How We Can Afford to Travel Full Time (and It’s Not By Being Digital Nomads)

A few years ago we felt stuck. We were burnt out from our corporate jobs but didn’t know how to leave them. We were dreaming of travel but didn’t know how to make that happen either. We held ourselves back from taking action because it was really hard to envision a different kind of life. We had spent so many years building our careers and expected to just keep plugging away at them for years and years to come. 

The more we advanced in our careers and the more money we made, the harder we thought we had to work. We felt like we had to give everything we had from Monday to Friday and then just keep giving it over the weekend. But we still had our fantasies about travel. Every Sunday night — which was my only little scrap of me time — I would do a search for all the trips I wished I could go on: world’s best epic adventures, world’s longest hikes, best overland journeys. The common denominator for all these ideas is that they couldn’t be done in a two-week vacation. We would need months or maybe even years. 

Yet every Monday morning we still turned up at the office. We were running on the hamster wheel.

We had stressful careers that we couldn’t walk away from…because we needed to pay for our expensive apartment and lifestyle…which we only had because we were working at stressful but high-paying jobs. If only we could somehow run away from it all and finally have the life we really wanted. 

I finally reached the breaking point with my burnout when I decided to take a weekend “off.” It was Gillian’s birthday and I just needed one day without emails or a powerpoint deck or a to-do list. So I didn’t answer any emails from my boss on Saturday morning or afternoon or evening. Finally, in the middle of our special birthday dinner on Saturday night my boss called me…just to make sure everything was ready for a meeting on Monday. That was really it for me. I needed a new life. 

I had always been the Type-A, career-driven one in our relationship. Although Gillian had a career that was meaningful to her, ultimately the corporate environment never really felt like a good fit. She felt trapped, spending my days in an office, answering emails. She knew it wasn’t what she wanted to do for the rest of my life. Hearing me say that I was ready to make a change was the moment she’d been waiting for. 

We considered whether to take a sabbatical and travel for a year. However that wasn’t the change we were looking for. We didn’t want to take a break from our soul-crushing careers only to go right back to them 6 months or a year later. We wanted a complete lifestyle transformation. 

Around this time we finally picked up a book that we’d heard about for years. It’s a book that’s really become the bible for people who want to escape the 9 to 5 and design their own lifestyle: The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. For those who haven’t read it, it’s a staple in every digital nomad’s library. What we took from the book was that earning an income didn’t need to take up our whole life. It could be possible to run some sort of online business or consultancy from whatever exotic location we wanted to be in. 

Immediately the wheels were turning. In our minds we were heading off to Thailand to become digital nomads.

Gillian could open a drop shipping store or I could start a blog and become an affiliate marketer. We would make tons of money right away and be living the life of our dreams. Of course, none of that happened. Some quick research told us that we were about a decade too late on that trend. But we were excited by all the new ideas.

And the next idea that we picked up came from the Nomad Capitalist. He’s quite a character but he does have some interesting ideas about the benefits of being a global citizen and lowering your tax bill. He specifically talks about earning money in one country, being a tax resident in another country and potentially living somewhere else entirely.  

After reading his book we started having a whole new set of ideas. He’s really keen on overseas property investments and we were inspired. We came up with a great idea that we could create income streams by investing in cheap properties in high potential markets like Montenegro. In fact, I spent so many afternoons at work sending Gillian property listings that her boss finally called her out for being on her phone all the time. We finally realized that it wasn’t the best financial decision for us to buy property in a country that we’d never even visited before. 

All these ideas — drop shipping, overseas income properties — might be good strategies for some people but they weren’t the right direction for us. At this stage in life, we weren’t prepared to become online entrepreneurs or international property moguls. We both felt that we’d already had very fulfilling careers. Neither of us was looking to start a whole new business from scratch.

Fortunately, in all our research and dreaming, we found our way to a concept that could actually work for us: Financial independence.

In the most simple terms, this means that once you’ve saved and invested 25 times your annual expenses, it should be enough to live on for the rest of your life. And if you want to feel even more confident in your financial outlook, you can save up more, like 33 times your annual expenses.  

We found this idea to be mind blowing. Suddenly there was a whole new option open to us. We had always done well saving and investing ever since our very first jobs. But we thought that we were saving up for some far off distant retirement that would be decades away. Now we saw that there was actually a formula we could follow. Once we had saved and invested enough…that could be it. We could finally walk away from work. And not in decades but much much sooner. 

There was only one catch. The formula is based on your annual expenses. We had no idea what we were spending each month let alone each year. But we did know it was a lot. We were living as expats in Singapore at the time, which is one of the highest cost of living countries in the world. Our monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment downtown was over $3,000 USD. We went to a boutique Crossfit gym that cost over $500 a month for both of us. I’m embarrassed to say I was spending over $200 every month on beauty products and services. And our dining out was so expensive that we just couldn’t bear to add it up. All of this gave us a very inflated view of how much we’d need to live on. Saving up 25 times our current annual expenses seemed like a crazy goal because our spending was so out of control.

But we didn’t give up. We did two important things to pursue our goal of financial independence. First, we started to track our spending to get a handle on how much was going out the door every month. And we really tracked it all, down to every last penny. Next we scrutinized every single budget line item and made deep cuts. These were some pretty significant lifestyle changes. We downsized our apartment from a two-bedroom to a much cheaper studio. We stopped eating out. We switched to a low-cost gym. The list goes on. 

After a couple years of deep cost cutting and investing every spare penny, we did it. We saved up enough that we were financially independent. We quit work, bought one way tickets to Europe and we’ve been traveling full time ever since.  

Of course, we could have chosen a different route to becoming travelers. We could have started an online business or invested in property. The difference with our path is that we don’t have to work for a living. We have all the freedom that we dreamed about during those sad Sunday nights. 

We would never want to discourage anyone from pursuing an alternative path like becoming a digital nomad. Maybe it’s something we should have investigated a decade earlier. But for us, taking control of our finances was the key to taking control of our freedom. 

Of course, getting to financial independence and retiring early is really just the beginning of the journey. You’d think that life is pretty easy once you’ve quit work and no longer have a boss. But it turns out that a lot can go wrong during that first year of early retirement. If you want to learn from everything we did wrong, you can check out the next post.