Digital Nomad, IT & SEO Consultant, Travel Blogger and Investor
A very welcome to my brief website. My name is Chris Wilpert. I am originally from Germany and born 1986. For a long time this domain was used to be a personal website for my acting career as a young men, but that is a long time ago and I never saw the reason to change it or even take it down. I want to use the website to give people an idea of my life. I will give you a glimpse of my private life and also a brief introduction of my various business activities. Maybe, over time, I will extend the one or other section, but for know I want to keep it simple and clean. If you have question don’t hesitate to write me an E-Mail (email{at}chris-wilpert{dot}de).
I live and travel as a Digital Nomad. That simply means I work location independently. This “Digital Nomad lifestyle” is sometimes really annoying to describe, because a lot of people sell it as a kind of holiday. I think people, who work at beaches can barely work effectively. Whatever people may tell you, make your own opinion about it. Not to forget everyone is different. If you are not already rich you may need to work to earn your money. It is like all kinds of work, but depending on what you do you have some more flexibility and freedom. So, I do have several income sources during traveling.
How does that look in detail for me? Well, I spend 3-4 days a week working and the rest of the time I explore places, do sports, watch movies and all the stuff you do at home as well. I roughly change the country every one to three months. That depends on the size of the country and what I can do there. Sometimes I rent an apartment for a month and use it as a base. Sometimes I travel like a backpacker from City to City and spend some more days at each place, because I also need to work. I plan to do that for around 5-6 years (I will need 4-5 more years due to Covid and slow traveling). I want to see as many countries as possible and maybe figure out where to live one day. Not to forget that I would like to find the right woman on my side one day…
I often hear “you are living the dream” and you may start thinking that as well. But let me explain the biggest con for me: You simply don’t have a good social life. Making friends for a couple of days, often getting involved with shallow conversation or the lack intimacy even if you have lovers and romances. This life is not for everyone. There are just two things I can give away at this point. Do what you feel like – no matter what it is there is a way to reach that goal. Appreciate what you have! Don’t look for things other people have. Make the best of what you got.
Please always check the latest status on my Linkedin Profile. At the moment I work as a Contractor (SAP SuccessFactors Lead Consultant) at Orbis People part-time and remote. I maybe have to go back and give you a brief history of my SuccessFactors career. After my first world tour 2012/2013 I was looking for a job in Germany. I had a couple of interviews via Skype at the end of my trip and there were two opportunities. I decided to work as a HR+IT Consultant in Frankfurt at Promerit.
There, I start learning about SuccessFactors. Well, you may never heard about it, right? SuccessFactors is a cloud suite with different modules around human resources from SAP. What I exactly do there? I help medium and big size companies to configure their purchased cloud module in SuccessFactors. I was the module owner for Employee Central (everything around core data in human resource).
I did not stay long at promerit. After a brief period of being self-employed I switched to iProCon Ldt. in the United Kingdom. That was a start of a beautiful career with Director Sven Ringling. For many many years, I worked along with Sven in different Companies. Now, I am focused mainly on Recruiting, Recruiting Marketing and People Analytics.
Let me start with what is SEO (search engineering optimization). In a nutshell you help customer to get better positions in Google and Co. It is a very interesting and kind of mysterious work as nobody knows the complete Google algorithmic (Fun Fact: Even Google said that nobody in the company knows all details of the complete algorithmic). There are some well known ranking factors (200) and a lot of A-B-Testing, but I think you got the basic idea.
During my first world tour I earned already some money with my travel blog. Next to the travel blog SEO becomes a hobby. It was logical for me to be self employed after working as an IT Consultant. I had signed up the business and decided to bring it to the next level. I created a website (in German – seo-lift.de) and also started a second travel project with a different concept. With the income of my two travel websites I already could survive (enough to survive, not enough to have a great life). I did had some customer and do some seo work, but mostly i build small websites. I still do some professional SEO for customers, but I have the benefit to select wisely as I don’t have that much time anymore and I don’t consider it as my main income.
Acquiring new customers was really not my thing and I got stuck with a couple customers in a year. For some other reasons I started to work in London, but kept my SEO Business to do some small stuff, but I moved the business from Germany to America (not living in Germany, but paying the highest rate of tax was not funny).
It all started around 2009. I was a business computing student and seriously thinking about all the money I earn as a working student or I already had on my bank account. Just learned, that inflation reduce the value of my money each year and banks start to pay less interest. So what to do? As a teenager I already invested couple thousand in a fund (Templeton Growth), but the time for selling was bad. I had a bad experience and didn’t want that again. I just learned more about stock markets and found out that Funds are nothing else than couple of different assets. Some stock, other in properties, currencies or whats so ever. I research about business numbers (fundamental information) and chartists, who put lines in the history of a course and try to predict the future through patterns.
I quickly find my first investment. It was Bank of America. It took month to earn some money with it. Ups and downs, but I got lucky (as a lot of beginners) and earned couple of hundred Euros. But it took sooo long and I wanted more. So I learned more about Options, Certifications and later CFD’s. Playing Stock games and play around with Demo Accounts. After 2-3 years and during my the time I was self employed I also become a Day Trader. Day Trader trade with a high leverage and hold positions for just minutes to hours (not really often over night).
Before my first travel, I made some good money and earned around 6-7k with the stock markets. I also learned my lesson about losing money. It happens twice in my trading career that I lost everything I had (once 5 Digit and once 6 Digit). At the end, I am very glad for the experience of losing everything because you just really learn it the hard way. I don’t do day trading anymore and my time horizontal changed back and forth in recent years. It just takes too much time and energy to keep up – also mentally too exhausting after all these years. I currently focus on Expert Advisers, automatic algorithm that trade for you and mid- / long-term investments.
In 2019 I fulfilled one big milestone of owning real estate. I bought 3 Studios in Medellin, Colombia. It was a rollercoaster because I normally planned to buy a flat for myself but Covid came and changed a lot. I also realized that Studios are better because I can rent them away when I am not in Colombia. So here we are with 3 AirBnB Studios.
One Studio was ready and already operative. It is fully managed and two were in pre-construction. I still manage two of the Airbnbs myself. An example of the one I manage myself you see on the right side. Two Airbnbs are next to each other and the concept is similar. It is a lot of work and sometimes a bit stressful but you only learn your business if you do it yourself. I am very proud and hope I can extend my offer in the future. Maybe something outside the City. Ideally, I stay in my own Airbnb when I visit Medellin.
Investing in real estate in a foreign country is not easy. In Colombia, it was difficult to get money inside the country and also mortgage is almost impossible for foreigners. There are also a lot of things to handle with Accountants, Lawyers and Notaries. I am not saying it is impossible but you have to deal with a different culture, rules, languages and structures. Nevertheless, it was worth the time and I am happy to see the outcome. The return on investments (ROI) is around 8-15% per year. The original plan is to keep the money in Colombia and invest in more real estate over time.
During my first world tour in 2012/2013 I created my first travel blog (In German – globesurfer.de). It was just for family, friends and saving my memories, but due to my technical background and some advanced SEO knowledge it becomes better and better. I originally started with the idea of a video travel blog and planned a video for each day. After 2 month I figured out that this is not worth it and created less videos and wrote more. Still have aver 200 videos from a 15 month long tour. Most of the videos are shitty and boring anyway =)
BUT the blog becomes popular after 6-8 month and also companies start to ask for a cooperation. I made some money with it and couldn’t believe it. Of course they all ripped me of at the beginning. I didn’t know anything. What is it worth to link them in an article? I discover Affiliate programs, Google Adsense and more. I start doing it a bit more professionally and things just go on… Most of the money I made with sponsored postings. Now it is a good mix with affiliates (commission from Amazon and Co,), Google Adsense and Sponsored Posting.
I also started a second project (German – backpacker-reise.de) with a different concept, because the first blog was just focused on my world tour. With this project I want to generate a second site with passive income and the goal to provide backpacking information for all countries in the world. It is doing great so far. Still invest a lot in content.
If everything goes right I plan to relaunch both projects with a new design in 2018, maybe early 2019. Earlier this year I started a 3rd blog project and podcast. I want to keep it secret for now, but if you are interested in topics like psychology, philosophy and sexual topics let me know. I still look for co-authors.
So, who is Chris Wilpert? Who I am? Should I go deep or flatly try to describe myself. No matter what I will write here you should meet me. It will be so hard to put me in words and you may not believe it or just don’t get the chemistry. Talk to me, tell me about you and lets learn from each other. Let me try to put some facts out and tell you where I wanna go in my life….
If I really need to describe myself I would say: direct, honest, open-minded, funny / sarcastic, sporty, smart, well traveled and spontaneous, who always says yes to adventures and doing crazy things. I do have a small obsession being in a clean environment (more less where I live and the bathroom) and also keeping it clean. After observing myself I would need to add that I can be stubborn and difficult to make compromises with. It is a result of traveling alone for such a long time. At least I am not that stingy anymore. I still look after my money, but you can’t imagine how much I kept everything for myself in my early years.
Some interesting facts are maybe that I consider myself as a buddhist, minimalist & feminist. I stand up for women, but I also have my own opinion about equal rights. Another thing, which is important to know: I still figure out what form of relationship works best for me with a partner. It is likely just happen one day but meanwhile it gives me a hard to time to find myself in a good social spot.
Much more important is where I want to go and where I see myself in 5 or 15 years. After my 2nd world tour I want to keep traveling but at a much slower pace. Maybe spending 3-6 months in one place. Just pick the places I love the most or want to get deeper into. I normally want to build 4 bases in the world but after buying my first apartments in Colombia I think it is a lot of effort and struggle. I will see how things turn out, but by the age of 40, I plan to settle a bit more.
At 40 I also don’t want to work anymore for the purpose of exchanging lifetime for money. I will always work and do things, but at the moment I do it for money. I wrote a financial goal here before but I think for some people it is hard to understand? With more wealth also comes a bit more responsibility and gratitude. Well I still work hard on different fronts and keep expanding businesses. The main thing is properly my long-term portfolio on the stocks and the investments I did and still do, with each penny I earn.