Mr. Nomad Numbers

We are a couple who travel the world and want to inspire people to think differently about the life they can design for themselves through our journey.

[Interview #008] Reprioritizing life after a health wake up call

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.

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

2019 End of Year Travel Rewards Report – How we earned $10K in free travel money

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!

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

[Interview #007] Priority Shifts, Remote Year & SlowFI led to the Nomadic Lifestyle

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

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

2019 Year End Spending Report – Still traveling the world for half the cost of staying home

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.

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

[Interview #006] Semi-nomadic lifestyle through minimalism and house sitting

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.

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

Destination Report: Chiang Mai – Part Two: Cost of Nomad Living

In this week’s blog post, we are now taking a deep dive into our budget and how the two of us spent $1,445 USD during our 34 day stay in Chiang Mai, Thailand in the fall. We picked Chiang Mai as our first stop in our 6 month journey to South East Asia for the food, the festivals, the weather, the culture, the large digital nomad community and of course we knew it was also very affordable.

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

Destination Report: Chiang Mai – Part One: What to do, see, eat and avoid

After spending a lovely summer in Europe, we embarked on a 6 months journey in South East Asia (SEA). While Mrs. NN already visited SEA before we even met, I never set foot there so there was definitely some excitement in exploring a brand new region as part of our 2nd year of nomadic travel. For our first stop, we decided to stay an entire month in Chiang Mai Thailand and we were blown away by the culture, the food and the digital nomad community. So without further ado, let’s go explore Chiang Mai and unveil in this two part article what we did, ate and saw!

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

[Interview #005] 44 cents a day to Millionaire by 31

These guys may not need much of an introduction because they are popular bloggers, featured in mainstream media and are now successful authors! They are also just fun and genuinely kind people.

We learnt about Kristy and Bryce back in late 2016 through their blog Milleniual-Revolution.com because they were doing what we wanted to do! Reaching financial independence and traveling the world. We had come across a lot of FI people and a lot of travel people but not a lot of people doing both. We read their cost of travel article and were blown away at what we read. These guys were traveling around the globe on less than $30K USD a year and they were planning on traveling for many years to come. We made the great decision to attend a FI retreat in Ecuador and were fortunate enough to meet Kristy & Bryce in person. It was a life changing week spent with our tribe and since then, they have become good friends!

At the time, I did not know Kristy & Bryce’s entire story but I was impressed by the fact that they became financially independent by 31! It turned out that Kristy had a rough childhood in rural China and lived in poverty for many years. She covers the series of events following her childhood in great detail in her fantastic book, Quit Like a Millionaire. Two decades later, she reached a net worth of a million dollars.

She is not only a rock star but a great example that anything is possible if you believe in yourself and have the appropriate financial know-how.

Let’s hear from Kristy!

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

How to never pay ATM fees while traveling abroad

Today we are going to talk about some of those nasty fees you occur while traveling when withdrawing foreign currency. We found a solution that has helped us save about 2.5% of our money withdrawn by ATM which would’ve been eaten up by an ATM “transaction” fee – that’s $25 for every $1000 withdrawn so it adds up! We’d much rather put that money towards a special dinner in Thailand than pay bank fees. With this solution we don’t have to worry about which ATM to use and how much cash to take out since all ATM fees will get credited back to our bank account at the end of the month. And best of all, this solution is entirely free for everyone in the US! If you’re not a US resident, we have an alternative solution for you too. Let’s dig into our ultimate ATM hack!

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

[Interview #004] Embracing Nomadic Travel from early retirement at age 50

I connected with Marcia through our Facebook community and felt that her early retirement story would be worth sharing with our readers. What I like about Marcia is that unlike our previous guests, she isn’t a blogger which can make her more relatable to most people reading our blog.

Marcia and her husband are both from Vancouver, Canada. They retired from their jobs in January 2018, at ages 49 and 51 respectively. Two weeks after their last day of work, they packed their bags and flew to Thailand, to spend the next 10 months traveling throughout Asia. They explored different parts of Thailand, Bali, Singapore, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Japan, before returning back to Vancouver to spend the Christmas holidays. In 2019 they returned to Thailand for the first 2½ months (yup, they love it there) of the year but then decided to take a different approach and visit parts of Europe for the remainder of the year. So far, they’ve hit up France, Italy, Cyprus, and Portugal and before the year is up, will also go to Spain and return to different cities in Italy and France before heading home in December.


By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago