We happened to have upcoming plans to visit countries that are currently experiencing widespread transmission of the virus (including Italy and Japan) as well as plans to visit the US. We wanted to share how we plan to handle our travels for the rest of 2020, what part of our itinerary we might change, any recommendations we are following to stay healthy and how we see this outbreak in general.
Michelle is a 36 year old event manager/festival organizer from South Australia. She currently lives in New Zealand where she spends time on a short work contract, after completing a full year of slow travel around the USA in June 2019. Since 2007 she has been to 40 countries, spread across annual trips but she still calls Australia home!
Michelle became interested in the concept of financial independence in 2012, discovering it via Early Retirement Extreme and Mr Money Mustache blogs. She has been learning about general personal finance topics to make the most of her money, with expectations of limited income potential in her chosen career. FI provided a clearer, big picture motivation for her savings efforts, which had previously been focused on funding her next overseas vacations or dry spells of work.
In this post, we are taking a deep dive into our budget and how the two of us spent about $1,000 USD for a 4 week stay in Koh Lanta, Thailand in November. We picked Koh Lanta for the cool paradise factor and the fact that it was a quiet island that definitely fit our slow travel lifestyle.
Sergio and Shannon are husband and wife (respectively an IT consultant and project manager consultant + corporate trainer) from the United States that feel lucky to be best friends. They see merit in improving their faults and supporting each other in the effort. They both strive for continual improvement and live a life full of small actions, small choices and small decisions that have a big impact on their lives. They’re also full-time house sitters (57 and counting) and digital nomads pursuing FI/RE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) who’ve traveled to 4 continents, 26 countries and over 80 cities since 2016!
After staying for a month in paradise on a Caribbean island for only $2,7000 in the Spring of 2019, we were overdue for another month in paradise because why not? Since we just wrapped up a month visiting Chiang Mai, we decided to go explore one of the many islands of Thailand and after some extensive research decided to give a try to Koh Lanta. So without further ado, let’s go explore Koh Lanta and unveil in this two part article what we did, ate, saw and what we recommend people to avoid!
Ryan and Emily are in their mid-40s and have been married for almost 10 years. They left their home in the US (North Carolina) in August 2018, and started their full-time travel adventures. They haven’t looked back since. They spent just over 13 months in South America—Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. They went back to the eastern US for 5 weeks to spend some time with their friends and family. Currently they are spending their second year in Southeast Asia – 2 weeks in Myanmar, currently in Thailand, and planning to visit Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam soon.
Last month, I bragged a little on Twitter that we managed to accumulate half a million travel rewards points in 2019 alone and I wanted to follow up with more details. If you’ve been following us, you know that Travel Rewards is one of the core strategies we use to travel the world for less than staying at home in the US. Do you believe that world travel is unaffordable because of airfare cost? Well we can show you with the magic of travel rewards, we were able to travel to 4 continents, 9 countries and 15 cities for 2 people for under $2000!
Eric initially reached out to me by answering one of the emails he received from us after subscribing to our newsletter. As we started chatting I ended up learning about his recent transition to the Digital Nomad lifestyle and the Remote Year program him and his girlfriend used as a way to smoothly transition into the nomadic lifestyle and also easily connect with like-minded people
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.
Noémie & Fabien are 31 years old, respectively from France and Quebec. They have been in a relationship for almost 8 years. They called themselves semi-nomadic as they spend on average, half of their time in Quebec working, and half of their time traveling (without working). They are currently based in Quebec, when they work about 25 hours/week, by choice. They look for jobs as they go along, always on a contractual basis. Even in Quebec, they consider themselves nomadic because they change houses all the time since they have chosen not to have a fixed address. In fact, their whole semi-nomadic lifestyle is based on housesitting.
They choose to work less because they want to have time to participate in community life through different social commitments; they consider themselves socially-committed people. Through their minimalist and semi-nomadic life choices, they try to do their best to live in the present moment by respecting others and by participating in the community in which they live.