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.

2021 End of Year Travel Rewards Report

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 USA. 

After accumulating about 1.5 million of Travel Rewards points in 2020 (worth about $25,000 in redemption at current valuation), we managed to accumulate some more and was also able to spend them again to enjoy some free international flights.

In this blog post, we will give you a quick introduction to travel rewards before digging into how many rewards we accumulated in 2021, which credit cards we opened, how much money we saved by redeeming these precious points and what our plans are for 2022!

Our Travel Rewards Balance history in 2021. Keeping a strong momentum!

Are you ready to talk about free travel money and see how much we got in 2021 by using Travel Rewards?

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By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

2021 Year End Spend Report – big life, small spend

When we decided to sell everything to travel the world in 2018, we knew that this new lifestyle was going to be fun, exciting and also full of unpredictable surprises. We did not know that we were going to go through a global pandemic.

While 2020 was the year of the pandemic, 2021 has been the year of hope with the vaccine that has been saving many lives. I predict that 2022 will be the year of adjustment where we adjust to live with the reality of the virus and resume more normalcy (including adding much more international travel for us).

We started 2021 in Taiwan, a place that we’ve been calling home since the pandemic started. We left in May to visit family in California and catch up with them, before doing the same in France while making a stop in the South of the country to explore the beautiful Calanques as well as visiting friends in Switzerland for a small week getaway. Finally for the last part of 2021, we decided to come back to Taiwan which has more or less sheltered us from the virus since they have managed to keep it away from its borders in 2021… Let’s see how 2022 goes

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By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals on our favorite essential items (2021 Edition)

As aspiring minimalists, we don’t extensively buy stuff and rather focus on experiences. However, we are savers that can’t pass on a good deal especially for an essential item we needed to buy anyway. This makes Black Friday sales the perfect time to make these thoughtful purchases as they are usually heavily discounted. The key here obviously is “essential item”.

Since everyone will likely be looking at deals online (especially in 2021 – a strong year for online deliveries), we decided to put together a list of our favorite slow travel essentials items that we have found discounted as part of the 2021 Black Friday season.

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

[Interview #023] From overcoming fears to taking control of his life – How 4 years of solo world travel and volunteering can change everything!

Travis King is a 37 years old, originally from Milwaukee Wisconsin. He spent the first 10 years of his career working with youth as a camp director.

As that two-year program was finishing and everyone was questioning his next professional pursuit, he thought to himself, “when do I ever get to make a choice for myself, for my life, and not for my resume?”.

That thought led him on a 5-month trip to South America as soon as his Master’s finished. He went on to solo travel and volunteer all over the world for 4 years. Those four years ended with landing a job in the travel industry as one of Remote Year’s first program leaders. A few years later he is now officially unemployed (by choice), living in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.

Let’s dig into his story!

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

The ultimate note-taking solution for nomads: reMarkable 2 Review

The advance of technology over the past decade has made our nomadic lifestyle much more comfortable and manageable. However technology can also bring a lot of distraction and can even impact our sleep. So in early 2020, we decided to use good old paper notebooks to practice journaling and note-taking. After accumulating a few notebooks (weighing ~100g apiece) and spending a decent amount of time setting up our monthly spread to make our journaling efficient, I was wondering if technology could help us!

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

Year 3 Nomad Travel Spend Report – Unplanned Pandemic Year (Part II – The numbers)

We learned a lot from our very unplanned third year of slow travel. We discovered wonderful places, people, and cultures (make sure to read part one to learn more about that). This year was also filled with so much uncertainty – we didn’t even know which countries we would be staying in, let alone how much budget we would need. We were able to still save a lot as we continued applying our money-saving strategy (through tactics such as booking long-term Airbnbs, eating locally, living slowly, applying for credit cards to travel for free, and more…) to keep our budget to a very affordable number. In this post, we are going to share and dive into every single penny we spent (because we love tracking that stuff!).

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

Year 3 Nomad Travel Spend Report – Unplanned Pandemic Year (Part I – The highlights)

Year 3 was an interesting year since 2020 was an unprecedented year for everyone. For the first time, we stayed in the same country for pretty much an entire year due to an unforeseen global pandemic. We have learned a lot from these past 3 years from both a travel and budget standpoint. In this first part, we are diving into the fun/travel part of our journey by looking at our top highlights.

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago

Blog Income Report – Q2 2021

We don’t blog for a living but that doesn’t prevent us from monetizing our blog because why not? This quarter our revenue was flat but we had significant change in our source of revenue. In this post we explain how we monetize our blog, what works, what doesn’t, and how much money we made in the second quarter of 2021 (which covers the period from 4/1/2021 to 6/30/2021)

By Mr. Nomad Numbers, ago