Know Web Development? Become a Digital Nomad Tomorrow.
By: Alex White
Tags: Tutoring, Mentorship, Digital Nomads, Freelance, Web Development

You want to travel the world, but you are just waiting for that perfect remote job that allows you to log in from anywhere, and pays you the big bucks so you can live the lifestyle you’ve dreamed about!

Instagram photos from 2019 of my wife and I in Mexico, Costa Rica and Guatemala

That’s where I was two years ago. Then I got that job! Full time, 6 figures, and I could do it from anywhere in the Americas that I could find high-speed internet. No one needed to tell me twice. My wife and I sold and gave away most of our stuff, cleared out of our expensive city apartment and moved to Mexico to live the dream!

Six months into my dream job, I quit.

Why? Because while it was high paying, and allowed my wife and I to live a life we’d only dreamed about, the job was stressful, difficult, and took up most of my time and energy. I had little energy at the end of the week to actually enjoy this amazing new life. But I had plenty of money — which made me realize — I didn’t need nearly as much as I thought. I was used to making ends meet in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I was in Mexico!

My rent was $500 a month for a beautiful place. Groceries were less than 1/3 of what I had been paying. It cost $2 to go to the movies — with popcorn. I realized I had accomplished half of my dream life. The other half? To work for myself, and only as much as I want. 8 months after I quit that dream job, my wife and I are living our dream life more than ever. For 6 of those months, I’ve been supporting myself primarily by mentoring people 1:1 in web development. I also do some freelance coding for money and barter. This is something you can start tomorrow while keeping your full-time job. This is something that can support you for just a few sessions a week in inexpensive but beautiful, and culturally rich countries like Mexico and Guatemala, where I am today on the spectacular Lake Atitlan!

Lake Atitlan, Guatemala

Two platforms have made this easy, Chegg.com and Codementor.io. These platforms are very different, but both extremely useful for programmers who want to make money from anywhere in the world. I will explain and weigh the pros and cons of each.

Chegg

Chegg.com is a site geared towards college students, and offers a few services, including buying and selling textbooks, and what I use it for, connecting tutors with students, and facilitating sessions as well as payment.

On Chegg, you sign up as a tutor and set your areas of expertise. Then students post their need of help, and you see the posts that apply to your expertise. People log on looking for help with all types of work — but the most in-demand subject seems to be programming and computer science. Students are looking for help with a wide range of things, from building a simple website, to solving difficult assignments in their advanced CS courses.

Chegg pays tutors a flat $20 per hour, which doesn’t get you very far in San Francisco, but does quite well in a place like Lake Atitlan! During finals week this past winter, Chegg doubled its pay for tutors in subjects with high demand — including Computer Science and Programming. I made $40 an hour for three weeks on the platform, helping students with mostly fairly easy problems.

There are a few things I don’t love about Chegg, which is why I mostly use Codementor these days.

One is that many students use Chegg.com as a way to get other people to do their work for them. If like me, you aren’t interested in helping people cheat, you will have to wade through many such requests. Another is that there are many very low effort pleas for help, where I imagine a bleary-eyed, overtired student has in zombie-like fashion, copy-pasted a portion of their assignment into the help request form, with no context whatsoever. I’ve read through dozens of help requests where I was more confused at the end of it than I was before I started. It’s no big deal, you can just ignore them, but I will say it is kind of amazing what kind of nonsense people will post when they are exhausted and desperate for help. I can’t help but think there must be a better way of educating our young people, but that’s a post for another day.

Finally, the flat rate for tutors is definitely a con for this platform. There is no way to level up your hourly no matter how good a tutor you are. But that’s OK! That’s where Codementor.io comes in!

Codementor

Codementor is a fantastic platform for connecting people who need help with code, with people who can provide that help. Mentee’s can put in requests for one time help, long term mentorship, post a freelance job, or even post larger projects that need people to work on through the CodementorX program, which you can apply to once you have demonstrated some skills on the basic platform.

On Codementor, there are students looking for help with assignments, people learning on their own looking for guidance, professional developers looking for expertise, and start-up founders looking for consultations. I’ve seen requests ranging from “Help me with HTML and CSS” to “Seeking a cryptography Ph.D. to help secure data”.

On Codementor you can set your own hourly, which means you can grow your business and level up as you build your reputation and skills. On Codementor, I’ve been making $60 an hour! People charge anywhere from $20 to over $100. That comes with a cost — Codementor takes up to 20% of that. The more you use their platform, the lower that rate goes, so there is some opportunity there.

I used Chegg primarily until I established myself on Codementor, and now I primarily use Codementor since I can make 3x the money. But I will still jump on Chegg and see if I can make a quick few bucks if Codementor is slow and I have the time.

Side By Side Breakdown

Money

Chegg: $20 per hour flat rate

Codementor: Set your own rate, Codementor takes 20% (max)

UI

Chegg: 3/5

Codementor 5/5

Opportunity

Chegg: 3/5 — It varies depending on the time of year.

Codementor: 5/5 — the ability to publish posts and drive clicks to my profile means I create my own opportunity

Overall

Chegg: 3/5 — A great platform to get comfortable as a CS tutor, and to earn some extra $

Codementor: 5/5 — A fantastic platform that can allow you to travel full time starting tomorrow. My bread and butter for the last 6 months.

Between these two platforms, bartering my skills with people I meet, doing a little freelancing, and picking up other gigs as I travel (right now my wife and I are part-time running a small cafe and hotel), we could keep this up as long as we want — and we have no plans to move back to the U.S.! Will we be able to stack money and retire early, like we could have if I stayed at my stressful job for another 10 years? No, not just by tutoring and mentorship. But with my time and energy freed up, I can plan and develop my own entrepreneurial ideas and put them into action. I have big plans for building my own business around my deepest passions — something I barely had time to even think about before.

Also, as I build a web presence around this, it allows me to do more 1:1 mentorship on my own, without a platform skimming some of my money!

Other Options?

There are lots of other opportunities out there for freelancing and teaching. You could create a course to post on Udemy.com or pick up freelancing jobs at Upwork.com or Freelancer.com. There are infinite ways for people to realize their dreams — these are just the two platforms that have empowered me the most.

Looking for a mentor?

Email me directly at alexwhite5d@gmail.com or find me on Codementor.

Check out my article about why 1:1 mentorship is one of the best ways to learn to code.

Want to Learn More About Becoming a Digital Nomad?

Check out my articles on using Paypal and Venmo while traveling and on using Google Fi as a digital nomad.

I also can coach you 1:1 on how to become a digital nomad. Email me at alexwhite5d@gmail.com. I also do life coaching for people who want to reconnect to their spirituality, and people who want to get out of their own way and start realizing their dreams.

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