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My top three takeaways from Exodus Summit 2022

Want my top three takeaways from Exodus Summit 2022?

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I’ma be bold with it and make a proclamation. I want to take a career break!  (on my terms, of course wink)

Is it a mid-life crisis? Nah, it’s really calling me.

Exodus Summit 2022 took place over the holiday weekend celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day. It’s co-hosted by Stephanie Perry and Roshida Dowe. It’s an online summit where the focus is on women black women who are interested in either moving abroad to live as an expat or to take a sabbatical to do something like long-term, slow traveling. 

This is my third year attending Exodus Summit. I found out about the summit from Halona Black who has been one of my friends on Facebook for a long time. She is an ex-pat living in Rwanda. I had booked a consult with Halona because I was intrigued by her ex-pat lifestyle and wanted to learn more about how she moved abroad. Our consult just so happened to coincide with the 1st year of Exodus Summit. I was able to get signed up and caught some of the summit mid-way through the event. Ever since then, I’ve been a part of the community, mostly passively lurking in the Facebook group. I chime in from time to time.  However, I have notifications turned on for Stephanie on Youtube and she had been drawing me further and further into wanting to, at a minimum, take a career break to travel for a good 6 months. 

The top three takeaways

I thought I’d share my top three takeaways with you all here because bay-bee this year was rich, both literally and figuratively.  The theme was “move abroad money.” The reason why I was interested particularly in attending this year is that I have a dream of taking a sabbatical to travel to Africa to visit 10 different countries. I’ve already been to Egypt and Ghana, but there are several others I still want to see, and I want to go back to Ghana. 

I want to see: 

  1. South Africa
  2. Tanzania
  3. Rwanda
  4. Kenya
  5. Nigeria
  6. Morocco
  7. Senegal 
  8. Madagascar 
  9. Sao Tome and Principe
  10. The Seychelles

Check out the video companion to this post. You can continue reading just below the video.

I feel like if I take a four to six-month sabbatical then I could just see everything that’s on my list while I’m there.  I want to do this before I’m retirement age so it’s important that I’d be able to work from anywhere and earn US dollars. To be more specific, I’d like to do this before 50 and I’m about to turn 47. It’s totally doable, but it requires mindset, a strategy, and action. More to come on that later.

I’m sharing this here on my blog and also on Youtube because I’d like some public accountability. Once I put it out there, people will ask me about it. I used to think nobody was REALLY paying attention to what I post on social media or even on my blog, but they do. There have been countless times someone mentions to me about what I post. I appreciate that. I’m glad ya’ll rock with me! 🤗❤️

I’m hoping you will ask me about my progress so I can actually tell you where I am, how far I’ve gotten in the process and I want to share some lessons along the way.

The first takeaway

The first takeaway from the summit was that I need to figure out exactly how much money I need to move abroad and that topic was brought to us by Adalia Aborisade. She delivered a workshop where she ran down how we need to arrive at our escape number.  If you want to take a sabbatical or move abroad to live the expat life, she covered it in her workshop. Now, I need to get to getting to figure out my escape number. I’ll definitely be outlining my number and my plan to get there here on the blog. So, stay tuned! Matter fact, sign up to get updates for when I release new content 🙂

I feel like we talk ourselves out of dreams sometimes because it doesn’t seem attainable. However, I don’t believe it will take a milli or even $100k for me to take a 6 month sabbatical. I just need to map it out. One of the reasons I started following Stephanie on youtube is because she actually took a one-year sabbatical and she said she spent fourteen thousand dollars to do it. She traveled around the world for a year doing house sitting. I’m not sure how prevalent house sitting is in the countries I want to visit on the continent, but I did fare very well in an inexpensive AirBnB in Accra, Ghana. 

Ultimately the amount of money I will need really depends on the lifestyle and standard of living I want to maintain. I also need to figure what I’m going to do with my main residence while I’m gone. I could temporarily rent it out or I could find a housesitter. Renting it out would be best because that will generate income. In theory, I’d collect rent to cover the monthly expenses to at least break even. I have serious homework to do on this one to get the right strategy in place. I do believe God will make a way.  

The second takeaway

The second takeaway was that owning a travel business is a viable way to earn money while working from home, traveling or living abroad. Dr. Kimberly West got my entire life together during her workshop. She has a travel business and she talked about running a travel business to fund your luxury expat or exodus lifestyle. Her session is one of the main reasons I committed to attend the summit this year. I have been contemplating being a travel agent for a few years now. Mostly because I went to host small group trips. I’ve looked into it a couple of different times and it seemed cost prohibitive. However, Dr. Kim dropped the gems in her session and gave us a downloadable toolkit with the nuts and bolts to get started. After listening to her Workshop, I went right on over and did my research on host agencies and signed with one. So I’m a travel agent now! More deets coming in the near future. 

I won’t lie, imposter syndrome has been creeping in a bit because selling travel is such a departure from what I’ve been known for in the past. However, it’s important that I move towards the next version of me and what I dream of for my future. I’m clear that I don’t want to have to show up to an office every day for work. I know it sounds cliche, but I want out of the rat race. I’m thankful to be able to work from home 2 days a week. That said, the other 3 days, I still have to commute, park at a satellite lot, take a shuttle bus and walk a half mile each way to get to and from my office to the shuttle stop. I could park closer, but that’s an additional $70/mo that I’m not willing to pay. 

The next version of my life will not involve me making, packing & shipping orders for a physical products business. That’s hella taxing and difficult to scale. To be totally transparent, I’m tired of working that hard. It was hard! Ya’ll hear me? At some point, I plan to talk about all the lessons I learned (failures) along the way for various ventures. This next version of my life will involve ease, clear boundaries and solid business planning. 

So, I’m thankful that Dr. Kim helped me connect the dots to see how I can start my travel business for fairly low cost. There is training and a time commitment involved, but it makes sense for me because I love to travel. When I come back from destinations, my people always want to know why I didn’t invite them. These group trips will be a way for ya’ll to travel with me. For our 1st group trip, we’re headed to Ghana in 2023. Once the details have been finalized, I’ll be sharing. In the meantime, get on the waitlist to get notified. 

The other reason I’m interested in travel planning is that I’d like to start offering transformation retreats for Black women in the childless not by choice community. We are an underserved group. It’s important to me that we have sacred spaces to heal, arrive at acceptance and re-imagine life without children and find our joy. 

The third takeaway

The third takeaway from the summit was that I need to focus on my YouTube channel.  I need a solid content strategy when I’m consistent with creating good quality content for the blog and Youtube, it can be monetized as a stream of income. 

As I mentioned earlier up the post, I have a lot of insightful information from my entrepreneurial endeavors. I’ve been tinkering around on Beyonce’s internet since 2007 when I 1st started selling soap. I’ve learned a lot of lessons (I’m trying my hardest not to call them failures, lol). At this point, I know what to do and what not to do. Also, video content will go hand in hand with the travel business because I will need to use video content for marketing.  

Now for a bonus takeaway. Baby, I may or may not be getting an onlyfans because chile Ms. Minny Mars she gave us the blueprint on getting to these coins. I learned that you don’t necessarily have to show your face or your grace to get coins on OF. There are men that are paying top dollar for feet pics. 🧐💰

To wrap this up, Stephanie and Roshida advised us to focus on one stream of income. While the summit gave us 21 different ways to make money, you obviously cannot focus on all 21. It’s impossible to do all things well (only God does all things well.) So I have chosen to focus on 2, but they are related.

Thanks for taking the time to read my three takeaways from Exodus Summit 202.  I should note that I am not an affiliate for, nor am I a paid spokesperson for Exodus Summit 2022. This is just my personal take. It get’s 5 stars from me. Excellent and I highly recommend it. You still get the replays over on their website. I’ll see you all next time. 

Sending hugs, love and inspiration your way,

Meredith

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