dropping tasks at will. So why not have students take advantage of that by having them brainstorm and categorize goals right in Asana from the start? It would eliminate all the back and forth in the unwieldy PDF and having to copy everything over to Asana later on.

4. I still feel very lost working with Asana, and since I don’t know what all I’ll be doing with it in the course, I don’t know what type of Asana tutorial I should follow. I understand that this course isn’t all about Asana, but what about linking to a good free online tutorial that covers everything students will need for the course?

I’ll update this post if I hear any changes are made to improve the module!

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

Bucketlist Bombshells Tribe

Bucketlist Bombshells Tribe

by | May 2, 2017 | Digital Nomad Skills

Bucketlist Bombshells Tribe

I discovered Bucketlist Bombshells via the Facebook group Girls Love Travel, and I soon found out Cassie and Shay (BB’s founders) had a Facebook group of their own – Bucketlist Bombshells Tribe (formerly Globetrotting Girl Bosses). I joined in late March 2017 to find out more about BB’s Skills courses and to connect with likeminded women who wanted to travel the world and work remotely.

BB Tribe was very welcoming and has a go-get-em-girl vibe. I do feel a bit older than many of the members, since the courses are aimed at millennials, especially those just out of college or a few years into their careers. While I’m a millennial as well, I’ve been working for more than a decade at various jobs. It could also be that I am more used to Skillcrush’s demographic, which is more 30s and 40s.

The group is quite active on Facebook, and there are topical threads for different days of the week, goal sharing posts at the end of the month, and book discussions. Many people are very new the whole travel thing and to freelancing, but it brings a freshness and idealism to Facebook that many more established groups lack. Everyone is very encouraging, and I haven’t seen any backlash or shaming. The newness does mean that sometimes more complicated questions go unanswered, something that will be remedied as members’ skills grow. I do hope BB Tribe keeps the nurturing atmosphere as it matures!

(There are separate groups for those who have enrolled in the courses, so technical help pertaining to the actual lessons is available there.)

The best part of BB Tribe so far has been the live webinars. Cassie and Shay, as well as some course alums, have Facebook Live Q&As every few weeks, it seems. Speaking as someone who used to hate webinars and has now grown to enjoy a few, depending on the host, I was pleasantly surprised by how relatable Cassie and Shay were and the quality of content presented. They gave me a clear indication of what the courses would be like, and were the main reason I decided to sign up!

BB Tribe is free to join, so if you are female and want to travel the world, it is an awesome place to start your journey!

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

Bucketlist Bombshells: An Intro

Bucketlist Bombshells: An Intro

by | May 1, 2017 | Digital Nomad Skills

Bucketlist Bombshells: An Intro

I just started taking Bucketlist Bombshells’ Design Skills Course! While researching the course, I wasn’t able to find many reviews for it (since it is a newer course, that is to be expected). So I have decided to remedy that fact for other learners!

I’ll be walking you step-by-step through my experience with the Design Skills Course. I’ll be comparing and contrasting it to other courses I’ve taken (primarily Skillcrush‘s blueprints) and discussing its strengths, focus, and areas that need improvement. If this goes well, I’ll do the same with their Tech Skills Course, and maybe even their Work + Travel Course.

Since the Bucketlist Bombshells are all about helping you build digital skills that will allow you to work from anywhere in the world, I feel like they will be a great resource for those who want to Create Wherever! But this blog is all about helping you gain the freedom and confidence to build a passion-fueled life in any place you choose! So comment with your own thoughts, things you’d like to hear more about, topics you want me to address, and questions you have.

In addition, I’ll be sharing my own travel experiences, my journey toward location-independence, reviews of other digital courses and services, and vacation planning tips for fellow free-spirits on a budget!

Want to hire me as a Pinterest Designer and Manager to help you get more traffic, leads, and income for your blog or business? Check out this page to see what I can do to help you grow!

New York City and a Smartphone

New York City and a Smartphone

by | Mar 20, 2017 | My Travels

New York City and a Smartphone

That’s how my travel journey began – with NYC and a Samsung phone that had seen better days.

Growing up, I had always wanted to travel. It seemed so romantic and glamorous, and I longed to visit the places that hosted so many stories I loved. But it seemed impossibly out of reach for a Western Pennsylvania girl who was barely making ends meet, didn’t drive until her late 20s, and got nervous at the thought of talking to strangers.

My parents did occasionally load all nine of us kids into a van and take us to visit friends and relatives. We went to Gettysburg twice, stopped by Niagara Falls for 15 minutes on the way back from our cousins’, and visited beaches near friends in Florida and Texas. But I was simply along for the ride.

Several years ago, my best friend mentioned a possibility of going to New York City rather inexpensively, since her family had a connection with someone who lived there. Things fell through, but we still talked about going, even though it would be more expensive. In early summer 2014, she told me her mom was planning a trip to NYC with her and her sister, and I was welcome to come along!

After lots of indecision and schedule changes, we were actually able to set up the trip for August, and I dived into research mode. As an introvert, new situations are always easier to handle when I know what I’m getting myself into. Since I also love possibilities (as a Myers-Briggs intuitive) and keeping my options open (as a perceiver), all plans have dozens of potential variations, that I also like to make sure are researched. But I knew since we also had a very limited 2 1/2 days in the city I needed to make the most of every hour.

My friend and I bounced suggestions off each other on the days leading up the trip, and I tried out a bunch of travel apps and loaded everything good I found onto my phone. I didn’t realize until we got to the city that everyone else didn’t have smartphones. I had also done more research than anyone on transportation. Even though everyone else had been to NYC before and I hadn’t, I became the group’s guide more and more often as the trip progressed.

I discovered I loved it. I could figure out the best way from point a to point b (thanks to Google Maps) and know whether we should take a bus, the subway, or walk. I easily grouped attractions into an optimal order based on location and opening times. People with more experience relied on my advice and things turned out well!

That was one of the most empowering experiences of my life. I realized if I could plan small pieces of this trip for others, I could easily plan large pieces of more extensive trips for myself! I didn’t have to wait to travel with a still-not-materializing husband, or book only prepackaged tours that skipped half the places I wanted to see (along with being super pricey). With the internet to do research and a smartphone to navigate, I could travel anywhere I pleased!

Now all I needed was time and money.

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