Financial Independence and Travel: Can You Have Both?

I used to be so intrigued by Devin’s article that I reached out to Featured.com and LinkedIn to see what various financial experts and business owners thought of this query. Devin himself concluded that “maintaining financial independence while traveling is entirely possible with a proper strategy.”

I actually have actually found that regular travel is compatible with a minimum of partial retirement. In fact, you will notice that Devin’s blog has a couple of photos of Ruth and I taken in Malta and Italy that try and portray the thought of ​​combining business with pleasure.

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Few would dispute that full traditional retirement is entirely compatible with extensive travel; This appears to be the dream of those that still work full-time. But increasingly the FIRE [Financial Independence Retire Early] Exercise and/or partial retirement or early retirement may also be compatible with a minimum of part-time employment, often partly on the move.

Hence the term “digital nomads” for those whose side jobs allow them to travel and work anywhere a laptop and a web connection can be found. Certainly you may run a financial website from almost anywhere, like I do, and sometimes write a column just like the one you are reading.

Our family’s routine of spending six weeks abroad each winter (normally in a special location every time) was refined after an identical trip to Malaga, Spain in late 2022. We repeated this experience last 12 months within the Bahamas and this 12 months, as mentioned, in Malta. In all cases, we commit to staying in a single Airbnb location for a minimum of a month; The prices are then lower. We are searching for elevator access and modern conveniences equivalent to a dishwasher, microwave, washer and dryer, in addition to the standard kitchen appliances equivalent to a toaster and low maker.

As we explain to friends who’re puzzled by our decision to remain in a single small place for an prolonged time period, our on a regular basis life abroad is not all that different from that in Canada: We wish to walk near a body of water each day (at home it’s Lake Ontario) and take a look at to eat most meals at home. We normally discover a farmers market and/or food market inside a brief walk of our temporary home.

As a result, our monthly food expenses will not be significantly higher than at home, although there may be after all a bent to spend a bit of more at restaurants.

The web makes digital nomads easier

Obviously, the web is crucial to the digital nomad lifestyle. For us, Netflix and YouTube are the essential applications alongside Airbnb – the latter is beneficial for locating local travel suggestions from semi-professional travel bloggers, in addition to offering music and even a limited amount of reports. We don’t rent cars and like buses and trains, but when we did we’d undoubtedly use mobile apps like Waze or Google Maps.

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By the feature article’s deadline, I had received 84 submissions from various financial professionals, travel specialists and business owners: too many to summarize on this short column. Unfortunately even in longer space of my websiteI needed to limit it to about 25 answers. The overwhelming majority agreed with Devin’s original premise that travel is indeed compatible with financial independence. As Rex Freiberger from Facts about croquettes “The portrayal of travel as a threat to financial independence is largely a myth centered around the most expensive option for travel.”

Travel doesn’t must be expensive, agrees Joshua Wahls Insurance through heroes: “Business class flights, five-star hotels and $40 cocktails at the pool bar are optional. A $500 round-trip flight and a $60-a-night Airbnb in a country where the dollar will travel three times as far are still trips.”

“Have your cake and eat it too” ideas submitted include renting recreational vehicles (RVs) for longer trips and turning your private home base right into a maintenance-free travel community, essentially facilitating a “lock and leave” approach to traveling abroad.

I even got here across a brand new term that I didn’t know from my previous reading or travel: Bleisure, a mix of business and leisure. Wikipedia defines bleisure as “the practice of combining business travel with leisure activities, typically by adding personal time to a business trip.” The essential idea, says Jay Ellenby Safe havensis to let your profession fund your transit: “We often help clients incorporate vacation days into business trips to save on personal airfare and accommodation costs.”

Geoarbitrage

Several sources mentioned the concept of geoarbitrage, which is solely living where the fee of living is cheaper. Devin Partida has explored this before Guest blog. This, in turn, means that you can further grow your investment portfolio, as Jay Samit outlined in his book . “By making money in strong currencies while living in and exploring more affordable parts of the world, everyone can enjoy a richer, more adventurous life while actually spending less,” he says.

The key’s moving from vacation to geoarbitrage, writes James Tech TripFrog. “A strategic traveler with a focus on FI [financial independence] prioritizes medium-term stays in regions where the cost of living is lower than in their home location. If you spend months in hubs like Portugal, Mexico or Southeast Asia, you can often live a high-quality lifestyle for 40% less than in major western cities. In this model, traveling actually accelerates your path to financial independence by lowering your monthly burn rate.”

A brand new suggestion is to make travel a daily fixed expense incurred every month, slightly than treating it as an item paid for with “spare change” in spite of everything other “essential” expenses have been paid. To me, this jogs my memory of creator David Chilton’s old advice to “pay yourself first” by allocating certain percentages of paychecks to savings.

Achieving financial independence doesn’t require monk-like austerity, says Scott Brown, founding father of Mint Wit. “The trick is to move from expensive, spontaneous trips to planned trips that help you achieve your FI goals… What we tell people instead is to embrace slow travel, house sitting, travel hacking with credit card points, off-season destinations, and don’t eliminate travel altogether.”