Designing Our Dream Life: Our Approach to Slow Travel and Early Retirement

This month, we are reflecting on the past five years of slow travel and embracing our early retirement. After sharing what we’ve done (Read: Year 5 Nomad Travel – The highlights) and spent this past year (Read: Year 5 Nomad Travel – The numbers), in this article, we are sharing the steps we followed that brought us to the live we have been living for the past 5 years! What to know our secret sauce?

Are you happy with your life? If so, then congratulations, you can stop reading this post as you have probably done everything that needed to be done and won’t learn much from our experience. 

During our working years, we felt that we spent a large amount of our time at the office, and this life was pulling us away from doing what we loved. So, we really needed to go through a reset to get us to the path of living our best life 😉 Here are the steps that we followed

Step 1: Design a Life You Love by Thinking Outside the Box

This is probably the cornerstone of everything that brought us to where we are today, and it is quite a challenging exercise.

One of the first difficulties that we had was to let go of the preconceived notion we had. Like that we had to go to an office for about 45 years (or until we reach a regular traditional age), or that we had to buy a home, a car or even that we had to start a family if we wanted to be happy.

Starting from a blank canvas, without any of society’s or human expectations, has definitely given us more freedom in our thinking. Since this is quite easier to say than to do, we use some of the following questions to get us started:

• What am I grateful for?
• What would you do if you only had 6 months to live?
• What brings me joy and happiness?
• What are my passions and interests?
• What kind of lifestyle do I want?
• What fears or obstacles hold me back?
• What kind of relationships do I want to nurture?
• Am I taking care of my physical and mental well-being?

We iterated a lot on this vision and even today we know that this will still be something that will keep evolving over time. That being said, we know from our experience that we have the ability to dream big!

Step 2: Chase Financial Independence

Once we have a great idea for our ideal life, thinking outside of the box, we will still had to consolidate it with the reality of what was actually happening inside the box.

One of the major obstacles for us was that we had to spend most of our time going to an office, in a very expensive city in order to trade our time for precious money. After researching travel (and actually the cost of travel), we realized that people were able to travel perpetually, which brought us to the concept of financial independence.

Financial Independence (FI) is the ability to use passive income to support your living spending. It is a wonderful tool that has helped us greatly to live our best life.

But again, this was not an easy task.

Step 3: Maximize Your Savings

The most efficient tactic to reach FI is to maximize your savings, period. Once you are able to save 50% of your income, you can reach FI within 17 years. 60%: 12 years. 65%: 10 years, and so on (Read: The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement)

You can take two approaches to achieve this.

• Cutting unnecessary expenses requires looking at the value of something before buying it and making sure it is worth the time (= energy) you will have to spend to earn the money to purchase it.
• Maximizing your earning through new skill acquisition that can help you get promoted or start your own business.

Step 4: Invest and Do It Early

Once you start saving, you don’t want that money to sit in your savings account that doesn’t really grow much, especially during the years where you are working and are accumulating wealth. During these years, you should invest and take risks. We recommend investing in low-cost index funds (following a 80% stock / 20% bound portfolio) and forget about it. To learn more about the strategy we employed, make sure to read The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life

Also, the earlier you start, the stronger your investment will grow thanks to compound interest. Compound interest is both a wonderful and powerful thing that many people underestimate.

Did you know that if we have a dollar and have it doubled every day, the amount you would earn after 30 days would be about 536 million dollars! Now let’s replace days by years. If you have 30 years of investing, you would then get 536 million dollars (of course you can’t double your money within a year so this is for illustration purposes only). If you only have 20 years of investing that same amount initially, you would only get 1% of this or about 524,000 dollars. And if you can only invest for 10 years, this would only represent $512. See how much more you would get by investing early?

Step 5: Enjoy life and celebrate it

Once you save, invest, and build your wealth, you will then become financially free and get on living pretty much any life you want because you will have this amazing FI Armor that will protect you by letting you take bigger risks or do things that you could not imagine doing before.

And as important as reaching the end of this financial step was, we realized that we could have celebrate our achievement along the way more often. We are much better at this now and it is something that we feel is as important as going through the motion of getting us to this point.

Side note: home ownership

While the journey was relatively easy for us since we embraced minimalism and were savers early on, this is not always the case for most people. One of the traps that we see people falling under has to do with home ownership. Home ownership is not the same as real estate investment. And becoming home owners, could set you back by a couple of decades from reaching your financial independence if you don’t think about it.

At the end of the day it come down to a personal decision. Do you want to own you home and raise your family (emotional investment) and accept the cost to pay for the mortgage and the downpayment? Or would you prefer instead to invest this money into something that could buy your freedom earlier?

A good rule of thumb for a home to be a good real estate investment is the 1% rule that says that your rent for your home should be about 1% of your purchase price. So let’s say you buy a home for $200,000 you should then be able to rent it for $2,000 (which is about a 6-8% annual return after removing expenses). Again if you want your own as an emotional investment then you don’t need to optimize for this, but I feel that it is something important to mention since the vast majority of home owners aren’t meeting that 1% rule. We felt this point was worth bringing up. What do you thnink?

Our bottom line

Alright, I think this is really it! What do you think about the exercise we went through to get us to live a life of slow travel since 2018? Did you know that we checked out so far 17 countries (excluding our home countries) and 44 locations between 2018 and 2023? Here is the list: