Me

Personal Bio:

In 1979 the only foreign country I had been to was Canada.  I was selected as a Rotary Youth Exchange Student to spend my junior year of high school in India.  Needless to say,  it was an amazing year and started a life-long enchantment with living abroad.

I am now 46 and have a wife and four children (18, 20, 21, 23) and the adventure  continues.  We have lived and worked in Japan, Mexico, Argentina and the U.S.  I work for  myself, my wife is a published writer.

We have never had a corporate or government transfer package and have always done  everything ourselves when it came to moving to a new country.

We have changed careers several times and have never had a 5 year, 2 year or even a 12  month plan.  We are not trust-funders or recipients of a huge windfall.  We have had our fat  years and our lean years but through it all have been careful with our money and always  made travel and education a priority for us and our children.

We have educated our kids both in the U.S. and overseas (my wife, Maya Frost, wrote the book “The New Global Student, Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition and Get a Truly International Education)

We like to dig into our host country, get to know our neighborhood and as much as possible live as locals (way cheaper).   We try to travel internationally as little as possible and instead explore the country we are in via ground transportation.

We have rented, bought and sold property abroad.

We have lived on teaching visas, temporary 12 month visas and short term tourist visas.

When people ask how long we are going to stay somewhere, our standard reply is “temporarily forever”.  “Home” is where we are at that moment.

Professional Bio:

Tom Frost has spent the past 25 years building consumer product businesses.  Using classic bootstrapping techniques, he has become an expert in the initial stages of start-up.  He assists entrepreneurs in sourcing vendors, developing marketing materials and websites and determining which method of getting the product into the target markets is the most effective and cost efficient.

In the 1980s, Frost spent four years living and working in Japan creating markets for American products such as Soloflex®, New England Log Homes® and Precor® exercise equipment.

Returning to the US in 1988, Frost sourced American-made products for Japanese companies and represented American manufacturers in Japan.  The product lines ranged from automobile accessories and vacuum cleaners to snowboards and skateboards.

During the 1990s, Frost was one of the largest American exporters of vintage clothing to Japan, supplying a network of over 125 vintage fashion stores in the hottest Tokyo fashion districts of Roppongi, Harajuku and Shinjuku.  He was the first to market American-made prisoner clothing and was featured in People Magazine as well as several Japanese fashion magazines.

In 2000, Frost was hired by a New Age catalog publisher to develop their online business to complement their six catalog titles.  The website that Frost created with partners in India went from annual sales of $10,000 to over $350,000 and the company continued using the website without revision through 2009.  Additionally Frost built successful relationships with vendors in Nepal, India, Indonesia and Thailand for the catalog’s imported goods.

In 2003, Frost built a new business selling magnetic jewelry.  Frost sourced the product in China, developed packaging using designers in Argentina and created an agent relationship in China that assembled and shipped the final product.  Within three years, distribution grew to over 1,000 retail outlets that included chains such as Wild Oats and Whole Foods and catalogs such as Norm Thompson, Flax Art and Design, and Signals.

In 2005, Frost moved to Mexico after making the jewelry business virtual using at-home sales people, online databases and a fulfillment company for storage and shipping.  Frost continued to run the business from his laptop in Mexico.  By cutting out the brick-and-mortar costs of running a traditional distribution company, Frost was able to plow the profits back into the business and double the sales in one year—while living abroad.

Having sold the jewelry business in 2008, Frost now spends his time between his home in Buenos Aires, Argentina and his farm in Uruguay.  In addition to assisting start-ups, Frost writes Expat Alley and manages the websites of his wife, author Maya Frost.