About us

Welcome to Nomad Numbers, a blog about lifestyle design through slow travel lifestyle with a specific focus on cost of living, because we love numbers!

We are world travelers who believe that life should be lived to its fullest potential. We started this blog to share our nomadic journey of slow travel and show that the cost of traveling the world can be much cheaper than staying at home. We hope that our adventure will go beyond inspiring people to slow travel but also to inspire people to think differently about the life they can design for themselves.

Mr. & Mrs. Nomad Numbers

What is our story?

Mr. Nomad Numbers grew up in France, studied in Europe and moved to the United States where he started working as a Software Engineer based in San Francisco, California. As someone passionate about travel, this relocation let him explore a new continent he never had the chance to explore before.

Mrs. Nomad Numbers grew up and studied in California. Through her work life, she had the opportunity to live in a few countries outside of the United States. These experiences got her excited to want to travel more and see more of the world as a local.

We met in San Francisco in the summer of 2016 and have since been married. Shortly after we met, we naturally started to make plans for our common passion for travel and were looking to travel the world for an extended period of time. Through the discovery process we came to a few conclusions:

• 1) the cost of slow travel is much cheaper than the cost of going to work every day as we proved it. Furthermore, by becoming location independent we have greater control over our spending.
• 2) we should have the courage to live a life true to ourselves, not a life others would expect from us.

So, in June 2018, after some extensive planing, we sold everything and gave notice to our apartment in San Francisco to embark on a nomadic journey. In the first 6 months of our journey, we cut our cost of living in half, reduced our stress level, increases our happiness and well being.

We started this blog to share our story and inspire people to think differently about the life they can design for themselves.

Where are we?

As we change locations every 4-6 weeks on average, we created our “where are we” page that we keep up-to-date with our current and past destinations since we became world travelers.

Isn’t travel something expensive?

Because a picture is often worth thousands words, let’s look at our first year of nomadic travel.

We spent $28,628 to fund 12 months of travel which is an average of $38/day. In comparison when we used to live in San Francisco we use to spend almost $70/day. As we realize this, we decided to come up with our blog’s tagline: “Travel the world for less than the cost of staying home!“.

Not convinced yet? Check out the following spending reports:

• our 1st Year of Nomadic Travel Spending Report that goes over everything we spent during our first year of nomadic travel
• our 2018 Year End Spending Report that contrast our spending by showing you how much we were use to spend while living a more ‘static’ life in San Francisco.

What are we traveling with?

As aspiring minimalists, we got rid of 90% of our possessions besides the two carry on backpacks that each of us travel with.

If you are curious to know what we are traveling with, check out our carry on packing list for nomadic long-term travels. It is a great start if you want to save time at the airport, be really mobile, reduce the risk of losing your stuff and save money!

What does our lifestyle looks like?

We are generally frugal but we do not consider ourselves cheap. We don’t deprive ourselves from enjoying an occasional nice meal and seeing all of the sights that we document through both our destinations reports and weekend guides.

We like to live the travel lifestyle on a local budget. Some of the ways we save includes:

• we stay in long-term accommodation, generally preferring AirBnB that provides us with up to 50% discount (you can do to by following our very own AirBnB tips). (If you sign up for AirBnB using our referral link, you will get a 40 USD credit, which should give you a nice discount on your first night!)
• we go grocery shopping, purchase produce that are in season and cook a decent chunk of amazing meals at home.
• we walk wherever possible as it is not only good for our wallet but also for our health and our waistline.
• we leverage credit card rewards points to significantly reduce our travel expenses as we explain in our Travel Rewards guide.
• we are connecting with the local communities to find the best secret places, groups or events that are more than often not shared online.
• we are having normal ‘everyday’ days – after all, this is not a temporary two weeks vacation but our lives!

What makes this blog different?

Glad you ask! When we started to plan for a life of travel, we found a lot of beautiful blogs on the Internet but it was difficult to get solid numbers of what it costs to stay in such places. There are a few websites that crowdsource this information but we found such resources either inconsistent, incomplete or even erroneous. Also most of this information does not seems to apply with our slow travel philosophy.

It also turns out that we have a passion for numbers! That’s right, we like to track everything, especially expenses. So we build a cost of living index for ourselves and decided that it might be useful to share it with people. Which is why we started writing both destinations reports and weekend guides.

We also design pretty infographics that give an at a glance view of our cost of living for each city we traveled to. Hopefully people can use them to plan their long term travel.

Want to stay in touch?

The best way to stay in touch with us is to subscribe to our weekly newsletter so you can receive our latest posts about our life changing journey as soon as we publish them. You can also use our contact us form.

You can also follow us on most social channels that we use to share specific content as outlined below:

• Facebook – we use our Facebook Page to share our latest blog posts. We also recently started a small & private Facebook group to connect with like minded world travelers. Community is a big topic for us and we hope that this group can help to both connect and support like minded people through this wonderful journey of exploration. (Note: This is still an experiment so please feel free to leave us a comment below if you like this idea.)
• Pinterest – we use Pinterest to feature the places we have been traveling to and our cost of living infographics.
• Youtube – we publish short videos on our Youtube channel from the places we visited which usually includes some beautiful aerial footage taken by the tiny (yet powerful) drone that we carry with us.
• Instagram – we use Instagram to share daily bits of our day to day lives. You should follow us if you want some exclusive content we don’t share on this blog.
• You can also find us on Twitter.