Despite his humble beginnings, Ward’s future as a man who gets paid handsomely to travel the world wouldn’t have seemed to shocking to people who knew him as a child, since he says he always had a strain of wanderlust even before he had the means to satisfy it: In the United States, Ward saved all he could working as a summer camp counselor, and ended up in Asia, earning around $650 a month teaching English for two years. Then, he had the bright idea to make a $100 investment in a professional website in 2010, a website that eventually attracted droves of readers: That’s the dream, isn’t it? By the time 2012 drew to a close Ward was making as much as $40,000 per month doing what he loved, and what started as a simple travel blog exploded into a full-blown digital media company called Step4WardMedia. Through this company he’s built and purchased more than 100 different websites, and it’s earned him more than a million bucks to date. Three years ago he was able to purchase an apartment in Thailand for use in those rare instances when he’s not on the road, and paid for it with $90,000 – in cash! With his newly improved cash flow, Ward has been able to afford just about anything, but he says he’s kept his lifestyle simple – even if you’re pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars, it pays to save up if travel is your main priority, which it’s always been for Ward. As if to prove that, earlier this year he fulfilled his goal of visiting all 197 countries in the world, and he also recently started up a charitable organization called Give Back Give Away. Even though he’s hit the big 1-9-7 in countries traveled, Ward isn’t planning on stopping now. It makes sense given the impressive amount of revenue he’s been able to generate for himself through travel (a dynamic that gets plenty of attention on his blog), but one gets the sense that he’d still be a chronic traveler even if he was still making $650 a month:
