When people talk with me about our nomadic lifestyle, I can see the question they’re dying to ask burning behind their eyes, and once in a while someone will actually ask it:
How the hell do you afford it?
Great question. Let’s discuss.
How the Hell do we Afford our Lifestyle?
Before taking the leap in July of 2016, we were living in a house (a big one…too big, actually…ask me sometime how often something breaks in a big goddamned house, and how much it costs…anyway, I was an idiot and bought a big house) with two cars. All of this Great American Goodness was located in the Northeastern U.S., one of the most expensive places to live in the world.
We had a mortgage. Insurance. Car payments. Preschool. Gas. Electric. Cable. Groceries. Student loans.
You probably have all the same delightful bills, so I don’t need to tell you. Life in Connecticut was expensive.
I also happen to have built, with a couple of partners, a data company based in New York City. I’m a tech guy, so I can work from pretty much anywhere. Since 2008 I’ve been making my own schedule and working remotely, so making the leap from answering emails from 60 miles away to doing the same from 10,000 miles away was a no-brainer.
Check Out – Under the Tuscan…Ah, Never Mind
So we make dollars, and when we’re abroad, we spend euros. Or Thai baht. Vietnamese Dong. Rupees. Etc. In many of the places we visit the cost of living is much, much lower than what we were incurring in the U.S., so we save a ton of money.
Getting around Cambodia by remork (another name for a tuk-tuk) is almost cheaper than the price of gas in the States. Dinner for three with appetizers and a couple of rounds of drinks for Mom and Dad in Koh Lanta, Thailand is around $20-$25 US. A visit to a specialist in Antibes, France to figure out what the hell was growing on my lip (it was a fibroma) cost me a cool $26.
You get the picture.
During the planning stages I spent quite a bit of time figuring out what our budget on the road would be. The first big ticket item was our travel insurance from World Nomads, which was about $2,800 for a family of three.
Travel insurance covers disaster scenarios like someone getting sick and having to be transported out of the country to another hospital. It also covers things like lost luggage and cancellations, but what we really wanted was the holy-shit-it’s-a-disaster coverage.
The other big cost item was flights. In the first 14 months we’ve flown 15 times, so airline tickets were a big part of the budget. Many of those flights were just a few hundred bucks to hop around SE Asia, but there were a few higher end tickets as well, like flying from Dubai to Thailand. Or Thailand to Rome.
We also had our student loans to pay each month. After that, we had to determine how much we wanted to pay for lodging, food, and entertainment.
After much research we settled on a monthly budget for accommodations, and everything left over was earmarked for food and entertainment. We also planned to balance every month we spent in the “more expensive” locations (e.g. Europe) with a month in “less expensive” countries like Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
Check Out – Phuket and the Phi Phi Islands
Within just a few months we found that we were spending much less than we anticipated, so we shifted all our extra income towards our student loans. Within eight months we had paid off Juliann’s three loans completely, and now we are working on mine. Those will take a bit longer, but we’ll be done much, much sooner than if we had stayed in Connecticut.
So we can remain on the road for as long as we like, provided I’m able to keep my business growing.
Of course, we didn’t have to leave the country to downsize. We could have moved to a hundred different places in the U.S. and bought or rented a reasonable home. The financial end result would have been the same. But we also wanted to travel, so being able to do so and save money at the same time has been a huge, delicious, juicy bonus.
The bottom line is that it costs much, much less to travel the world than most people think.
County Cork
Our week in Dublin was a blast, but we were well aware that the true treasures of Ireland lay outside the city. The AirBnB that we had rented in Shanagarry, County Cork, was a beautiful cottage on the property of the Walsh family. Caroline and Vincent, our hosts, were wonderful and warm people that made us feel at home instantly. It was almost like visiting family.
The real bonus was that the Walshes had three adorable kids 5 and under, and Braeden was off-the-wall delighted to be able to play with some kids his age every day.
The time we spent in Shanagarry was almost – almost – like being a normal, non-nomadic family. After breakfast the Walshes 5-year-old girl would come knocking for Braeden, and he would sprint out the door to play with her and her two brothers, spending hours out in the yard chasing the chickens, playing ball, and generally raising hell. Sometimes the kids would all come and hang out in our living room, and more often they would go to their house and play.
Juliann and I started enjoying quiet time together that we rarely get, and being able to put together 20 minutes of uninterrupted thought in the middle of the day was like a vacation in a tropical paradise.
Shanagarry itself – and County Cork in general – was so beautiful. We weren’t far from the sea and the little town of Ballycotton, where we spent more than a few hours warming up in a delightful pub over a pint and some beef stew. We picked up where we left off in Dublin, enjoying some family time at a pub almost every afternoon, and we made sure to visit a few: the Blackbird, our favorite; McGrath’s, reportedly home of the best Guinness and guarded by the grouchy-looking but affable enough owner Sean; and the Schooner Bar, where we enjoyed a couple of excellent meals on drizzly, blustery days. The Hunted Hog in Castlemartyr was also a favorite stop for a pint and some grub.
By the way: the food in County Cork is outstanding. I was shocked to discover that there was more to Irish Cuisine than boiling meat and vegetables, and I delightedly dove into delicious helpings of Guinness Stew, Cottage Pie, Fish and Chips, Bacon and Cabbage, Fisherman’s Pie, some of the best burgers I’ve ever had, and much more. Hats off to you, County Cork, for incredible eats.
We paid a visit to Kinsale, a small harbor town to the southwest of Shanagarry. The town was picturesque and we had our best meal in Ireland at the Bulman Bar (an open-faced crab sandwich to die for!) just outside the downtown area. Scilly Walk, a scenic harborside path through the trees, began right by the Bulman, so after lunch we hiked the Scilly for an hour or so, then stopped by Charles Fort to have a look around.
The fort was amazing. Built in the 17th century, it now stands, impressively preserved, with mind-blowing views of Kinsale Harbor. We took an hour or so to explore the fort and then headed back to Shanagarry to let Braeden play with the kids before dinner.
We would relax for a couple of days, do a road trip, and repeat. We checked out the Lusitania Memorial at Old Head, the closest spot on land to where she was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat in 1915. We drove to the adorable town of Cobh, the last stop for the RMS Titanic on April 11, 1912, before she left Europe to meet her fate.
We spent a misty, cold morning at Blarney Castle, where Juliann fulfilled a lifelong desire to kiss the Blarney Stone just as her beloved Grammy had done many years before. The grounds at Blarney Castle are amazing, by the way, and we could have spent hours exploring.
I also found a local CrossFit Gym, Red Iron CrossFit, run by an excellent coach named Sarah. The whole crew there was fantastic and treated me like family for the two weeks that I trained there.
It was difficult for us to move on when our two weeks in Shanagarry were up. Both Juliann and I had been eager to visit County Cork where many older branches of our family trees had started, and the area was beautiful and fun in ways that I never imagined it could be.
We really did not want to leave the Walshes, who had been such wonderful, gracious, welcoming hosts.
Thank you, Caroline and Vincent. We miss all of you!
But our next house was waiting for us in Sneem, County Kerry, and if we thought we had seen beauty in Cork, we were about to be blown away.
Next: Sneem!