We are extremely proud to release the new Jet Set Zero website and trailer.  The entire team has dedicated the last 7 months of their lives to bring the show to where it is today, and we are all excited and amazed at how far we have made it and the support shown by our viewers.

We hope you enjoy watching our new work as much as we have enjoyed putting it together.

Thank you again to everyone that has given us support and advice.  You’re the ones who have made this possible.  So if you haven’t yet, add us on facebook, sign up for rss, follow us on twitter, and most importantly tell your friends.

Thanks again, and here’s to a another great season.

Thanks,
Jet Set Zero

Today we launched the newest iteration in a very long series of web designs with substantial help from our friend, designer Andy Collins. Check out his portfolio at inrgbwetrust.com.

We want to know what you think! Please leave us comments on this post, or email the web team at web [at] jetsetzero.tv.

As you likely ascertained from both our blog and episode 201, money is and will be a big issue in Tokyo. Before launching into that discussion, I’d like to catch everyone up on our financial situation, and I should start by summarizing the cost of Season 1.

A core thesis of Jet Set Zero is that a lifestyle of travel is possible on poverty-level wages: we started with $0 cash and have funded all our travels with easily accessible jobs. After a summer of suffering, we had saved enough to land in Vietnam with $3,859, to support us until we had steady income. We actually found teaching jobs within weeks, and while it took some time to accumulate a sustainable set of teaching hours, we did manage to refill our funds. So our travel-budget thesis was proven for Vietnam.

Dan used his teaching income to journey back home, so all the numbers I’ll include here are just for Rob, Brian, and I…

From Seattle: + $3,859
In Seattle, we lived as spartan a life as possible, eating on less than $1.20/person/meal, utilizing the public bus system, and foregoing restaurants, movies, long trips, even decent beer. It was hell, but it was only 3 months and you’d be surprised how far camaraderie can carry you: being poor is brutal, but being poor with your friends is a lot less miserable. In total, we pulled in $12,451 on 11 weeks of work. We managed to spend only $4,140 during the summer – food, utilities, transportation, phones, insurance, and 5 outings. Our total preparations for travel–tickets, VISA’s, vaccinations, expat insurance–came to $4352. So we survived the summer to land in Vietnam with $3859.

Teaching Revenue: + $6,788
In three months, for a combined total of around 450 hours of teaching, we made almost $7,000. We would have made more, but because we were only in Vietnam for 3 months, our school gave us limited hours. When YOU go to Vietnam to teach, you’ll stay for 1 year, so you’ll make far more money in 3 months’ time…

So in three months, our positive net assets were $10,647.

Accommodations: – $1,940
In our first guesthouse, we spent about $15/night for 2 doubles for a little over a month, but then Brian, Rob, and I moved to a new neighborhood, where we paid:
* $240/month for Brian’s single
* $280/month for Rob’s and my double, pictured to the left
* All in all, around $230/person/month is pretty damned good.

Food: – $1,652
Our eating adventures took us from 25 cent donuts to $30/lb fresh lobster, but we ate almost exclusively at local (non-western) food places, so we generally didn’t pay much. This food budget amounts to $6.12/person/day, which treated us to fried noodles, numerous hotpots, fresh avocado shakes, bird head and goat’s penis, dog, beating snake heart, small Vietnamese sandwiches, the occasional egg omelet, and of course, tons of Pho.

Coffee (Cafe Sua Da): – $102

Given that each coffee is roughly 55 cents, I thought it would be worth acknowledging that we purchased around 200 coffees in our time in Saigon. This also doesn’t include the innumerable coffees Rob and I made in our room in an attempt to save money, using a simple single-cup coffee drip. I suppose it’s a sad state of affairs when you’re making coffee to avoid a 55 cent price tag…

Beer: – $150
I know this may not seem like an intimidating number, but it doesn’t include the many beers our friends bought for us…and considering that beer costs about 50 cents for a big bottle, Saigon may have been harsh for both our lungs (pollution) AND our livers. Our favorites were Saigon Green – the domestic rice beer – and Bia Hoi – the fresh local beer on tap. We had to adjust to drinking beer with ice, but after awhile – eh, it’s beer, get used to it. Some of my favorite memories were sipping beer with friends, watching the lifeblood of Saigon flow through the streets, listening to the chorus (cacophony) of sounds, and letting the worries of the day slough off my shoulders.

Transit around Saigon: – $470
Lyhn (a.k.a. Bonus Hog) cost us $125 to buy and probably another $30 in repairs – she was a demanding mode of transit, somewhat like a sleek sports car…somewhat. Our rental bikes cost $50/month each, but we didn’t actually rent them until October. Gas cost us 60 cents/liter ($2.20/gallon), so we only spent around $45 total. Helmets were $10/each. Finally, there were some times we couldn’t motorbike, so we spent another $90 in taxi rides and Xe Oms (motorbike taxis).

Random Adventures: $100
Riding ostriches, grass skiing, amusement parks, waterslides, a couple dates, a LAN party, a movie or 2, a Thanksgiving celebration, some Karaoke mishaps, and a couple other rounds of fun at Saigon prices. Also, despite our best efforts, we didn’t actually pay for lots of this stuff due to our friends’ overwhelming hospitality, so the number above doesn’t necessarily reflect actual prices. It does, however, further demonstrate that our friends made our time in Vietnam what it was.

Trips Out and About: – $744
In truth, the only major trips we paid for were the journey to Nha Trang and our trek to Phu Quoc island. $744 paid for the following:
* Trains to/from Nha Trang; transit to/from Phu Quoc
* Chartered boat around the islands of Nha Trang
* Guesthouses in Nha Trang and bungalows on Phu Quoc
* Sustenance, including food, beer, and coffee
* Motorbike rentals for ripping around Phu Quoc island

Miscellaneous: – $125
* Cell phones ($30 each), sim cards ($5 each), and a handful of minutes recharges ($3 each)
* Totally legit software and DVD’s ($1 – $7 each)
* Shampoo and soap (very cheap, and certainly not expensive enough to justify how little we bought)
* Laundry (50 cents/kilogram, also not expensive enough to justify how little we did laundry)
* Tailored shirts ($15/each)
* Odds and ends from various markets

So in 3 months’ time, we had $5,364, meaning VICTORY! Starting with $0 in Seattle, we made enough to travel to Vietnam and not go broke. Moreover, in our last month, our teaching hours were ramping up, our spending was going down, and were getting a taste of what a lifestyle would be like for 1 year in Vietnam. We proved it can be done in Vietnam. So if what you’ve seen on this blog and in our episodes intrigues you, go do it now – Vietnam is waiting for adventurous travelers. We did a lot in 3 months – imagine what you could do in 1 year.

Next, I’ll explain how much we landed in Tokyo with to restart our experiment.

Our goodbye to Saigon has been a long and confused one. The past week was a carnival of final classes, farewell dinners, last-minute errands, and scrambling to wrap up our affairs in Vietnam. On Friday, Rob was going to fly back to the U.S. for 3 weeks, and we were going to fly to Tokyo. It’s been real HCMC, but our time here has ended…but then Saturday rolled around and we were still here. Sunday came and went, Monday melted away, and Tuesday saw us still here, twiddling our sweaty thumbs. We kept discovering final things that needed to be done, and in the midst of all, we simply forgot to book our flights. Yes, we’re stuck in Saigon because we didn’t book our flights. Now, I would expect such a plot twist from myself, the author of previous adventures such as “Locked my Keys in my Car 4,” “Slept through my Flight Home from England,” “Left my Car in Neutral and Woke up to Find it on the Neighbor’s Lawn (with a parking ticket).”
But, from an entire team of competent people? *shakes head*

The deeper story here is that we’re…absolutely…swamped. Concluding our affairs in Seattle was a similar ordeal – basically, everything shut down for 1 week. Here we are, 10 days into that final week, and we’re still overwhelmed. We apologize for the interruption – the story will continue with another episode and some blog posts that provide a little more detail on the debacle of this past week.

We have officially dropped all pretenses: we’re yuppies. But we know you are too, and that’s why we’ve taken our show to the iTunes store as a podcast. You can now find our podcast link on the right side of our website.

Try it out, and, as always, your feedback is essential.

Few things make me laugh more than our business plan. It’s not that it isn’t soundly researched and argued. It doesn’t even matter that it’s chalk full of beautifully beveled diagrams with a consistent and classy mauve color scheme. No, as it turns out, plans have a shelf life of about a week before reality riddles them with holes.

Take, for example, our “Episode Pipeline”. This fancy term describes the process through which each episode is invented, filmed, and delivered to you. Well, if on paper creating and distributing an episode every week across an international team sounds insane, the reality of it is much worse.

So, we’ve come through five episodes, our pipeline churning flawlessly with Jed at the helm, and lucky number six finally jams the cogs. Not our cogs– Fed Ex’s cogs. Apparently three-day shipping from Vietnam could mean up to six days.

So we apologize for this hiccup, and promise to have episode 6 for you soon. In the meantime, please review our recent casting call, or let us know what you think. We’ll see you again really soon.

As September was closing, we had $1752 to our names. Unfortunately, the sources of our slow financial death continued unchecked, and money disappeared to fund coffee, food, drinks, transit, and accommodation.

It turns out that we get paid on the 4th of the month, which fell on a Saturday in the first week of October. So, we still had to wait until Monday to collect our meager paychecks.

We were prepared to open our wallets wide for this trip to Buon Ma Thuot, but as we mentioned, we didn’t spend a single Vietnam dong. This act of hospitality effectively saved us whatever money a normal weekend would have cost, plus $30 by consolidating all our gear into 1 room (with Dan) for 2 nights.

Accommodations were only $180 this week, while food was around $200. The small financial crisis of the week was renewing our VISA’s, which were set to expire on the 5th of October. We doubted Vietnam had the infrastructure to track us down, but we figured being illegal aliens in our first country would be a bad idea. So we dropped $240 to avoid deportation. With all of us having jobs, transit rose to $35. Finally, Rob, Brian, and I needed some new clothes for teaching, so 2 tailored shirts and 1 tailored pair of pants cost us $61.
All in all, the past week cost us $716.
We now have $1036, barely holding onto 4 figures.

Here’s how it broke down per person, for the week of September 29th to October 5th.

• $50 for food, about $10/day, which includes an ok breakfast ($1), coffees at a wifi cafe (3 * $1 = $3), lunch ($2), dinner ($2.50), and maybe 2 drinks after a day of stressful teaching ($1.50). Remember that food was free for the 2 days of Buon Ma Thuot. We still need to drive this number down.
• $45 for sharing our double rooms, which includes splitting the cost of only 1 room for 2 days.
• $60 for new VISAs and a small sense of security.
• $12 for transit, even with Bonus Hog, our new bike. Any given day could involve multiple trips to our school (about $.75 each) and trips to outside classes ($1.50).
• $17 for a tailored shirt.

So the week that ended with Buon Ma Thuot was about $184/person, still higher than we want and higher than projections.

We like to launch stuff. New episodes, new projects, new ideas. Today, its a new website.

We’ve been working hard for a long time to find the best ways to share our story with you, and we think this is step in the right direction. Our new site should load faster, be easier to update, hold tons of new content, and most importantly be easier to read and navigate.

We’ve also launched a new player. We’re a lot happier with it and are excited to finally start sharing our episodes in HD with you.

Let us know what you think! The more we hear from you the better we can make this. If you have a second send us some quick thoughts using the form below.

Thank you for your support.

We’ve seen it. Now its time for you to check it out and let us know what you think.  As always we welcome feedback, comments, suggestions, ideas and money.  brian[at]jetsetzero.tv