Working on the road

I'm in Internet Marketing and have been working from home for 10 years. I see no reason for a majority of companies to have in office staff. Everything people are doing these days are on computers, so why make them commute? Why pay huge rent on a building? A lot of time and money can be saved by allowing telecommuting. To me, packing people into an office every day is like adult high school. No one can speak their mind, everyone has to follow the rules and if you're late you get in trouble.

There are a ton of options for making money online while allowing you to travel. Affiliate Marketing is what I'm specifically focused on and I was doing this while traveling cross country for 3 months a while back. Unfortunately, my girlfriend works in an office that only allows telecommuting a couple days a week. Otherwise, I'd be on the road all the time.

I'm a programmer and my wife is a real estate agent. We only travel about 4 or 5 full weeks a year. I can work almost from anywhere as long as I have an internet connection and phone. My wife can coordinate members of her team when we're traveling and can almost work full deals. I don't particularly like working while on vacation but we are very thankful for the fact that our jobs allow us to travel at least some. I guess my job actually could allow full time but that's not something we have interest in pursuing.

I'm a geologist and have been doing research/writing for the oil industry. It was a nice gig until this past year when oil prices plummeted.

Steve

Deleted please...to much info that didn't pertain.

I have no doubt that people in many occupations work from RVs. You can even be paid via PayPal.

I edited various Caribbean boating-related magazines and other publications for years. Our work evolved in the early 2000s until the editorial end was done entirely online. The publisher was (still is) a great guy who left the editorial entirely in my hands to manage while he supervised ad sales.

For my main job, the monthly finished product was roughly a 100-page color magazine the size of Time or Newsweek, distributed throughout the Caribbean.

I never met most of the design staff nor 95% of my writer-photographers in person, and some of them lived aboard sailboats. They pitched ideas and emailed articles and photo files to me. I organized the whole enchilada every month and uploaded all the edited pieces to a password-protected FTP site (File Transfer Protocol) for the designers to download.

The designers did their page work, inserted the ads, and I downloaded their proof files to correct. They uploaded the final files to printers - one was in Miami.

I just needed a laptop and Internet connection periodically, and worked from odd places all over the world, including a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. So an RV is a piece of cake. I didn't need a printer.

I eventually retired from full time editing - obviously work is work even when you control your schedule and workflow. I still write travel articles occasionally, and easily keep in touch with my editor via a 4G or wifi connected iPad as needed. I've worked for her for four years and we've never met in person.

I'm in the tax business and work in a traditional office from Jan 2 - April 15th. During the off season, I stay connected and continue working from home, the office or the RV. In the RV I carry an inexpensive Epson XP-410 printer/copier/scanner, a 2nd monitor which plugs into my laptop, and a Verizon Jetpack. It works very well and there is little interruption of client service. If someone drops something off at my office, someone scans it and sends it to me through a secure portal. I love technology! I can now travel for 3 or 3 months a year with no problems.

Todd

Fizz wrote:
Just about any type of office work can now be done from home.
Before you go thinking how soft that is.
Your hours can be tracked to the minute. You may be at home in your PJs but you're always on the job. Sitting having supper when you remember something, next thing you know its 11 PM and you're still at the keyboard.
Mind you sitting out on the patio enjoying a nice day while plugging away is kinda nice.

x2

No tracking of hours for me since I'm self employed but it does allow me to go on long vacs and still get earn my monthly fees.
For me this required discipline since there is only my data plan available at the campground so I'd do things like combine laundromat or supermarket shopping with access to free WI-FI. Saved my data mostly for the occasional movie or TV show and of course responding to and monitoring emails.

allenm wrote:
I assume by working on the road you mean from a campground. OK, so here is my pet peeve - the bandwidth at most campgrounds. The strength of the WiFi signal is a completely different issue. I carry a WiFi extender which works pretty well if I'm out a couple hundred feet from their antenna and am getting a weak signal.

But an extender does nothing for bandwidth. Most smaller campgrounds have about the same service you have at home. Works great for 1-2 users. Maybe ok for 3-4 users. But much more than 6 users it bogs it way down. Whatever bandwidth they have gets divided between users.

Larger campgrounds are probably going to have multiple WiFi hosts, but even that bogs way down with so many users these days trying to stream video and audio.

I got so frustrated I went out and got my own G4 WiFi hot spot. I haven't found many campgrounds where I couldn't get a good signal but that would probably be a different story out west.

It's costly. It's also surprising how much data one uses for normal tasks. My wife and I don't stream any music or movies. We just do email, transfer normal spreadsheets and docs and some browsing. We normally use up our 20GB plan sometimes go a little over.

If you need exceptional bandwidth for your employment, you need to provide it. The wifi at the RV park is not designed for guests to use for commercial activities. You would get the same results if you tried to use the other campground services for commercial activities. For example, our septic and waste disposal services are not sized for someone to staying with us to run septic pumping service waste through it. Our fresh water system is not sized to allow a fire fighting outfit staying in the park to fill their water trucks.
Working on the road often will require you to provide ALL the resources you need. You shouldn't depend upon others.

Thought about RV'ing and taking my photography and hypnosis business on the road while we travel.

I am a software tester. I test internet pages which borrowers access to make their loan payments, and are able to find other resources for various needs. (I'm not saying who I work for).

Are business users identifies what needs to be changed, made new, or deleted. Some of these changes are because of Federal Government compliant reasons, some are because the consumer is having a bad internet experience with the web site, and some are enhancements to make things easier for the consumer.

After the "item" is identified, it goes to the developer who develops the code. A good Quality Assurance department will always be a separate, independent department from the development department. Most testers don't understand computer code. But we hammer away on the web site looking for bugs and errors, emulating the consumer on the street, how they would use it.

We test, document our tests, log our defects, which go back to the developer for fix, and then we retest again. We look, search, and explore trying to find the weak spots in the application.

My company (and many companies ... especially their Information Technologies departments) has provided the methods for us to work from home (or actually work from anywheere) as long as we have a secured internet connection.

My laptop is a company laptop with all the software and all the security protocals needed to ensure a secure connection to inside the "firewall". So when firing up the computer, if I am at home, or in the office, the computer is exactly the same at both locations.

Except for an occasional meeting where we need the face-to-face contact, even our business meetings are conducted over the computers. We share screens, and have communication over our computers too (voice), or the option to dial-in with our phones.

My wife works for a different company the provides the same features. Except she does not have a company laptop. She uses her own laptop to access her company's system. When she logs in, she takes over her user session, just like she is at the office. In the office, she has a dummy type terminal and keyboard and monitor, so she doesn't need her actual computer.

We both sometimes put in as much as 60 hours a week (or more), so the availability to work from home, really has it's advantages here.

Sometimes, if we have a planned trip, but we end up getting pulled into something that requires week-end coverage, we take our work with us and many times, we have worked from a campground.

More and more companies are seeing the advantage of providing such technology to their employees to work remotely. Some work from home, some work from their campsite. I'm glad and grateful I can do it too. Right now, I'm home. It's lunch time, put my work computer on "idle" for a few minutes and jumped on my personal laptop to check RV.net.

By the way, you may ask, why don't you go camping more and take your work with you. It's because I use my I-phone wifi hot-spot and I'm paying for my own plan. If I connect my company laptop through my I-phone hot-spot, it's a data and bank width hog. I couldn't afford the data plan. So I have to use that feature VERY wisely. Only only when really needed.