All the Practical Details that You Need to Know About Full-Time Travel

We receive many questions about what goes on in the background to make a life of full-time travel possible. Long before you book your flight and pack your bags, there is a seemingly endless list of administrative details to get right.

We’ve put together a summary of the approaches, tools and products that help ensure that we stay well connected and protected while we’re on the road. Some of these are affiliate links.  

Accessing money while overseas

• We’ve automated our cashflow by having our investments generate a regular monthly payout in the form of interest payments and dividends 
• We keep enough cash for one year’s expenses in a combination of a savings account and redeemable GICs for easy access. This also functions as an emergency fund
• Our favourite credit card for making purchases in Canadian dollars and collecting Aeroplan points is the American Express Aeroplan Reserve Card 
• We put the majority of our non-Canadian spending on the HSBC World Elite Mastercard, which has no forex fee and returns 3% on all travel purchases in the form of a credit which can be used to offset travel expenses
• When we withdraw cash from ATMS, we use our Interactive Brokers debit card, which gives us the spot exchange rate without a 2.5% bank mark up. The debit card withdraws cash directly from our brokerage account
• We track our spending using You Need a Budget and have regular meetings to allocate our budget for the next month

Ensuring sufficient health insurance coverage

• Our global medical plan covers hospitalisations and other major health concerns, but we pay out of pocket for preventive care and other minor medical needs
• If needing a preventative dental or medical service while traveling, we look for an English-speaking provider with strong reviews on Google Maps   
• We’ve cycled through different insurance plans depending on our needs at the time:
  • We chose Cigna Global when we were overseas for most of the year and wanted comprehensive coverage including cancer care
  • Now that we’ve resumed our Canadian residency, we are choosing travel medical insurance providers for the specific travel periods. We have used SafetyWing in the past but have recently found Genki to be more cost effective
• Since we don’t plan to travel to the U.S., we exclude coverage in U.S. for a significantly lower premium

Staying connected while on the move

• Data: We spend around $8 USD/GB on our global data with Flexiroam by topping up during their frequent sales. We appreciate the long expiry date on their data and the ability to share it between users.
• Incoming Calls/SMS: We use GoSim for free incoming calls, incoming SMS and using WhatsApp. This is also how we receive One-Time Pins when needed to access accounts and services. Our accounts stay active as long as we top up our account by $10 AUD once per year. Our GoSim phone number is Estonian so we also maintain a Canadian number using Fongo, a free VOIP service. 
• Outgoing Calls to Landlines: We use Skype to call any phone number globally for a small charge which varies by country (usually just a few cents per minute). Our Skype account tops up automatically by $10 CAD as needed.

Receiving mail while abroad

• We have switched as many statements as possible over to email.
• Since we used to live in Singapore, we used a Singapore-based service to scan and email our mail to us for the first year of our travels.
• Now that we are residents of Canada, our mail is sent to relatives instead.

Renting a car

• Our favourite website for finding car rental deals is qeeq.com. When the rental rates seem high with the larger companies, we use Google Maps to find smaller local companies with many positive reviews. 
• For rentals lasting just a few days, we always take full insurance to avoid any hassles. For longer rental periods, we look for providers offering collision damage waivers with deductibles below $500 USD. 
• Upon pickup, we photograph any marks on the car and the gas level to avoid any disputes later. 
• Gillian carries an international driver’s license which is available from CAA or AAA and needs to be renewed annually. Only some countries require this document, which is simply a translation of your driver’s license.

Questions? If you want to know anything else about what makes life easier on the road, just ask!