2019 Year End Spending Report – Still traveling the world for half the cost of staying home

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.

Year 1 Nomad Travel Spend Report – Traveling the world for half of the cost of staying home

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!

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