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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
We were introduced to Emily & James by our friend Jessica (@TheFioneers). We later learned about their incredible journey and had to reach out to them to share it. While we felt that retiring from a regular job in our mid-30s was a good achievement, wait until you hear how James and Emily leveraged geo-arbitrage, an aggressive real estate investment strategy and a positive mindset to become financially free in their 20s. They had a really clever way to reach early retirement… well earlier.