When we decided to get married and sell everything to travel the world, we knew that this new lifestyle was going to be fun, exciting but also much cheaper than staying at home. What we did not know was how much cheaper it was going to be to live a very high quality of life where we would go grocery shopping at local farmers markets to cook amazing meals, eat at nearby restaurants to enjoy the local food scene, rent cars or hop on a buses to take regular getaway trips, go on long hikes to spend more time in nature, attend local shows/festivals to immerse ourselves in the culture of the places we are visiting and everything else you get the freedom to do when you decide to travel the world slowly.
As we closed out 2019 and our first 18 months of nomadic travel, I’m digging into our finances to see how we did in 2019 and we are happy about the results. In our first 12 months of travel, we reported that we spent less than $30K which was about half of the cost when we lived and worked in a high cost of living city. Not only did we cut our expenses, we rebalanced our spending towards activities that we enjoyed the most, are living a less stressful life and are having the time of our lives. In 2019, we are happy to report that we pretty much kept the same level of spend through to the end of the year.
So let’s dig into our 2019 Year End Spending Report!
Where have we been in 2019?
In 2019 we’ve been to the Americas (San Miguel de Allende, Aruba), Europe (France, Porto, Lisbon, Kotor) and SouthEast Asia (Chiang Mai, Koh Lanta, Ko Lipe, Langkawi and George Town).
| Location | Total cost (for 2) | Living cost only (for 2) |
| San Miguel de Allende | Mexico (January) – 29 days | $2,025.89 | $1,748.88 |
| San Francisco Bay Area | USA (February) – 12 days | $1,782.63 | $426.63 |
| Aruba (March) – 29 days | $2,918.54 | $2,708.68 |
| San Francisco Bay Area | USA (March, April, May) – 77 days | $6,223.38 | $4,680.76 |
| France | France (June) – 34 days | $1,511.83 | $1,177.67 |
| Costa Brava | Spain (July) – 9 days | $2,995.58 | $1,267.59 |
| Porto | Portugal (July) – 29 days | $2,383.71 | $2,304.21 |
| Lisbon | Portugal (August) – 21 days | $2,005.10 | $1,964.32 |
| France (September) – 16 days | $1,880.36 | $1,529.72 |
| Grenoble | France (September) – 9 days | $529.92 | $529.92 |
| Kotor | Montenegro (October) – 17 days | $1,463.30 | $1,172.22 |
| Chiang Mai | Thailand (October, November) – 34 days | $1,577.75 | $1,438.49 |
| Koh Lanta | Thailand (November) – 24 days | $1,459.27 | $1,090.74 |
| Ko Lipe | Thailand (December) – 4 days | $467.64 | $408.24 |
| Langkawi | Malaysia (December) – 8 days | $366.08 | $307.02 |
| GeorgeTown/Penang | Malaysia (December) – 14 days | $564.84 | $562.91 |
| Total – 352 days | $30,709.19 | $23,318.00 |
If you are interested to get more details on the budget related to each place we’ve visited, please take a look at both our destination reports & weekend guides.
Where did our money go?
Our total spending was $30,709.19 (or $83.45 / day) and our living cost was $23,318.00 (or $63.36 / day). $30K is about half of our spending when we were back in our static life in San Francisco. (Note: for more details about our spending in California, pre-nomadic life, check out our 2018 Year End spending report).
Here is our budget breakdown per spending category using a pie-chart:
Or if your prefer tabular data, here is a table:
Major highlights:
- Our top three spending categories where housing (31.90%), Food (Groceries + Dining out = 24.75%) and then Travel Gear (8.62%).
- Our International transportation spending (mostly international flights) was about $2K, which is pretty low considering the fact that we traveled across 3 continents. The reason for that is that we love using travel rewards to get free flights.
- Our International Health Insurance spending was $1.5K as we lost employer health coverage since Mrs. NN left her remove job in March 2019 and we had to sign-up for our own coverage. We’ve been paying $2 / month to get insurance in California and about $1.5K for our global expat insurance with IMG Global for the second half of 2019 (we expect this cost to jump to $3K in 2020 as we will be paying for this coverage for an entire year).
- We spent $500 in cancelations when we could not go to Dubrovnik, Croatia (from 2019-09-07 to 2019-09-13) and we pre-paid a few expenses we could not get money back from.
What did we exclude from our budget and why?
We excluded in this budget a few common categories as they did not apply to us or were just one time expenses. For full transparency here is what we have not included from this spending report and the reason why:
- Automotive: We simply don’t own a car, so we aren’t spending on car insurance, parking or car maintenance. We do however rent cars as we need them as this is captured as part of our “Local Transportation” category.
- Loans/Debt: Because we are focusing on our cost of living spend, we are not including any unrelated loan payments we have.
Are we missing anything else? Please let us know by leaving your feedback in the comments section below.
Our bottom line
Since we started our nomadic lifestyle, we felt less stressed and are having a lot of fun roaming the planet, one city at a time.
This lifestyle gives us so much freedom that we are extremely grateful for. Freedom to spend our time on the things we care about like reading some life changing books, learning news skills, starting projects we are excited about like our free travel tool, our cost of living expenses series or some drone footage we are publishing on our Youtube channel. Freedom to spend more time than ever with our family (between 2-4 months per year), strengthen our relationship, and look at building a community of like-minded people. Freedom to focus on our health, so we will live happily as long as we possibly can.
And not too surprisingly, by embracing values that sound right to us like minimalism and slow travel, it turns out that we can become full time travelers for about $30K a year. This can be up to 10X less than the amount of money that people would spend to take a luxury year long trip around the world (these can cost up to $300K). Is it worth the sacrifice?
As we are at the beginning of a new year and decade, we would highly encourage you to take a few hours in your life to truly think about the life you want to design for yourself. This is at the core of what led us to our lifestyle and something that can be very powerful. By focusing on what you truly want in your life and delivering on your plan, it can take you less than 10 years to fulfil what might sound like a dream today. We hope that you will be able to live your ideal lifestyle, whatever that may be!
Happy New Year & Happy Travels
Mr. & Mrs. Nomad Numbers
9 Comments
MNG · January 16, 2020 at 5:25 pm
Wow! This is amazing! Thank you for sharing these numbers and breakdown. You have know idea how immensely motivating this is to see. My husband and I hope to be following in your footsteps in the near future. I was a tad surprised to see the extremely low costs you experienced in France – even over Spain and Portual. Is this because you were outside of major cities? Just curious.
Mr. Nomad Numbers · January 17, 2020 at 9:01 am
Thanks MNG for this nice note. We are glad that you’ve find these numbers motivating. Where are you guys from at what type of nomadic lifestyle are you planning on doing?
We forgot to callout that a small part of our trip to France was spent at my parents which has significantly reduce our cost of living during this period. But if you stay outside of the big city France can become really affordable. And if you can afford to slow travel this will reduce the cost even more.
MNG · January 20, 2020 at 2:01 am
We are currently in Florida. We chose to get away from the brutal winters up North and accelerate our FIRE plan living here with no state income tax. We have a fifth wheel and hope to slow travel the US and Canada along with international trips as well. We have traveled fairly extensively internationally but it’s never slow (which we hope to change). This summer we will be in Germany, Czech Republic and Greece (half of it we will be working). Within the next 2 years, we hope to spend time living in SE Asia as well as cover more ground in S. America. By then, my husband should be fully retired.
Your real life numbers are truly motivating for us! Also, thanks for the clarification about your stay in France. Thanks for all the information and content you provide.
Mr. Nomad Numbers · January 20, 2020 at 7:41 am
This sounds like a wonderful plan, especially on living in a no income tax state. We are jealous are we are currently California resident (even-though we only come back to visit family a month per year) and do pay pretty high state tax for little benefit now that we have become fully nomadic.
We are glad that you found our number useful. If you signup for our travel tool you can get access to all of our expenses for each place we’ve visited. Check the link at the top of our blog to know more about it (our tool is entirely free).
Joe · February 6, 2020 at 3:37 pm
I love your numbers. This looks like my ideal nomadic lifestyle. You traveled but didn’t take too many flights. You get to know a country much better than the average tourist and didn’t spend a lot. I’d love to do that someday. Once our son goes to college, we’ll have a lot more freedom. However, Mrs. RB40 likes having a home base so we probably can’t do it as cheaply. We’ll see how it goes.
Mr. Nomad Numbers · February 7, 2020 at 2:18 am
Thanks, Joe! One of the reasons why we did not take too many flights is because we are trying to minimize flying as we know it hurts the environment. Slow travel helps with that as we move every 4 weeks or so. That being said, we still believe that overall our impact on the environment should still be lower than the average American who travel less but own at least a home, 1-2 cars and keep purchasing a bunch of stuff during their entire lifestyle. We do none of that and are also focusing on reducing our day to day waste as much as possible. As for your and Mrs. RB40, I would love to see your numbers when you start adding more travel to your life. 🙂
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