[Interview #005] 44 cents a day to Millionaire by 31

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!

[Interview #004] Embracing Nomadic Travel from early retirement at age 50

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.


Destination Report: Porto – Part One: What to do, eat, see (& avoid)

One of our favorite things about our nomadic lifestyle is that we can design it however we’d like based on our priorities. We can slow it down or speed it up, go to a food destination or a cultural city, spend time sightseeing or working on projects, meet up with friends or set out on our own, save money in Central America or splurge (within reason of course!) in the Caribbean. One of the biggest advantages to us is the ability to spend long periods of time with family and friends that live in different parts of the world. Since my family lives in France, I didn’t get a chance to see them very much during my 10 years in the US. Now we plan on spending 1-2 months every year with them and focus on great quality time versus the quick holiday catch up I was used to do. This is what brought us to Europe this summer!

Today we are fast forwarding a bit to our first slow travel destination of our 2nd year of long term travel: Portugal. (June was spent in France with family and was all over the place. Early July was spent with friends in beautiful Costa Brava Spain and we well talk about both at a later time). Given how popular Portugal is among expats, digital nomads and retirees, we were looking forward to see what the hype was all about! We decided to spend about 2 months in Portugal, spending our time between Porto and Lisbon. Porto was our first stop and we ended up with pretty mixed feeling about this city. Let’s see why by exploring Porto!

(more…)