The Queen Is Looking for Her Very Own Chip or Joanna Gaines — and It Could Be You

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Queen Elizabeth may be the longest-running and most beloved royal of all time, but she didn’t get there alone. For her entire life, Queen Elizabeth has had a trusty staff by her side to help her plan her every move, make her every meal, and even assist her in carrying her purse. And now, the Queen is looking to add one more member to her staff. She’s looking for a property project manager. And that project manager could be you. 

But, what exactly does a property project manager do? According to the job listing, the person joining the in-house team will “manage an extremely varied portfolio of major projects across the Royal estate in London.” The person will prepare specifications and schedules of work for home projects and renovations. He or she will find and appoint contractors and ensure work is delivered on time and within budget. Basically, for all you HGTV fans out there, she's looking for a royal Joanna Gaines.

As for who will be a good fit for the role, the royal household is looking for someone who comes with plenty of project management experience. The posting adds that the experience was “ideally gained within historic occupied buildings.” 

The person must be an expert at managing end-to-end projects from procurement, financial governance, and contract management. The person must be supremely organized and can work under tight deadlines and is a whiz at “anticipating issues.” 

The person who fills the role must be a “natural communicator and collaborator used to working with colleagues, contractors and in-house teams, you'll quickly build credibility at all levels.” Additionally, they must also be an “internal customer champion, with agility and resourcefulness, you'll deliver projects that everyone will be proud about.” 

The job will require someone to work 37.5 hours a week, Monday to Friday. In return, the person will receive a salary of £40,000 - £50,000 ($48,446 - $60,582) dependent upon experience. Think you’ve got what it takes? Apply here, but act fast as the job listing expires on Aug. 4. 

How to Ethically Volunteer Anywhere in the World

I’m frequently asked about volunteering overseas, and unfortunately I don’t know much about it. So today, I’m turning the blog over to friend and volunteer tourism expert Shannon O’Donnell from the blog A Little Adrift. She’s been volunteering around the world for years and recently published a book on the subject. She’s the expert, so without further ado, here’s Shannon’s advice on finding good volunteer opportunities.

A foundational motivation underpinning the past four years I’ve been traveling around the world has been the idea that serving others would help me find clearer direction for my life. There are many ways to better understand and respect other cultures as we travel, but for me, the most effective has been volunteering.

I left home to travel for many reasons, and I had many preconceived ideas about what I would find outside the confines of the United States. Traveling dispelled many of those notions almost immediately, but it was only when I slowed down and spent time volunteering that I was able to sink into the travel experience in a way that goes beyond photographing the major temples, churches, and iconic sites.

When I first left in 2008 on what I thought would simply be a year-long round-the-world trip, I was overwhelmed by how convoluted and ethically ambiguous the international volunteer industry seemed. Simple searches to find projects I could support on my trip yielded a bevy of companies touting volunteer experiences in the poorest countries in the world and yet costing many thousands of dollars — it didn’t make sense, and it nearly discouraged me from doing any work at all.

But once I traveled, researched, and learned, I realized there are many quality, ethical options out there for travelers interested in volunteering, but finding them is tougher than it should be. It’s this quandary that motivated me to write my book, The Volunteer Traveler’s Handbook.

I know what it’s like to want to volunteer and travel but to be confused by the sometimes huge fees, the equivocal ethics, and the sheer number of options. With that in mind, I jumped at the opportunity Matt gave me to share five clear steps on how to find and vet good-fit volunteer projects.

Step One: Understand Development and Aid

During my first year volunteering internationally, I overlooked this first step and instead fueled my volunteer efforts with enthusiasm and little knowledge, and as a result I unfortunately supported a few projects that I now see had fundamental ethical issues. One of the hardest things for new, eager volunteers to understand is that not all organizations — even nonprofits — are doing good, necessary work that ethically develops the communities and ecosystems where we volunteer our time. For that reason, take a step back from the planning and instead learn more about core problems facing development projects when they bring in Western volunteers and ideas.

Two core themes I analyze in my book center on how too many volunteer projects can actually foster dependency on international aid and compromise the dignity of the people they are trying to help. Before you volunteer, your job is to understand the macro-industry around volunteering. I’ve collected a list of fantastic books, TED Talks, and websites that provide context for international aid conundrums and the interplay between volunteering and development work. Each one of these three books and articles offers a good start toward broad-level understanding:

Step Two: Choose a Good-Fit Type of Volunteering

There are an overwhelming number of ways to volunteer, and since I started traveling more than four years ago, I’ve tried most of them. I used a placement company on my round-the-world trip to find a monastery in Nepal where I could teach, I’ve taken recommendations from travelers on the road, and now I most often volunteer independently with small organizations I find organically as I travel. Your next step is to assess your time commitment and your personal volunteer motivations.

• Independent volunteering: Independent volunteering is ideal for long-term travelers and those on a flexible round-the-world trip who don’t know when or where they might be traveling. There’s usually little or no facilitation, so you must arrange all travel, accommodation, and food. In exchange, the fees are low or free. You’re traditionally working directly with the project or organization on a very hands-on level.
• Placement companies: Middlemen take a fee to match you with a specific type of volunteer project and usually offer a medium level of facilitation. Ideal for very specific or niche volunteer experiences and either short or long time commitments.
• Voluntours: These offer a high level of facilitation and are ideal for those on a short vacation who want to pack in a lot of sites with a nod to service integrated into the trip. Voluntours are expensive, and the ratio of touring to service can vary greatly. Usually, the bulk of your fee goes to the tour company itself.
• Social enterprises: All travelers can support the small businesses working in their own local communities for change. If you can only volunteer for a very short time, consider nixing the volunteering and instead infusing your money into local communities as you travel. Volunteering is not always the right choice on every trip, but you can still do good by choosing restaurants, shops, and business with an underlying social mission.

Step Three: Research Organizations in Your Interest Area

Now we’re down to the nitty-gritty details. Travelers too often skip the first two steps and risk having an unfulfilling trip at best and doing harm with their volunteering efforts at worst. My prep work for a new volunteer trip starts with a search of the major volunteer databases to see what projects exist in my interest area. I then use a spreadsheet or an Evernote folder to track the details.

These websites allow you to sort and sift through the whole gamut of types of volunteering (conservation, teaching, medical, etc.) and requirements (family, timing, location). For now, simply fill your spreadsheet or folder with projects that excite you, and in the next step we’ll look at vetting potential volunteer projects.

• Grassroots Volunteering: A small, growing resource of free and low-cost organizations and social enterprises all over the world. This site is my personal passion project that I launched in 2011.
• Go Overseas: This site collates volunteering placements from many companies and returns a lot of variety in the search results.
• Idealist.org: A large database that occasionally returns some fantastic, small, niche organizations.
• Pro World: A wonderful middleman placement company with community-driven projects and offering internships, volunteering, and study-abroad programs.
• Volunteer HQ: Very fair placement fees even with the refundable registration fee taken into account, and they seem to choose projects with a long-term community approach.
• WWOOF: Working on organic farms is a wonderful way to give time to farm, agriculture, and sometimes conservation projects. (Matt has previously provided a full guide on how to WWOOF on your travels.)

Step Four: Ask the Right Questions

Vetting the volunteer projects you researched is your next step and allows you to narrow your list. Diligently follow through with this stage of the process because there are heartbreaking consequences to supporting projects that are not sensitive to the needs of the people and places they serve. An example— and a cautionary tale — is the current orphanage scandals reported in Africa and Cambodia; something as innocuous as volunteering at an orphanage often has sad and heartbreaking side effects on the children.

Frustratingly, there are disparate issues within each volunteering niche, so I wrote up a full list of questions to ask your volunteer organization on my volunteer site. The core issues most volunteer projects face come down to:

• Where is the money going? Look at placement fees and how much of that fee goes back into the community or projects.
• How is the organization working with the community? Have they asked the local community if this project is something that is wanted or needed? Find out if the organization is prepared to stick around and support the project or development work for potentially many years if that is needed, or leave altogether if not.
• What is expected of volunteers? What is the exact nature of the volunteer work, and what is the level of volunteer support on the ground?

When you’ve effectively questioned the organizations and projects that interest you, you’re only left with the personal decision of weighing time, costs, and project details to decide which one fits your volunteering goals. My 11-year-old niece and I volunteered during our seven-month trip to Southeast Asia, and my volunteer goals then were quite different than when I travel solo. My various projects over the years have reflected my differing circumstances…as will yours!

Step Five: Take a Deep Breath

The single decision to weave international service into my round-the-world travels changed the direction of my life. I left the US back in 2008 confused about the direction I should take. I left behind my previous dreams as an actor in Los Angeles and hoped that travel and volunteering would help me refocus. It has done that and more: the regular integration of service in my life gave me a new lens through which to experience the world and an ability to experience communities and cultures in a way that simply traveling through a country does not.

Once you’ve picked your volunteer experience, take a deep breath before you tackle the planning phase and those practicalities. I have travel resources and volunteer resources when you’re ready for that, but pause first. It’s easy to get bogged down in the details, but the larger picture is very rewarding when you’re able to sit down in the airplane — your bags packed, vaccinations done, details planned — and simply anticipate the new experiences and perspectives you’re about to face.

Shannon O’Donnell has been traveling the world since 2008; she travels slowly and volunteers in small communities along the way. She recently published The Volunteer Traveler’s Handbook, and her travel stories and photography are recorded on her travel blog, A Little Adrift.

NM Case Study Project: Shifting Mindset and Creating Budgets

A few months ago, I announced a new case study program, in which I would work with a cross-section of readers and help them plan and execute their trips, walking them through all the stages of travel planning and creating a roadmap toward their dream. And I said that along the way, I’d share their stories as way to inspire and help you plan your own trip.

Four months ago, I introduced you to the case study participants, and now it’s time to update you on their progress! I’m excited to share their stories with you.

Jianne

Jianne is a 27-year-old office worker from Manila striving to take a two-week vacation next year. Living in the Philippines, she has no access to travel hacking but does have a plethora of visa restrictions and a weak currency. And since her family won’t let her list her apartment on Airbnb, we had to get creative.

But the first step was getting Jianne to change her mindset, since she’s a bit of a spender. She likes to shop! My first goal was to get her on a budget and change her spending behavior. We needed to get her to only spend on her needs and reinforce the idea that any extra spending delayed her trip.

You can’t know what to cut if you don’t know where the money is going, so I got Jianne to track all her expenses so we could see where the low-hanging fruit was. Immediately, we cut back on movies, eating out, taxi rides, and her shopping. Jianne had never tracked her expenses, so right away we saw there were also a lot of little things she could trim back without changing her lifestyle.

In the beginning, Jianne started off strong, but in the last couple of months she stumbled. She stopped tracking her expenses, went out a bit more, and overall, fell off the wagon. But perfection is not the goal, and she realized her mistakes. Now, she’s recommitted and has since started working harder at tracking and cutting her expenses. To put it in her words:

For the past months, we’ve been tracking and trying to cut down my expenses. At first, it sounded easy but when I started doing it, it was harder than I imagined. It’s been helpful targeting my unnecessary expenses – not only for the trip but as a personal habit as well. I realized that you need determination and focus on what your priorities are when you’re trying to spend, even just for a snack.

Shifting how you view and spend money is a hard process. We’re undoing a lot of bad habits, and I expected some dips. But we’re back on the right track again. And that’s important to remember — it’s easy to create this new budget and think you’re going to change overnight — but you’re not. It takes time, and if you stumble, it’s better to step back, realize your mistake, and start fresh. Jianne may not be monetarily closer to her trip but she’s mentally a lot closer and I feel we’ve turned a corner.

Diane

Diane, a 59-year-old from Canada, is on a fixed income. She and her husband live in the countryside on their pension. There’s no way for her to increase her income or take lots of advantage of the sharing economy like Airbnb (and that’s not something they really want to do anyway).

Diane has dreamed of traveling for years but never really thought it was within her grasp. Like Jianne, Diane had to find a way to reduce expenses so she can save most of her limited income. She has a retirement savings account, but we want to avoid tapping into that as much as possible since that has to last many years to come!

Like with Jianne, we started tracking her expenses. She got a cheaper phone plan, stopped eating out, began planning her meals to avoid buying unneeded food, and stopped making unnecessary purchases from the dollar store. Moreover, since she is in Canada, we got her a TD Aeroplan card so she can start racking up miles toward a free flight to Australia next year. This is really important because, since she is on a fixed income, there’s only so much we can save but since we have a year until she goes away, that gives us plenty of time to get miles for free flights. Diane was leaving money on the table by paying for her expenses with a debit card.

Diane has been working really hard and has seen incredible results. She went from saving $20-50 CAD a month to saving over $500 CAD! She has learned to frame everything as “This takes away from my trip,” and her family has really been on board with her doing this.

Most importantly, she’s convinced her husband to cut back on his smoking. Not only is this phenomenal from a health point of view but financially it saves them a lot of money that can go toward her Australian dream trip. Once her husband realized how much he was spending on cigarettes and how much this meant to his wife, he cut back a lot.

Here are her own words on her progress:

For over 10 years, I’ve said that I want to go on a world trip, and thanks to Matt I can now say that it’s going to happen. He has helped guide me through the obstacles of thinking I don’t have enough time or money. He has shown me ways to cut unnecessary expenses that helped fund my trip and even live better when I return. My husband has cut down his smoking, I have my first rewards credit card, and finally feel I’m making progress towards my dream trip to Australia next year.

Given Diane’s fixed income, there’s not much we can do but cut expenses. We already saved $3,000 and, at the current rate, we’ll add another $5,000 to her bank account.

Jeremy
Jeremy has chosen to bow out of the case study program. I hope he gets to where he wants to go!

Sander and Jolien

This couple from Holland is in great shape. They are working until they go away, and they make more than enough money to afford their trip. They don’t really need my help on the financial side, though I’ve helped them get better at tracking their expenses (which they like doing), create a separate bank account for their savings, and work up an ideal budget for their trip. They are on track to leave in June with plenty of funds. Here’s them in their own words:

We have been working with Matt for over four months now. He helped us provide insights into our finances. This way we could decrease our expenses by cancelling unnecessary expenses like coffee to go at the train station or ice creams. Matt also gave us a great tip: grade all expenses you want to make. If you grade it a 7 or higher, you are allowed to buy it. Lower, you cannot. This is something we need to work on continually, because it is really easy to buy something on an impulse.

As I got them to shift into a more frugal mindset, we’ve reduced our calls to once-a-month check-ins, but starting in January, we’ll start looking into flights, gear, insurance, work visas, and everything else.

The Brandon family

Beside those updates above, today I’m introducing you to the Brandons, new members of the case study program. I wanted to enlist a family also to show that it’s not all about being young or traveling solo.

The Brandons are a middle-American couple from Indiana with two young sons. The husband, Michael, is retired and wife, Jennifer, is a teacher taking a year off to explore the world with her sons before her oldest enters high school.

Jennifer is doing most of the planning, so I’ll be working with her on how to save for four, get into travel hacking to earn points and miles, and deal with the booking and practical aspects of travel. They don’t have any debt outside their mortgage and save roughly $2,000 USD per month while having $10,000 already saved for the trip. As they want to spend extended time in Europe, they have a long way to go before they leave in September 2016!

I think they’ll be a good example for other families who, while maybe not planning a year away, can see how to afford a trip for four, cut their expenses, and use travel hacking tips to lower flight and accommodation costs!

So that’s everyone’s progress. The first real step toward successful world travel is getting your finances in order. That’s been the challenge over the last 3-4 months. But now that everyone is on the right track and saving money, we can move to the next phase and start planning the actual trip. That’s where the real fun begins!

Until the next update!

– Matt