As slow travelers, we’ve come to realize that establishing a sense of belonging can be quite difficult. For the past couple of years, we’ve been pondering if having a home base could be the answer. In our latest blog post we delve into our thoughts on this topic and where we might find such a base!
Jason Robinson is a 44 years old who grew up in a fairly small manufacturing/factory town in Ohio to a mom who stayed home and a dad who always took overtime to make ends meet. Travel wasn’t really a thing back then.
It wasn’t until his 30s that he started traveling more domestically and trying things like hostels. A year later I sold it all, 8 months later covid hit, then 6 months after that I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes
In this interview, you will learn what does a typical day in his life look like (compare to before), what inflection point led them to decide to change your life trajectory, what were some of the limiting beliefs that hold him back, what is his cost of living per year and how is has been traveling the world as a onset Type 1 diabetic!
Ready to dig in?
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!
Are you ready to talk about free travel money and see how much we got in 2021 by using Travel Rewards?
(more…)
In this post, I will be answering the most common questions we have been getting through our nomadic journey (so far!) as well as giving you some insights into what a day in our lives looks like as full-time slow travelers.
Scott and Caroline are both 49 and have been married for 26 years! They met in high school in New York City, dated throughout college and married a year after college, settling into a tiny apartment in Manhattan. They had their first child a year after they married and their second child 5 years after that. By age 30, they already had 2 kids and were well into our corporate careers.
They focused early on saving, career, and raising a family, and saving early definitely gave them a jump start towards financial independence. With that said though, they were your typical dual-income in a High Cost Of Living (HCOL) city – making six-figures but still feeling like we were just getting by and watching every penny, as we tried to prioritize saving.
Let’s learn more about how the decided to quit their corporate career to build their path to financial freedom to travel the world early on in their lives.
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 full-time travelers, we take a lot of transportation, live in multiple apartments, eat out at restaurants, shop at markets, taste new snacks and enjoy exploring our beautiful planet. Since we explore much more than the average person, our impact on the environment is very much a concern for us. In the article, we share tips on how we reduce our impact on the environment that we apply while we travel but many tips you can easily apply at home.
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!
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.
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!