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How-to Dismantle Your Life, Lesson One: Credit Cards

My wife and I are taking a very extended trip to south-east Asia to travel and volunteer for a year (or more…) - long enough that I consider the move “indefinite.” That means you’ve got “shut down” activities to contend with - i.e.: arranging a sibling to come over and water your plants is not going to cover you. Instead you need to tackle everything from selling or renting your house, getting rid of your car, quitting your job, getting your investments and retirement assets sorted, and everything in between.

I’ve been working through a tonne of this stuff over the last few months (which accounts in part for my low post volume here). In the spirit of helpfulness I’d like to share some of my learnings for anyone else that makes a similarly exciting and challenging choice.

First Lesson: CREDIT CARDS

Well managed credit, as anyone knows, is a tremendous asset. When you’re on the road, dealing with lots of different currencies, banking systems, and so on, credit cards become an even more important asset, giving you flexibility and access to resources where debit cards and US dollars fear to tread. [image credit: wikipedia]

Here’s some of the key reasons to hold onto those cards and take them with you:

1. They may work: They’ll work in places your debit cards won’t, and the more options you have to try at a recalcitrant Bangkok bank machine, they happier you’ll be.
2. Emergency resources: Credit cards also usually have emergency numbers: my Mastercard, for instance, had an international collect-call number to help get you sorted if you can’t get your card working somewhere. This becomes really important if your bag gets stolen - that 1-800 number can help you get back on your feet after a catastrophic wallet-loss.
3. Insurance: Many cards can come with additional insurance - on cars that you may rent, major purchases you may make, trip cancellation insurance, life & health insurance, and so on. Of course, YMMV depending on your bank and card options, so be sure and compare. That being said, I’m taking one “platinum” card that’s no-fee, and carries car insurance.

Those are the primary reasons I’m taking my cards. Now, here’s what I’m doing to get them ready:

1. PIN numbers: You can attach a PIN number to any credit card. Beyond the advantage of increased security, PINning your card will let you use it at bank machines to withdraw cash in local currencies. Good for where debit cards may work less consistently, or if you (shudder) run out of cash entirely.
2. Share your travel plans: Call your credit card issuer and tell them your travel plans. Otherwise, most credit issuer’s anti-fraud policies will swoop into action and lock your account when they see purchase activity shift suddenly from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Tell them your departure date, return date, and the countries you’ll be visiting while away.
3. Cancel non-essential cards, take the basics: I killed all of my department store / gas station / promotional / etc. credit cards. I’m taking with me a Visa, a Mastercard, and an American Express. The thinking is that a Sears Card won’t do me much good in Bangladesh, and leaving it locked up at home somewhere leaves open a window (however small) that it will be abused in some way (identity theft, data breach, etc.) - which is difficult to handle if you’re in touch only intermittently and trying to fix it from the other side of the world. Cancel non-essentials to minimize your exposure.
4. Carry cards from different issuers: Each of my three cards is from a different issuer, the hope being that if the transaction system used by one doesn’t work, a different one will. Spread your bets around the table a bit.
5. Figure out how to get statements online: If you’re using your card, you’ll want to pay it off periodically. This means accessing statement balances online - so make sure that you’re familiar with your card’s online account management tools and can get that statement balance. Note: there’s an element of risk here in that you’ll likely be using sketchy internet cafes to deal with your sensitive financial details; I’m not sure what the work around might be.
6. Discipline! Create a payment schedule for yourself: Its easy to forget to actually pay your card balance if you’re not getting a paper statement in the mail to prompt you to do so. Pick a day of the month to be the day that get the aforementioned statement balance and then log into your online banking account and pay it. Make sure you stick to that schedule, availability of internet access permitting. The last thing you want to do is have your account locked up or run into other problems because you’ve forgotten to pay a balance for several months.
7. Leave a copy behind: If you run into trouble with your cards, it can be very helpful to have someone in your home country that can go to bat for you with the card issuer without incurring long-distance phone bills (and during normal office hours). To that end, I photocopied the front and back of each card and am leaving a copy (along with a recent statement) with family here.

So there you go - those are the steps I’m taking. If you’ve got any others I’d love to hear them. No doubt as my travels commence I’ll have updates and additions, so take each of these with a grain of salt.

credit travel

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I’m Headed to South East Asia for a year…

The headline says it all. My wife and I have rented out our home, given away our car, taken leaves or quit our jobs, and are in the process of packing and storing everything we own. I’ve been waiting to announce it until both of our workplaces and friendship circles are in the loop - which now they are. (image credit: wikipedia)

January 28th, we head from Winnipeg to Victoria and visit friends and family until Feb. 1, when we head to Singapore. From Singapore, our intent is to explore Malaysia for a few weeks before heading to the jungle river deltas of Bangladesh to meet up with the Hands On Disaster Response volunteer crew, working to get communities back on their feet after the devastation of Cyclone Sidr. Were hoping to be there at least a month.

From Bangladesh, its to Bhutan (home of the measure “Gross Domestic Happiness”), and then likely back to Bangkok and the Indochinese peninsula (Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos). Depending on finances, we’ll likely end up in Taiwan for an extended period where friends in place already can help us land gainful employment.

During this time, my hope is to live the wandering blogger / entrepreneur’s life: laptop in hand, I plan to continue writing here (and elsewhere), and working on my various projects as time and Internet availability permits.

I’m hoping that the exposure to new people, places, languages, foods, ways of living, societies, religions, and so on provides creative impetus for my next decade of entrepreneurial and career growth, as the academic greenhouse of university life did for the last.

One fascinating thing about this trip already is the how deeply intertwined it is with technology. The volunteer group? Found via digg and a YouTube video. The bulk of my communication with friends in Singapore has been via SMS. My wife and I are packing a laptop, several digital cameras, and signing up for a Flickr Pro account. We’ll be staying in touch via VOIP calls via laptop, email, Facebook, and SMS. We’ve got generally awesome hands-on accounts of everywhere were headed from the thousands of travel blog posts that have been written.

The last time I went traveling for an appreciable amount of time was 11 years ago, for a six month trip to Australia. At that time I didn’t even have an email address. One thing is abundantly clear already (see the previous paragraph!), before even getting on a plane: The world has been fundamentally changed by 11 years of the internet. As one plans a trip like this, you can’t help but feel at times that the world has gotten smaller as result; those moments, however, are balanced by the fact that for every moment of perceived smallness, you’re introduced to a thousand places, people, and opportunities that you’d never have known about otherwise.

So: I hope that you’ll join me in exploring a new part of the world by keeping an eye on this blog - which I hope to populate with great tech content from an entirely new perspective. If post volume here has slumped over the last few months, I apologize in advance: the act of decommissioning one’s life is complicated and eats up a tonne of time. If post volume continues to vary wildly, I apologize for that too, and blame it on the vagaries of connectivity and the availability of beach-side bars.

Thanks to everyone who’s read, commented, or otherwise participated in this blog to date - I’m looking forward to keeping it going in 2008!

-R

travel volunteering

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Trippish.com - Roadtrip Weather Forecasting, a Few Features Short of Great

Trippish.com executes a simple mashup to provide a very useful roadtrip planning tool, adding weather forecasts to driving directions. Using Microsoft’s Live Local, Trippish provides similar route planning features as (obviously) Microsoft, Google, and MapQuest.

On top of this, Trippish offers…

1. Weather forecasts along your route, mapped with informative icons, and showing more detail when hovered over. (picture below)
2. An “ideal start time” calculator that uses multi-day forecasts and the length of your proposed trip to determine the best start time to minimize your exposure to lousy driving conditions. The site notes (under “What is Trippish”) that the algorithm is still under refinement.

Trippish bears the beta tag, and it shows. While the core feature of adding forecasts to your route seems to work fine (I tried it out from Winnipeg to Minneapolis, which is a trip I’ll be making in a few weeks), the site is missing to features that I generally take for granted.

So, here’s 4 suggestions for Trippish as they work through their beta that would make the site an addition to my permanent bookmarks collection:

1. URL Publishing: Sharing is by email only. To get the URL above, I had to “share” the map with myself by sending myself an email from Trippish, click the link in the email, and then grab the URL.
2. Clean URL’s: The URL’s are awful. Hopefully Trippish will be adding a nice URL scheme for map “publishing” as time goes on - “trippish.com/username/spring2007″ for example.
3. Membership Features: There’s no membership features for saving your own maps. This feature has particular relevance with the weather forecasts; it would be great to check and re-check an itinerary as the departure time drew closer. Not that you can’t do it with the current setup, but a decent url-publishing service and/or membership features would add a lot of utility.
4. Ditch the Sidebar: Yargghh - the sidebar menus are horrible for navigation and info presentation, breaking every commonsense UI-design rule. Given the feature depth on the site, and good inverted “L” two-column layout would make parsing and using the site a lot simpler.

I know my parents would have appreciated Trippish in their bi-annual migration from Victoria, BC to Palm Desert, CA, and I know I’ll be checking back for that aforementioned trip to Minneapolis. Digg seemed to like it, which bodes well. In the meantime, I’ll be watching their beta progress, and watching Google’s activity to see if Trippish is about to get clobbered.

directions, maps, roatrip, travel, trippish weather

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