Jens Fredrick is an adventurer, traveller, and a popular YouTuber.
He has more than 2.3M subscribers on his YouTube channel, ‘Harald Baldr.’
Introduction-
Jens Fredrick Aamodt Jorstad (Harald Baldr) was born on 12 December 1985 in Oslo, Norway.
He grew up in Oslo and did his schooling in this city.
Harald has a younger brother.
Education-
Harald holds a couple of bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree.
He studied for bachelor’s degrees from Curtin University in Perth, Australia and graduated in 2005.
Harald studied for a master’s degree in International Relations from Webster University Thailand – Bangkok and graduated in 2008.
Later, he studied BA from Chichester College and graduated in 2010.
Deciding to move abroad-
Even though Harald grew up in Norway, he felt that his country wouldn’t be the right fit for his entrepreneurial and financial dreams.
He wanted to earn a lot of money in a short period of time and become financially free and he felt that this would be difficult for him to do in Norway because he learnt that most of his income would be taxed.
For a long time, Harald has been a classical liberal and felt that it would be difficult for him to live as a classical liberal in Norway.
So, he decided to move abroad.
In 2000, at 18, Harald boarded onto a plane and moved to Australia.
He enrolled into Curtin University in Perth, Australia and started studying for a bachelor’s degree.
Love for travelling & living frugally-
In Australia, Harald lived on student loans and borrowed around $100,000.
Here, he used to save up money for travelling by living very frugally.
Harald used to live in a low-rent accommodation which used to cost around $260 per month.
His room was just 2*3 metres with a shared bathroom (eight people used to share this).
As a student in Australia, Harald used to have just one pair of jeans and some $1 Bali T-shirts and in order to save money, he used to avoid going out with his friends and thanks to this, he even lost some of his friends.
Also, he used to cut his own hair.
Thanks to all these, Harald was able to afford to travel thrice a year and even while travelling, he used to stay frugal by living very economically.
During that time, he fell in love with travelling and decided to travel the world.
Career, quitting his job to travel-
After graduating in Australia, Harald didn’t move back to Norway, instead he started working for his friend, who ran a web development company.
He worked as a web designer and his job also involved dealing with clients.
After working for a couple of months, Harald started outsourcing his work to Filipinos and Indonesians.
This was very lucrative for him as he used to pay them only a couple of dollars per hour.
And thanks to the money that Harald saved, he started investing in stocks.
Jim Rogers, an American investor, inspired him to invest and he was very influenced by his books.
During that time, Harald was also working as a lecturer on the side.
He worked as an economics lecturer at a couple of universities for a period of four years.
Harald worked at Webster University Thailand – Bangkok and Khon Kaen University in Thailand.
In 2014, as he got burnt out, he quit working as a lecturer and started travelling.
Blog & YouTube–
Harald used to blog at HaraldBaldr.com (now discontinued).
Initially, he used to blog about freedom, politics and economics but later switched to travelling and investing.
Harald started his YouTube channel, ‘Harald Baldr‘ on 20 March 2015.
Harald Baldr is his favourite Viking King of Norway and so he named his channel after him.
Harald used to shoot videos of himself travelling since 2001 and these early videos are available on a few other YouTube channels but not on his YouTube channel.
From 6 July 2016, he started posting videos on Harald Baldr channel.
Becoming successful-
Some of his initial videos weren’t getting decent views and one of the viewers suggested Harald to include an image of a woman in his thumbnail to attract more clicks.
Even though he didn’t like his advice, he reluctantly followed it in order to grow his YouTube channel and that particular video got millions of views.
Later, Harald stopped this practice of click baiting thumbnails and instead focused on improving his content by making it more interactive, that is, he started genuinely interacting with people in his videos and thanks to this, his channel gained momentum.
He also experimented with the content of his videos by making drone videos, financial videos, monologues, travel, history and political videos.
And Harald stuck with the kind of videos which were bringing in more views and income.
As of December 2023, he has 2.37M subscribers on his YouTube channel.
Funding source-
Initially, Harald used to fund his round-the-world trips with his student loans.
In one of his videos published in 2019, he said that he was still repaying his student loans.
Later, as Harald started publishing videos on YouTube and as they started getting millions of views, he started earning well from them and he uses this income to fund his travels.
His favourite countries are Italy, Russia, India, the United States, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Germany and England.
He also visited countries like Brazil, Tanzania, Mexico, Philippines, Holland, Greece, Nepal, etc.
A philanthropist-
As Harald started earning enough money with his YouTube channel, he pledged to give away his Patreon income to the needy people.
And he started giving away money to needy people in various countries.
Harald’s Patreon account is currently unavailable.
He also promotes local businesses.
So, how are you inspired by the success story of Harald Baldr?
Share with me in the comment section below.
Looking for inspiration to start your travel?
‘To Shake the Sleeping Self’ is the best book for travel inspiration.
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