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Olumide Gbenro has never called one place "home" for long.

The 33-year-old entrepreneur grew up in Nigeria until he turned six, when his minister parents decided to move to London. Then, seven years later, the Gbenros were granted visas to immigrate to the United States through the country's green card lottery so Olumide, his parents and two siblings relocated to Columbus, Ohio.

"Being a person of color, I felt that there were certain times in my life where I just didn't feel valued as a human being," Gbenro tells CNBC Make It of growing up Black in the Midwest. "I always felt left out."

Gbenro wanted a creative life: one that was filled with travel, art and opportunities to meet people from all corners of the world. But his parents wanted him to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer.

In 2016, he finished his double master's degree in epidemiology and behavioral science at San Diego State University. He found himself caught between two paths: go to medical school and become a doctor or travel the world.

"All of my life, I just followed the rules, whether it was from my parents, religion or society," he says. "But deep down I knew that if I took the position in the PhD program, I could never go back, I could never travel abroad I'd be stuck to a lab, so I decided to say 'no.'"

Gbenro packed up all of his belongings and left the United States to see the world but it would take him years to land in Bali, his forever home.

Gbenro's first stop was Berlin, where he had friends from graduate school. He spent three months there on a tourist visa bouncing between friends' couches and hostels.

When Gbenro left the United States, he had "almost zero savings and no plan." He quickly grew his Instagram following posting travel tips, dance videos and other content. Gbenro decided to monetize his hobby: He would message other creators and businesses on Instagram and offered to help them improve their social media strategy for a fee (often $250).

Starting a remote business was "really tough in the beginning," Gbenro recalls, but soon he had a full roster of clients and enough income to make social media his full-time job. He took an online course in social media marketing that helped him structure his business, and an old friend in San Diego referred him to his first two clients.

Once his visa expired, he traveled to Mexico for four months, then went back to San Diego. "But I realized I wasn't happy living in America still," he says. "There was something about living in America that made me feel like I wasn't growing."

He continues: "As a Black man, there was a psychological trauma and pressure I felt living there, especially as an immigrant too, feeling like I didn't fit in."

Gbenro officially launched his social media marketing business, Olumide Gbenro PR & Brand Monetization, in 2018 while he was still in San Diego,collaborating with celebrity chefs, real estate agents, business coaches and more. Though he was thriving at work, Gbenro still craved a change.

One afternoon he was scrolling through Instagram and stopped on a photo of one of his friends who was traveling in Bali. She was relaxing on a beach, surrounded by lush palm trees, with a coconut in her hand.

'It looked like the perfect place to live," Gbenro says. "The difference between Bali and every other city I researched is that it seemed very peaceful all the locals, in photos online, looked genuinely happy and like they spend a lot of time in nature."

In 2019, he found an apartment in Bali through an acquaintance on Instagram, booked a one-way plane ticket and never looked back.

Since moving to Bali, Gbenro has been able to spend more on travel, dining and other hobbies as well as boost his savings. "I'm never worried about money anymore because Bali has a much lower cost of living than the U.S.," he says.

For his first nine months in Bali, Gbenro used a tourist visa. Indonesia offers tourists a single entry visa that is valid for 60 days and allows for four 30-day extensions, adding up to a six month stay.Gbenro would fly to Singapore or Malaysia for brief trips once his visa expired, then renew it upon his return.

Soon after he switched to an investor visa, which requires proof that you are contributing to the local economy. Gbenro expanded his marketing business to help people advertise their properties in Indonesia to qualify for the visa, which he renews with the localgovernment every two years.

As an entrepreneur, Gbenro earns about $140,000 per year. In addition to his consulting business, Gbenro hosts several conferences for digital nomads, including the Digital Nomads Summit, which attracts thousands of people and will be hosted in Bali this September.

His biggest expenses are his rent and utilities, which together are about $1,010 each month. Gbenro lives in a one-bedroom apartment in a building with a private gym, pool and restaurant downstairs.

He spends about $600 each month on takeout and eating out, often ordering food from local restaurants on a popular app called Gojek. Gbenro's other larger expenses include health insurance, transportation (he rents a motorbike) and travel.

Gbenro likes to travel at least once each month and often ventures to Uluwatu, a small region on Bali's southwestern tip famous for its surfing.

"I'm probably spending about the same amount of money I would each month if I was living in San Diego, but my quality of living is much higher," he says. "I'm living a life of luxury."

Here's a monthly breakdown of Gbenro's spending (as of January 2022):

Olumide Gbenro's average monthly spending

Gene Woo Kim | CNBC Make It

Rent and utilities: $1,010

Food: $600

Transportation: $98

Phone: $28

Health insurance: $137

Travel: $300

Laundry: $60

Total: $2,233

Gbenro says the most challenging part of building his new life in Bali was battling loneliness. "I was going to the beach every day, drinking coconuts and seeing beautiful sunsets, but I lived by myself and didn't have friends here," he explains.

Once he started visiting co-working spaces in Bali and attending in-person networking events, Gbenro says it became much easier to build close friendships with other expats and locals. He knows conversational Indonesian, but says a lot of people living in Bali also speak English.

"I've really been loved and welcomed by the Balinese," he says. "Everyone's always smiling there's a really genuine, heart-centered tone here that you can't get anywhere else."

Olumide and a friend out to lunch in Bali

Ruda Putra for CNBC Make It

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This 33-year-old left the U.S. for Bali and lives a life of luxury on $2,233 a monthhow he spends his money - CNBC

Inventory Base Academy has launched its new course - how to start your own inventory operation.

The new course is aimed at helping new and experienced inventory providers to understand the business processes and acumen required.

With over 70 lessons, information points and topics, the self-paced home study material covers seven areas.

These are - The Lettings Industry Landscape;Marketing to Landlords, Agents & Tenants; Sales Forecasting & Pricing Reports; Social Marketing & Branding; Business Structure; Continuous Professional Development; and Becoming a Successful Inventrepreneuer.

It outlines the legal requirements of running a successful business, it teaches providers how to create the right impression when developing leads, how to get the most out of their social media presence and build the framework that will start their service business off on the front foot.

Sin Hemming-Metcalfe, Head of Training and Development at Inventory Base Academy, says:The property market is changing and at an extremely rapid pace. Whether you agree or not, the government is intent on implementing what it sees as improvements to ensure tenant safety and hold the PRS even more to account.

The launch of the levelling up plan, removal of Section 21 and a national landlord register are yet more examples of the type of legislation the rental sector is now expected to implement and manage.

We want to help providers grasp the opportunity to build and support their client base by supporting them to respond to these challenges.

Visit link:
Secrets of successful inventories revealed in new course - Letting Agent Today

On a sports talk radio show recently, a Carolina Panthers fan lamented how long it takes for true fandom to take hold for a new NFL team.

In the first few years of the franchise, he said, people would cheer for the Panthers except when their previous favorite teams came to town. Then theyd revert to being Steelers or Raiders or Packers fans again. It wasnt until a generation of children in the Carolinas grew up as Panthers fans that the team developed an intensely loyal fan base.

Thats one mans theory, but it makes sense. And its something the National Football League seems to understand on a molecular level. For professional football to remain profitable in the long term, it needs not only the devotion of grown-ups, but of children.

This is a problem for the NFL, since young Americans are increasingly uninterested in professional football, and in other sports as well.

A 2020 survey found that fewer than a quarter of Generation Z watch a sports game weekly and nearly 40% dont watch sports at all. They might tune into the Super Bowl at 4:30 p.m. MST this Sunday, but not necessarily to watch the Bengals and Rams. More than any other age group, young adults are the most likely to say they only watch the broadcast to see the commercials and possibly the halftime show.

As a 2019 article in Sports Illustrated said, Youth appeal is a bigger NFL business concern than protests or concussions. As such, the league is aggressively marketing itself to young Americans, using social media such as Instagram and TikTok, and the video game franchise Madden. A little more than a year ago, Conor Orr wrote for Sports Illustrated, The attempts to reach younger viewers are not yet at the level of outright pandering.

One might say the pandering arrived with the NFLs partnership with childrens network Nickelodeon, which has broadcast two games replete with animated slime cannons that celebrate touchdowns. While the broadcast might have been aimed at children, one of my colleagues reports that she has 30-something friends who watched and loved it. Nickelodeon also has a series called NFL Slimetime that features child-friendly game highlights, interviews with players and segments highlighting teams.

Will it work? As with the development of the Panthers fanbase, it will probably take a generation to see. But for all the NFLs clever marketing, the league has kid problems that are tougher to solve, the first one being that, when not sanitized and edited for Nickelodeon, the games themselves are not always child-friendly.

In this, Im not speaking of the gladiatorial nature of the sport and the inherent violence of 250-pound men tearing into each other. Broadcasts are quick to cut away when someone is hurt, and injured players are quickly whisked into tents.

Its the experience of going to games that are famously unwelcoming for families, so much so that on online forums like Quora and Reddit, people ask if its OK to take a child to a game. The answers often note that its pretty much a given that there will be drunkenness, foul language and generally boorish behavior outside the stadium and in the stands, more so at night games. In other words, take your chances, better at an afternoon game.

Of course, fans behaving badly is not unique to football, and anecdotally, there seems to be this lately, from fans verbally abusing players to throwing water bottles to running on the Super Bowl field. Also, theres more opportunity for bad behavior to be filmed and posted on YouTube, like this verbal altercation at a Raiders-Ravens game last September. Imagine sitting by those guys with your 7-year-old.

Five years ago, The Washington Post examined where and when violence was most likely to occur in NFL stadiums (then, the Chargers had the most arrests; the Panthers, the fewest, and the most incidents occurred during evening games). Likely, many of these incidents are related to alcohol consumption; researchers say nearly half of people going to NFL games consume alcohol, and a third report that they start drinking two hours before the game, a practice so common that it has a name: pregaming.

The NFLs biggest kid problem, though, has nothing to do with any of this, but is the fact that, thanks to Americas declining fertility rate, in coming decades, there will be far fewer children for them to woo, on Nickelodeon and elsewhere. If trends go unchanged, American women will have roughly half the number of children they had in the 1950s, an average of 1.78 throughout the course of their childbearing years. This has sobering implications for every aspect of American life, so much so that there ought to be a Super Bowl ad encouraging people to have children, like one Denmark produced a few years ago.

Already, people are looking at what effect a declining birthrate might have on participation in youth sports, in decline because of competition with myriad other activities and concerns parents have about concussions. These concerns will eventually confront the number-crunchers at the National Football League as well, and no amount of green slime will help. Do it for Denmark, that nations pro-fertility ad urged reluctant couples. Do it for the NFL, ours might say.

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Super Bowl LVI: When is it, and why is the NFL being marketed to kids? - Deseret News

Those making bids for office include Boston NAACP President Tanisha Sullivan, who is running against longtime Secretary of State Bill Galvin; former ACLU attorney Rahsaan Hall, who is making a bid against longtime Plymouth County DA Timothy Cruz; and Boston City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo, who is running for DA in Suffolk County, where newly-appointed interim Kevin Hayden hasnt said whether he will be a candidate.

Thats a stark change from the electoral slates of not many years ago, when entrenched white male candidates were regarded as so unbeatable that many candidates were reluctant to even take their chances.

The shift leftward is visible in other contests as well. Even as Attorney General Maura Healey seems established as the early front-runner for governor, both Sonia Chang-Diaz and Danielle Allen have staked out positions clearly intended to outflank the attorney general on her left.

Not that Healey is any kind of moderate, at least not by the standards of any state but this one. But in Democratic politics, the ground is shifting. And the faces of those running this year are a clear reflection of that.

* As Boston begins the search for its next schools superintendent, one intriguing subplot is what this will mean for the future of the appointed School Committee.

Following a resounding vote in a nonbinding referendum, the notion of scrapping the current panel for an elected one has never had more momentum than it does now.

Thats a potential political problem for Mayor Michelle Wu, who opposes a return to an elected School Committee. (She says she favors a hybrid, with some members elected and some appointed by the mayor.)

Politically, an elected School Committee is an easy sell to voters, just by virtue of being more democratic. Given the choice, who wouldnt opt for electing their government?

But Boston has had an elected School Committee it was abolished in 1991 by Mayor Ray Flynn and its latter years were nothing the city needs or should want again. With every decision deeply politicized, it spent most of its time in gridlock. Running the schools had become nearly impossible. Troubled as the School Department may be now, it bears little resemblance to that old, broken version.

Then, and maybe now, the strongest proponents of an elected School Committee were politicians, not parents or educators. They liked the idea of more offices for political ingenues to run for, and they liked being able to exert more direct influence on decisions, including budgets and promotions. Nearly every appointment of a principal back then prompted a low-key political campaign.

Lets just say educational quality was not always front and center.

People have forgotten what a disaster it was, said former city councilor Michael McCormack, who first proposed replacing it with an appointed committee and got Flynn on board. I hope Mayor Wu sticks to her guns in not going back to that, and I think she will.

Flynn, and Mayor Tom Menino after him, argued that the appointed committee made the mayor squarely responsible for the schools. That hasnt fueled sufficient progress, but accountability has not been a bad thing.

Ultimately, what we desperately need is to improve the schools. If Wu can be an effective driver for the changes that are needed which I believe she can be I dont really care whos on the School Committee, or who picks them. Just somebody, please, fix the schools.

* Under the leadership of Mayor Carlo DeMaria, Everett is a city where weird stuff happens routinely.

The latest is that Schools Superintendent Priya Tahiliani who is currently pursuing a complaint against the city for racial and gender discrimination says through her attorney that surveillance cameras were recently found in her office. The devices were reportedly discovered last month.

Tahiliani, whose contract runs until 2024, maintains that DeMaria has been trying to push her out of her job for some time. The School Committee recently shelved plans to undercut her authority, in the wake of her complaint.

Its anyones guess what anyone thought they might uncover by planting a camera in the superintendents office.

Only in Everett.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at adrian.walker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Adrian_Walker.

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Will this be a big year for progressives, and other thoughts - The Boston Globe

Progressives activists including elected officials gathered at the Florida Capitol Tuesday to complain that the Legislature isnt addressing the problems that average people need help with.

We are tired of a state that continues to demolish the capability of local officials trying to address the needs of their constituents; we are tired of coming year after year to file lawsuits against these bills that are chipping away at our basic human rights, said Francesca Menes, deputy organizing director for Local Progress, during a news conference.

The group represents a collection of progressive public officials.

Jack Porter, who sits on the Tallahassee City Commission, cited one example: Floridas housing crisis. She pointed to trailer park in her community where the owner doubled rents and pushed residents out of their homes.

It breaks my heart to get email after email that people are struggling and they have been removed from their house illegally, Porter said.

One bill pending before the Legislature HB 537 would allow landlords to charge monthly fees instead of security deposits. That would reduce up-front costs but hook renters with monthly fees that they wouldnt get back, unlike a refundable security deposit, according to critics.

Porter argued that policy decision should be left to local government.

Rep. Angie Nixon, a Black Democrat from Duval County, urged repeal of HB1, the anti-riot legislation passed last year. The bill toughens criminal penalties against organizers and participants in demonstrations that get out of hand, even if counter-protesters started the trouble.

A federal judge has ruled the law violates the Constitution.

Nixon has filed her own bill (HB 857), which would repeal the old law.

Our governor keeps saying this is a free state and I say, Free for who? Its not a free state for people who look like me, who are a part of LGBTQ community, and not a free state for women, Nixon said.

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Progressives claim FL Legislature is ignoring real people's needs this session - Florida Phoenix