Pros and cons of a nomadic lifestyle

About a year ago, we decided to quit our regular jobs, give up our lovely apartment in San Francisco and sell all of our possessions to become nomadic and enjoy travel as part of our lifestyle. We have been embracing slow travel, minimalism and a nomadic lifestyle for a year so we thought that it was a good time to reflect on the past year. In this blog post, we will discuss the pros and cons of a nomadic lifestyle and hope this will give you a full perspective if you are interested in pursuing this lifestyle. 

(If you just stumbled on this blog for the first time, don’t forget to check out our 1st year of nomadic travel spending report where we shared how much we spent to travel the world for our first year. Beside the numbers, it’s a great introduction to what we did during that time).

The Pros: What makes nomadic living our dream lifestyle?

• We can live where we feel like
  • Location independence is a big deal to us. We have the freedom of going where our hearts want us to be. Feeling the need to experience a summer of festivals? Well, we choose to go to Montreal. Feeling an urge to immerse ourselves in the Mexican culture? Well, there is Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, Tepoztlán, Oaxaca, Puerto Vallarta and much more to explore.
• We learn a lot
  • As we make our way from place to place, we encounter new people and places we have never been before. We are constantly learning new things and even picking a few phrases from a new language here and there.
• We can spend extended periods of time with our families
  • My family lives in France and Mrs. NN’s family lives in California so being nomadic allows us to spend long periods of time in each place and spend quality time with our families.
• We connect with new people
  • We have been connecting with a handful of locals and travelers that have wonderful stories to share. Some people include a retired couple that moved to Aruba to help the local population to grow produce and a former wealth investment banker that quit her comfortable job to start writing a novel.
• We live with less & getting organized has become easy
  • For practical reasons, we had to get rid of all of our possessions that could not fit into the two carry on backpacks that each of us carry. Not only does this make it dead simple to decide what to wear on any given day, it saves us a lot of mental energy and money that we can redirect to build meaningful connections and spend our money on experiences.
• We have more time for ourselves
  • By traveling slowly, we had to slow things down since you can quickly run out of steam and things to see if you stay in the same place for 4-6 weeks. This has contributed to free up a lot of time for ourselves that we redirected to do the things we really want. From photography/videography/blogging (for myself) to cooking, taking a nutrition class (for Mrs. NN) as well as simply doing nothing (Because let’s be honest, doing nothing really feel goods once in a while, doesn’t it?).
• We have greater control over our budget
  • Before becoming nomadic, we had little control over how much we pay for rent, food and transportation as we were dependent on our cost of living in San Francisco which isn’t a cheap city as you might guess.
  • Because nomadic living gives us the freedom to live anywhere in the world, we can now choose how much we want to spend for any given month. Feeling like we want to splurge a bit? Well we went to spend a month in paradise. Feeling like we want to spend less than usual? Well there is SouthEast Asia for that. While we won’t be there until this fall, we can already report that we booked a one bedroom apartment (with a swimming pool) for under $600 a month. 

The Cons: What are the challenges of a nomadic lifestyle?

These are the biggest challenges we’ve faced so far as we transitioned into this lifestyle. 

• Keeping a routine
  • When you live in one place and have a regular job, the routine comes pretty easily. For us it’s quite the opposite. As we move often, our environment (accommodation, weather, language, culture…) changes every month or so, which means any routine often needs to get reset or adjusted accordingly.
• Building a community
  • It is hard to make long-term friendships as we travel around the world. We are aware that this is just the nature of being nomadic and we are choosing to maintain existing relationships we have back at home.
  • But since we are not at home, we miss a lot of birthdays, holidays and seeing our nieces and nephew grow up.
  • Community is important to us so we plan on having a homebase for part of the year when we feel ready to slow down (even further).
  • We are also focusing on the blog so we can connect with like minded people and we hope to be able to connect with some of you in person through our travels.
• We don’t have a permanent ‘home’
  • While we don’t miss having a permanent ‘home’ yet, we’ve explained why this is something we plan on establishing after a few years of travel. 
• Living together 24/7
  • This is probably an obvious one as we transition from having to go to an office everyday to being together all the time.
  • Now that both of us don’t have a regular job, we keep about 50% of our time to work on our own projects. This has helped us keep our sanity while developing new skills.
• Constant travel research and planning
  • We have to spend a minimum amount of time to decide where to go and book our transportation and accommodation for each destination.  And the more often you change destinations, the more often you have to do it. This is part of the deal when you become nomadic. Mrs. NN enjoys doing this while I spend my energy on keeping our finance/budget in check and we think this is a good balance.
• Staying healthy
  • Health is an important focus for us, so we try to choose places with decent air quality and healthy food options. Air quality can actually be really bad in specific cities (like Mexico City where we spent 6 weeks last fall). Same applies to water. During our 3.5 months in Mexico we had to purchase water since even what people call drinkable water isn’t really drinkable for us (we actually learned that the hard way :-))
  • We also love cooking so rather than eating out all the time, we cook a decent amount of food at home with local ingredients which are truly delicious!
• Our kitchen sucks from time to time
  • While we have improved greatly in how we book places (check our ultimate AirBnB tips), we can’t avoid rentals that are less equipped than we’d like to feel at home – such as an oven and blender. At the end of the day, we need to make compromises. 
• We had to become an expert at packing / unpacking often
  • We have to pack / unpack every time we move. While I don’t mind the hour to spend on the task, Mrs. Nomad Number would rather not have to do it :-).  

Our bottom line

Although we are having the time of our lives and seeing beautiful places around the world, no lifestyle is perfect and we wanted to share some of the challenges we experienced in our first year of full time travel. As long as you are prepared to navigate through both the ups and downs, you should be well equipped to enjoy your own journey.

As for us, we don’t regret the decision at all and want to keep this lifestyle going in the foreseeable future. We are sure that we will encounter more challenges but we try to remind ourselves that we would have a whole different set of challenges if we stayed in one location. But being nomadic, we at least get to live in a lot of different cool places and prioritize experiences over accumulating stuff at home. For us, the pros of a nomadic lifestyle far outweigh the cons!

What about you? What holds you back the most from starting a nomadic lifestyle? If you’ve done it, do these pros and cons of a nomadic lifestyle resonate with you? Please feel free to leave us a comment in the comment section below.