You have been thinking about this for a while. Months, probably longer. Weighing it, researching it, waiting for the right moment.
Nobody has told you what the waiting costs.
Not what a move would cost. Not what getting it wrong would cost. What staying exactly as you are costs you, every month, whether you ever leave or not.
CheckPoint 1 works it out. Five pillars, five calculations, every figure taken from numbers you supply. It will not tell you whether the answer is high or low, because it has nothing honest to compare you to.
It counts. What you do about the count is yours.
Guesstimate
Arithmetic.
CheckPoint 1 supplies no figures. Not one. There is no average, no benchmark, no score, no red-amber-green.
What it supplies is which things count and how they combine. You name the items and enter the numbers. It does the arithmetic and shows its working, so every figure it produces traces back to something you typed in.
That is a deliberate limitation. A file that scored you would have to invent the thing it scored you against, and an invented number is worth nothing when the subject is your own life.
Why Offline CheckPoint 1 is a single self-contained file. No login, no subscription, no server. Nothing you type leaves your machine, which matters more here than anywhere else on this site: you are entering what you earn, what you owe and what you are afraid to lose. When you press Save Progress, a fresh copy of your file is saved directly to the location you choose on your device, with your answers written into it. That copy is the record. There is no account holding it and no backup anywhere else. Clear your browser history and cache, and no trace remains in your browser - the only existing copy is the file itself. Delete that properly, and it’s gone forever.
Five pillars
Five figures.
The GeoFree life rests on five pillars and needs all five working. Ideology is hard to price. This is an attempt to do exactly that, to whatever extent it can honestly be done.
Each pillar is priced on its own, because each is a different way of looking at the same life. What comes out at the end is drawn back together across all five, since that is how they actually work.
Every section opens with what you are about to work out, then a story of it going wrong for somebody real, then the fields. Five stories, one per pillar, each drawn from something that actually happened. Every field carries its own panel explaining what figure goes in it. Every result carries a panel showing how it was reached.
The same hour can appear in more than one pillar, and the file counts it in each. That is not the arithmetic going wrong. An hour lost to a client in another timezone is a claim you did not choose, work that leaves nothing behind, and a direction you were too tired to correct. Where two pillars land on the same hour, that hour is the expensive one.
Four figures come out at the end, in four different tenses: what your arrangement costs every month, what it would cost in one go if something you depend on stopped, what the deciding has already cost, and what the waiting has already cost. A figure you have not worked out yet leaves its box empty rather than absent, and tells you which section would fill it.
Alignment
Whether the life you are building is aimed at what you actually value — and what the waiting has cost while you worked that out. If you have been deciding for years and cannot name a single place that would have met your conditions, this section will not produce a figure. It will tell you that, which is the more expensive answer.
Optionality
What it would cost you the day one of the things you depend on stops. A client, a platform, a landlord, a person.
Leverage
The hours that leave nothing behind, priced at your own rate. Not the work you dislike. The work that does not compound.
Portability
What it would cost to be free by the end of the month. The one figure here you could verify this afternoon by reading your own contracts.
Sovereignty
What you pay every month to keep every claim on your time and money satisfied — and which of those claims you actually chose.
The question
nobody runs.
People deciding whether to build a location-independent life will research visa costs, tax structures and the price of a flat in Lisbon for months. Almost nobody prices the thing they already have.
That is the wrong way round. The current arrangement is the only one with real numbers attached, and it is running whether or not anyone is looking at it. Every month spent deciding is a month of paying it.
Knowing where you stand is not the same as knowing what standing there costs. The first is a diagnosis. The second is a figure, and a figure is the only thing that has ever made anybody move.
It holds for people who never leave. Four of the five have nothing to do with moving.
Anyone cursed
with curiosity.
- You have been weighing up a location-independent life for months and have never priced the one you already have
- You want to know what your current setup costs you, not what a move you have not planned might cost
- You would rather run the arithmetic on your own figures than trust an average built from somebody else's
- You have no figures to hand and are not sure you could produce them, which is itself worth knowing before another year goes by
Not the right fit if:
- You want to be told whether your situation is good or bad. It will not do that, on purpose. It has nothing honest to compare you to.
- You want the action-focused system rather than the count. That is Velocity, and CheckPoint 1 comes with it.
- You are not willing to be honest in the boxes. The results can only be as accurate as what you put in.
A digit
Stops the guess.
A first attempt that collapses costs somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000, depending on how much you had to lose. CheckPoint 1 does not measure that. It measures what your current arrangement costs you before any of it, which is the number nobody has.
At $9, the only reason not to know is that you would rather not.
You pay once. Nothing renews and nothing expires - any upgrades to this file will be sent to everyone who bought it, for free.
Count
It is not that we have a short time to live,
but that we waste a lot of it
Seneca
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