Is it possible to travel full-time? Well, according to one man, that answer is a resounding yes. Patrick Schulte is his name and travelling is his game. He, his wife, Ali, and their two kids have circumnavigated the world by boat and have driven around in a 1958 Volkswagen van by land. And what’s more astonishing, they’ve been doing it for 20 years. So how can someone afford to travel full-time like Schulte? Simple: become a professional, online trader.

Picking up trading at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange at a young age, Schulte quickly moved on to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), where he began trading a diverse range of markets, from the Dow Jones to soybean options.

Schulte quit his job in 2003, left Chicago and has been travelling full-time ever since. Initially travelling for 4 years thinking they’d return to a more ‘normal’ lifestyle, the travel bug clearly took hold for Schulte and his family, and they have never looked back. While 2007 wasn’t quite as accessible to be a self-employed trader as it is in today’s digital world, according to a guest post that Schulte wrote for Making Sense of Cents in 2022, “everyone else had been working overtime to turn just about everything into an online job, trading included.” Along the way, Schulte has written two books, Bumfuzzle in 2008 and Live on the Margin, in 2012 to document his experiences. The man even has his own website named after his first book, Bumfuzzle, where he posts on a regular basis (the latest update includes rather lovely pics of Taiohae Bay, in French Polynesia). Schulte also started a business, Wanderer Financial, where he teaches other people how to trade professionally, which features a daily live chat he hosts before the market opens. After 2 years of COVID-19 lockdowns, this sounds like the ideal lifestyle, to me.

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