Discover the cost of our slow nomadic lifestyle in our 2023 EOY Spending Report where we share every single dollar we spent so you get to see how much it costs to live an abundant life around the world traveling to 10+ destination across 5 countries!
Time has flown by, and it’s already been five years since we embraced the slow travel lifestyle, immersing ourselves in the beauty of the world. During this half decade, we’ve ventured across four continents, explored the wonders of 18 different countries, savored in the experiences of 48 unique destinations, all while staying at 70+ distinctive Airbnb!. This journey has been a remarkable one, and today, we’re excited to unveil the financial insights we’ve gathered along the way.
In our fifth year of nomadic travel, we once again embarked on the road less traveled. With the pandemic now behind us, we ventured far from Taiwan to explore the world anew.
Together, we experienced Australia for the first time, caught a glimpse of Fiji, and discovered the wonders of various Southeast Asian countries.
Despite our extensive travels, we managed to maintain our frugal ways and save a significant amount of money. By employing money-saving strategies like booking long-term Airbnbs, indulging in local cuisine, embracing a slower pace of living, utilizing travel rewards from credit cards, and more, we kept our expenses well within a reasonable budget.
In this post, we will meticulously detail every penny we spent, as you may be astonished by the final tally. Are you ready to delve into the breakdown?
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
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!).
As we closed out 2020 and our first 30 months of nomadic travel, I’m digging into our finances to see how we did in 2020 (aka. the year of the global COVID-19 pandemic).
It’s been 2 years since we got married, got rid of all of our stuff and left San Francisco to become nomads and slow travel the world! Year 1 was amazing, we were living out our dream lifestyle to see the world and staying in some really cool cities. Plus, we were able to do all of that for half the cost of living at home in San Francisco. Coming into year 2, we were becoming seasoned nomads and getting into a rhythm of enjoying new places, eating delicious meals, exploring nature, settling into monthly apartments and even making new nomad friends. We learned a lot from year 1 and applied similar money saving techniques such as booking long-term Airbnbs and using airline reward points. We had exciting plans for 2020 but like the rest of the world, we had to quickly adjust when the pandemic hit in March. As a result, we became grounded nomads and had to decide where we wanted to wait things out for the last 4 months of year 2. This also involved canceling a lot of flights and Airbnb bookings.
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.
When we decided to get married and sell everything to travel the world, we knew that this new lifestyle was going to be fun, exciting but also cheaper than staying at home. What we did not know was how much cheaper it was going to be to live a very high quality of life where we would enjoy the local food scene, cook amazing meals, take regular getaway trips, spend time in nature, attend local shows/festivals and everything else you get the freedom to do when you decide to travel the world slowly.
As we are closing our first year of nomadic travel, I am digging into our finances to answer this question and the results are pretty exciting. In a nutshell in the last 12 months, we slow traveled to 10 locations in 5 countries for about half the cost of living in San Francisco. But more than reducing our spending, geo-arbitrage let us rebalance our expenses towards activities that we enjoy the most, spending more time with our respective families, living a less stressful life and exploring new places in the world.
So let’s dig into our spending report for our first year of nomadic living!
(more…)As we are closing 2018 and our first six months of nomadic travel, I am digging into our finances to answer this question and the results are pretty exciting. In a nutshell in the last 6 months, we slashed our spending in half, rebalanced our spending towards activities that we enjoyed the most, are living a less stressful life and are having the time of our lives.