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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
As aspiring minimalists, we don’t extensively buy stuff and rather focus on experiences. Our ‘deals’ lately have looked like $1.50 Pad Thai, a $5/hour massage and a free swim in perfect blue ocean waters. However, we are savers that love a good deal and if there is an essential we needed to buy anyways, Black Friday sales are a good time to make that thoughtful purchase.
In case you were planning on purchasing items we’ve mentioned in our packing list posts in the past, we’ve pulled together a list of items that are currently discounted during Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
In this week’s blog post, we are now taking a deep dive into our budget and how the two of us spent $1,172 USD during our 17 day stay in Kotor, Montenegro this summer. We picked Montenegro over its more popular neighbor Croatia because it’s got beautiful scenery, is less busy and is more affordable compared to Dubrovnik.
Wendy is a Taiwanese-American that living in her 6th country (so far!). Besides Taiwan and the US, where she spent 12 and 11 years, respectively, Wendy also lived 2 years in Cameroon, 2 years in the UK, 6 years in China and now Vietnam. Each place has definitely had a significant impact on the person she has become.
She took the plunge to step off of the corporate grind when she realizes the one more year syndrome was too easy to repeat. When her husband’s new job offer came in lower than expected, they took this as a sign to seize the moment, and try out full-time travel. From their year, they learned that financial freedom doesn’t need to mean never working again.
For the final stop of our 4 months journey in Europe, we stayed in Kotor Montenegro. We picked Montenegro over its more popular neighbor Croatia because it’s got beautiful scenery (check out the view from our apartment below) and is not as busy or pricey. While we stayed only 2 out of the 4 weeks we initially planned, we really enjoyed it and would really recommend it as a lesser known gem. Let’s go explore Kotor!
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We stumbled upon Ali & Alison’s journey through their instagram feed and we immediately connected with them. They are like-minded people that decided to embrace nomadic living as part of their lifestyle and this is why we decided to reach out to them to write this interview.
Both Ali & Alison grew up in the US and met each other in 2004 in Seattle, Washington. Back in Seattle their typical day revolves around work since they were both gone for their jobs 50-60 hours per week.
They had their wake up call when Alison ran their numbers against the typical FIRE calculation of 25x annual living expenses in July of 2017 and realized they had reached their financial independence number. By becoming nomadic they can now separate themselves from their career-focused lives and the urge to participate in lifestyle inflation. They have taken their curiosity to explore new places, which used to be funneled into a vacation just once every 2 years, and made that into their full-time lifestyle.