I get this question a lot, but am never sure what to say.
“Uh… it’s cool.”
A lot of times when people find out that we’ve spent the majority of our marriage on the road, they say, “I could never do that”, or something to that effect. My mom the other day said, “I can’t understand why people say that, it’s not that hard!”, and I know she thinks what we’re doing is awesome. Maybe it’s what they say about apples falling from trees.
Truthfully, I love everything about it, but it’s hard to explain why.
Maybe it would just sound vain. But oh well…
I don’t make my bed, wash my sheets, do dishes, clean the toliet, take out the trash, deal with the land lord, worry about my car, etc…
To me it takes out all the unenjoyable parts of life that somehow consume my day and replaces them with some things I enjoy – miles and points. Instead I wake up downtown with a view of the skyline, or on the beach.
I’ll try to explain the daily grind of living out of a hotel as best as possible. But honestly, I haven’t lived in any one place for a solid year or more since 2010… So I’m more qualified on the living out of a hotel part than the contrast to real life part.
Lacking daily life stress
This is huge, huge, huge. Whenever I rent a car I say to myself while in traffic, “I’m never renting a car again,” and usually later that night I say to Carrie, “I promise never to own a car ever again.”
This is one example of many but it’s a good one. I can never own a car again. I get the convenience, for sure. But the expense of buying a car, the expense of insurance, the stress of driving, the stress of driving in traffic, the stress of accidents, and the biggie: the stress of mechanical problems (and the expense), is a huge huge deal to me. I was used to owning a car, and years later, it’s the most unappealing idea in the world.
A car is an example of a convenience with huge costs and stresses that is worth it to most Americans because of the convenience. But for us, owning a car would not only be inconvenient it would be a waste. We wouldn’t use it 95% of the year.
Simply put, our lifestyle makes stressful things inconvenient.
Imagine this for every aspect of daily life.
Last time we rented a house, our landlord was a total… bad word. He went awol when things needed to be fixed, and then after our walk through where he said everything looked good, he kept our deposit for dumb things like not mowing the part of the yard where a storm 3 months before had taken down parts of trees that he said he’d have someone take care of.
No commute to work, no cleaning the bathroom, taking out the trash, doing the dishes, cleaning our room, buying shampoo, soap, toilet paper, etc… All the daily grinds of life don’t apply to us.
We live downtown all over the world
We’ve given up cleaning for instead living all over the world. Generally, I like to leave the curtains of the bedroom open so I can wake up and see the skyline, or the beach, or the mountains, or wherever we are. We’re in a beautiful downtown hotel once again, and it’s still morning, so this is fresh on my mind, as I’m sitting next to the window.
If I go back to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Vienna, Budapest, New York, and many many other popular cities all over the world, I know these cities. When I land, I know what bus to get on and how to get to my hotel without asking the info desk. I know which way to walk to get to the sites. I know these cities. In a way I’m kind of a resident of the world.
You can’t own too much stuff
Believe it or not, I consider this a good thing too. But owning stuff makes life more difficult for a full time traveler. But I find that despite all the stuff I would be capable of buying, if we had a home, I would only be able to use a small portion of it. The things we have with us, are the things that get used.
Personally, I think this helps me practice contentment. Being content is a big part of happiness, and in this case, we don’t want more, we usually desire less.
Plus, again, it’s economical. Not owning a TV or having a cable bill saves a lot of money.
In a way it’s a simple lifestyle.
Sometimes it’s luxurious
Despite being simple in nature, the miles and points game allows us to have enough hotel points that we were able to live out of 4 and 5 star hotels last year for a total of $7,078. 7 grand is a lot of money on hotel points… but it’s less than $600 a month. And right now I’m staying in a $250+ a night hotel.
But some of the luxuries we pass up. I don’t need a bellman to carry my bags to the room, I don’t need someone to “turn down” my room to prepare it for sleep every night, and I certainly don’t need a butler to unpack my bags (I found out that’s a thing). In fact we usually keep the do not disturb on most of the day so the housecleaning doesn’t need to clean our room except when we leave.
However, the simple fact that I get free chocolates, coffee, and water is nice. And often we get a welcome gift; usually fruits and sometimes a wine or something.
The real luxury is when we get lounge access. Free food and drinks in the club lounge. Having the option… is kind of luxurious.
Food is completely different
It is extremely rare that there is a stove or oven in our room, and when there is, it’s always a short enough stay that buying all the condiments and ingredients turns out to be more expensive than going out to eat.
We go out to eat… a lot. Like every meal.
On longer stays we’ll scout out a grocery store. Believe it or not, Kroger has decent sushi. Sometimes we’ll get fruit and yogurts for breakfast, and sandwich material for lunch.
We also like to eat healthy. A lot of premade options aren’t healthy at all. So even if we do have a microwave, we’re not buying frozen foods. It just doesn’t happen. Instead we try to buy healthy premade things, like salads and sushi. Or we eat out. We don’t eat fast food (although my parents get us $50 McDonalds gift cards for every occasion).
Therefore, food is the part of our budget that goes up while traveling. We did spend about $7,079 last year on food as well. Car, housing, bills… it all goes down. Food might go up. Somehow we’re still frugal food snobs, but it is filled in with freebies and groceries.
The upside is that we get to try a lot of local foods… and sorry to say, we never do dishes. The other big plus side is that we don’t have to take time out of our day to cook. Believe it or not, time is very valuable when you work 80+ hours a week and still want to go site seeing. The last thing I want to do is cook and do dishes.
Carrie also says, “you get to know how to use the hotpot”. Almost everytime we’re in a grocery store we say, “do we have a hotpot in the room?” and same about the fridge.
Working from a hotel room
This is sometimes the worst part and sometimes a great part. I sometimes can work 14 hours straight, with two breaks for meals. This is impossible from a bed. You’d kill your back. And often the hotel room has 1 desk… and there’s two of us.
A room with 1 desk and no lounge chair is painful. Or no desk at all! On a number of occasions we just have to go to the coffee shop and work for half of the day. Not complaining. Just saying that I worry about my back sometimes. 😀
Yet, a lot of hotels have great workspaces. And when there’s a nice lounge, we can go do small work there. I’ve never worked from the lobby, but I suppose that could be an option. It doesn’t matter too much though, with enough coffee, I’m laser focused.
What’s normal anyways?
The weirdest part is that there seems to be a homey feeling of a hotel room. Visiting family for a while, it was really weird that our next hotel stay felt refreshingly homey. I think it’s a matter of personal space. I don’t like bumming off of people. People recommend couchsurfing, and we’ve done it, and we used to host people a lot… but it’s really hard for me to do. I hate feeling like someone else’s responsibility.
Maybe a hotel room just feels like our own space.
But despite there being little consistency, they all feel the same. The fact that I’ve seen all these coffee makers before, or the designs for each brand or design. For whatever reason, each room feels like our room.
Even small things.
We stay at hotels long enough that I can tell the difference between Hyatt shampoo and InterContinental shampoo, and how it feels. This sounds girly, I know. But it’s true.
For the record, IC shampoo is the worst. I’m pretty sure it’s just soap. Cheap cheap cheap. Always steal the shampoo from the Hyatt if your next hotel is an IHG hotel.
There are probably a million things like this, and I can’t even think of them because… they’re routine.
What’s not normal.
Carrie compared real life to “camping”. And she stressed that she doesn’t mean that it’s rugged or tough. She actually loves camping more than anyone I know. But what she meant is that the excitement of trying something new is there. Cooking is a rare adventure, for example.
This doesn’t ring true for me. I cook because I need to eat. Perhaps she sees it as a way to create exactly what she’s been craving.
The downside
I hate transit. This has little to do with hotels, and more the full time traveling thing. I hate everything about flying. I hate TSA, waiting for a plane, being on the plane, waiting to stamp my passport. I absolutely hate wasting time. Carrie might say my obsession for efficiency is akin to a disease. Maybe it’s true, but I just can’t help but think about all the work I could get done if I could have teleported instead.
For the same reason I hate the bus and train too. The train might have outlets for me to get work done. Awesome. But it takes 10 hours to do 1 hour of flying. At some points we’re sitting still and I get anxious watching the ETA go up. The bus is the worst of all. Best for my budget but practically torture.
But the things other people worry about, I don’t.
Not having a place to stay is no big deal to me. I know I’ll get a hotel, and doing it once I land isn’t a big deal to me. There are so many times that I booked a hotel on the phone, connected to wifi, while waiting in line to get my passport stamped.
Nowadays I tend to just book cancelable rates without care, because my calendar system is so solid.
The downside is that I spend a lot of time looking for deals. If I’m going to Budapest, getting a deal is easy. No worries. But when planning a trip to somewhere without hotel deals, I spend hours looking for the better deal. Not even hotel shopping, just hours trying to figure out ways to get the hotel I want to be a lower price.
Compared to most people, I don’t spend much time planning travel.
Really though, I can’t complain. I book everything on a whim and do zero planning. Even if I’ve never heard of the country, I think, “I’ll figure it out when I get there”. Then I ask locals lots of questions once I’m there. “What should I see?”, “is there a democracy here?”, etc…
This cuts down on my travel planning that could waste a lot of time. Or a lot of times, I already know what I want to see. In Kenya, I knew I wanted to go to Maasia Mara. From Maasai Mara some people recommended Lake Nakuru. So that was our next stop.
Conclusion
Hands down, I find travel less stressful. The stresses of daily life are so unappealing, that it’s hard to picture “going back”.
Our travel style is pretty care free, to say the least. We book things on a whim. I did an interview in February where the guy asked if I had been anywhere this year. He was super impressed that in the first 5 weeks of the year we’d been to 6 countries. Then he asked, where are we going next, and I didn’t know.
The reality is that we’re never in danger, and we always end up in a nice hotel. So I don’t tend to care about the rest.
However, these things aren’t inherent to fulltime travel. Others plan out every day a year ahead.
In the end, whatever your style is, living out of a hotel isn’t stressful. It’s quite nice to not have to deal with bills, landlords, trash, cleaning, dishes, etc…
On the other hand, it is more simple. Rooms are smaller than houses and we keep only what fits in a carry on. These are the things that are inline with our values though, so I don’t complain. I can’t say it enough, I love fulltime travel.
I want this life! It’s just not possible right now with my 80lb pitbull! 😉 Maybe someday. lol
80lb pitbull is a lot! But I know people who travel like this as a family. Not comparing kids to dogs tho…
I agree Ryan – the dogs are the one ‘thing’ I just cannot walk away from. I do have a friend that shares a dog with another family though. I think that may be an option for me when my two dog boys go on to their reward someday.
Funny, cuz Carrie has said that she needs a dog-share program before. A family she can split a dog with. Don’t think she was serious but interesting to hear people do that.
Oh I was serious. If we’re talking a pug or a french bulldog, then yes. totally serious.
Im curious what kind of money do you make only blogging? I know it can be lucrative for some, but you dont seem to have a lot of affiliate links, or advertisements that you are blaring. Does your wife make good money, or do you have savings your digging into?
Technically I’m not only blogging, I have side projects. But there is no doubt it takes most of my time. Well, you can make a dang accurate guess by looking at my budget what a blog like this makes solely off of affiliate links.
I’m blessed with a few readers who always use my credit cards tab when they sign up.
We have burned through all our savings, for sure. Wife works on the site/projects as well. We work similar amounts.
I don’t mean to be intrusive, but it would be nice to have a general idea (broad range perhaps) of the income a blogger such as yourself could earn as opposed to another blogger pushing more credit cards with affiliate links.
Every lifestyle has costs. No one lives for free. It would be nice to have some general idea about the costs of a lifestyle such as yours as well as what might be left over for savings and retirement planning.
Curious what other type of work projects in which you each engage. You mention 14 hour days… Curious, too, about a “typical” day – if there is one … how it’s broken down between work and sightseeing while on the road.
I travel a lot for work and enjoy my time in hotels much more so than I had ever anticipated. Yet, when I return home, I’m confronted with the “joys” of homeownership and the expense and responsibility it entails.
As for an automobile, in our society it is more than a convenience for most. Unless you live in a large urban environment with mass transit and many “essential” places within walking distance, it’s really a necessity.
I don’t mean to be evasive, as I was referring to our budget and expenses which are publicly listed. The wife’s blog lists every dime basically. We have no savings, retirement, insurance, etc…
The range is quite broad indeed. Most blogs don’t make any money. Period. Most people see the top bloggers and think it’s easy money. But the reality is some bloggers you might like probably make $200 a month on referrals and others make… a lot. I can’t speak to exact incomes, because I’m not one of those.
“Other projects” is helping travel businesses market, more or less. Most of my time is on the blog.
I thought about tracking all my time in a week and doing a post on exactly what I do. Sounds a bit egocentric, but might be interesting, and people ask.
Drew, thank you. I enjoy and learn from your blog and appreciate your efforts.
I think many of your readers might be interested in what you do on a typical day – if there is one – and how you combine travel and work in your unique lifestyle.
Not to sound snobbish, but as you climb the income ladder then some of those things you mention as stresses cease to be. Of course the journey up that ladder can be easy or rough, depending on your talents and luck. I am totally a fan of what you are doing and wish that had been an option during my younger days. I’m wondering how long do you think that you can keep it up? What would be a tipping point that would force you to change your lifestyle? Would you return to the US if you had to settle down and join the real world or reside in a different country?
That’s probably true. I thought that when complaining about the landlord, however, I feel like owning a home causes repairs. But it’s true that not being financially stressed make those repairs as little of a deal as me finding a hotel.
If we did settle down it would definitely be in the US. Honestly, I can’t picture not traveling, and we simply don’t have enough money to own a home and travel. So maybe security to invest in a house would at least get us to commit to one city half the year.
But I don’t really desire that at this point.
The things we do miss while traveling that could catch up to us would be:
1) Not having friends, when we’re both extremely extraverted.
2) I get more work done when I stay put.
3) Community things. Like I really enjoy playing sports.
Um… that’s about it though. I can’t see anything else causing us to want to stop.
If we fell in love with a place. Like Austin is full of Ultimate Frisbee, so I could play everyday. We have lots of friends in Austin. And so if we fell in love with Austin, maybe we would miss being in town for things… idk.
But either way, when/if we do get a place, we’ll be gone half the year. Travel is too much of who I am.
Thanks for asking.
Drew
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It’s not my experience that the stresses of daily life get any easier as you climb the income ladder — I expect this depends on your personality. I was a nomadic traveler in my younger days, now I’m a middle-aged fairly-high-earning family man. I’m materially much better off than I was living out of a backpack and I’m certainly not UNhappy with my lot in life — but I do long for the days when I didn’t have a list of tasks I had to get to every single day.
Like Drew and Carrie, we traveled with small backpacks and kept track of every expenditure we made. It made us consider the value and necessity of every single item that we carried and allowed us to live in the moment rather than having a constant nattering in our head about “pay this bill, register the kids for this program, schedule this meeting, get the shopping done, take the car in for service, call the plumber, pay the taxes, return this phone call, etc. etc.”
Honestly, I look forward to the day when the kids are through college and my wife and I can arrange our retirement investments to return enough income to allow us to travel perpetually, whether we maintain a home base or not.
[I should add that when I say that I don’t think stresses necessarily dissipate with an improvement in life position that I don’t mean that to apply to people with who have trouble feeding themselves or their families, getting adequate food or clothing, or medical care.]
Drew,
Amazing however as a jew aren’t you affraid from visiting some of the Middle Eastern countries(or any other muslim countries)? I have an israeli passport and want to visit Dubai however they will not admit anyone like me, because I am an israeli. I can get in with my american passport but I am just affraid that something might happen to me. Can you advise on that?
I’m not a jew in any way, but I’m not afraid of anywhere, and especially so not because of other people’s religion.
I find that people are much friendlier in real life than they are in the news.
so true….. 🙂 Delightful post Drew.
I’ve been learning from your tips and tricks on traveling for less, if not quite free. Now, I must work on this reducing the stress load. Too often I’m sweating the details on everything…. from macro to micro, from flights to car rentals. This past trip to Jamaico, “no problem,” and “yah-men” (which rhymes with Yemen — among my future dream destinations)
As always, lead on. 🙂
Yea, I try to not make travel stressful. So not having delta miles helps. 😀
Going to Jamaica helps. :-p
..an epiphany that comes only from traveling! Sadly, the media, through its fear mongering, has already done too much harm. Hopefully its reversible, for the better of our species.
No kidding!
I’m curious if you make connections to the people in each city: do you have friends there, how do you typically meet locals, do you find that a big part of your travels, etc.?
When we landed in Italy I had no plans and stopped at an empty ticket sales counter and asked her about her favorite places in Italy. It ended up being a long conversation with lots of suggestions, and even included a drawn map.
Locals are everywhere in every country. I don’t need a hotspot. Even if I just landed, I just start talking.
I find that people really like to tell strangers about their country. So the key is to ask about their country.
One time in Sri Lanka we were walking and we asked someone where the locals eat and she said, “in our homes”. Then pretty quickly she invited us into her home and met the entire family. This is a home with an actual fire in the kitchen and no doors, despite there being like 8 of em in the 500sqft home. They invited us to go on their fishing boat.
There’s all kinds of those stories. But we just avoid tourist areas, and talk to people.
Similar story that led us sitting on someones floor and eating fish they just caught, started with a friend asking about Bali. But I imagine if you tried asking in the south, they would have tried to sell you on a place that gives a kick back.
So I just ask truly on the street strangers what to see. That’s it.
that’s the spirit….. and it works just about everywhere. I did something similar on my own travels around Iran, (sic) beginning early 1991….. yup, me, an “amrika’i” from the “great satan” — wondering around Tehran and beyond without a minder, (except in Abadan) without much pre-planning….. and yet always an open mind and curiosity. Everywhere I went, I was treated with open arms and hearts…. like a long long cousin, a guest to be treated with respect and infinite generosity. (even from the humblest of families)
Ok, I’m being nostalgic — at this time of Nowruz…. of spring and rebirth.
in this post Drew, you give “travel is free” a new dimension…. it frees the mind. 🙂
Iran sounds like an adventure of it’s own.
What’s funny is that I’ve always felt like “travel is free” had a double meaning, but no one else has ever gotten that. But that’s actually the idea of the “logo” of the bird leaving the cage. (Maybe we should make it bigger).
Thanks, but my question was not really clear enough: can you make friends on the road? Are you able to make (friend) connections with locals —not for information but for camaraderie?
I guess it sounds negative but, put another way, do you need companionship besides your spouse when travelling? (and what is her opinion on this)
Ah. Great question.
We are both really extraverted so I would say it’s the thing we miss most. I personally am fine without, and it’s something I would say Carrie needs more.
So periodically we do long stays in the US near friends. Hanging out with friends is great, and traveling with friends is the awesome. Schedules rarely work out, but it happens.
In terms of making friends with locals, it’s practically the same as camaraderie when english isn’t their first language. Rather it’s just not the same.
This is exactly why we’ll never live one place abroad. If we stayed in one place, it would be the US.
Carrie likes having friends even more than I, and so in the future we might do longer house sitting gigs in the US. Austin, Seattle, San Fran… try to get gigs there where we know people.
But it’s hard unless you stay somewhere more than a couple of weeks.
What exactly do you do 80 hours a week? you mention in several blogs how much you work and I always wonder exactly what you are doing? Just research and writing the posts or something else?
Also you complain about the train. Considering that you can write on the train I would think you would love it and would prefer it to a plane. 10 hours to work vs 1 hour of just going to the hotel to work.
Honestly, all fulltime bloggers I know work that much, it’s not just me. But I love what I do, and I see it as allowing me to live a life I love… so perhaps it comes across as a little obsessed. But instead of spending time on flyertalk for fun, I’m reading routing rules for a post.
But even if I were to reply to every email I would spend half a day, especially when helping people plan routes and find availability and stuff. It’s just the nature of it. I do take a lot of time to write too. My best posts take a full day to write. I know bloggers who post about deals can write one of those in 30 minutes, but it’s just not the nature of the site… just trying to do something different. So a lot is just testing routes and testing routes.
But there’s also a number of things that are busy work. I could go on for a while about these, but for example, we’re designing a new website. That takes a ton of time. We’re creating a couple other things that will hopefully launch this year as well. For example we have a ton of videos we’re going to start posting soon.
Also, the infographics, complete guides, and things like that are very time intensive.
There’s just a lot of things, plus another startup that we’re apart of.
With the last Amtrak train I did write the entire time. However, a lot of the time of the post is research and there was zero wifi, which is a bummer. The Amtrak in the northeast was awesome and had great wifi. But if the time is similar I prefer train. It’s hard to get work done on a day of flying… so I agree.
If you work 80hrs a week, that leaves you with 8 hrs to sleep a night and just the weekends off to actually see the city you’re in. In other words, you take 52 weekend trips a year.
Or work 7days a week and spend 5 hours everyday site seeing. If I go hard for 5 hours straight everyday, I don’t need more.
I truly admire your way of life. I think I could have been happy it, but definitely went the traditional way instead with corporate career, husband, and 3 kids. We do travel a lot thanks to my points/miles hobby. However, we plan to do something similar in retirement. We’re thinking something like professional house sitters who do long stints in different places, mixed in with some hotels, and probably own a home-base condo in a city where one of our kids ends up just to have a place for some of our stuff!
Really love your blog and your extremely original content. Happy to use your affiliate links. You deserve them more than anyone else I read.
So sounds like you might try our way of life at some point anyways. Maybe we’ll live similar lives just with opposite timing. Maybe we’ll have a home later, who knows. The one thing I don’t want is a corporate career, although, a real business is sometimes what the greener grass, so to speak. Stable income at least.
But really, house sitting is a cool way to do it. The nice real life pace of being in one place for a while, and the adventure of being in a new place… for free.
Anyways, thanks for the support. Very glad you enjoy the content. Let me know if I can ever help in anyway.
Do you ever think about what you do after you “retire” from this lifestyle? Ever plan on settling down in one place in the future or worry that you have gone though all your savings? It’s a fun and adventurous lifestyle for sure, but how long is it sustainable? Throw a kid into the mix and it makes things a lot harder…. Just thinking if you ever think long term or worry about the future.
I doubt things will get mixed up that much for us… if ya know what I mean.
Worry about blowing through savings; not really. To be honest, we don’t make a ton of money, but we make more every year. And if the blog ever died, I would gladly purse other business ideas that I strongly believe that would be more profitable. I’m young.
I really don’t see us stopping, I just see us adding a home. This isn’t anytime soon. This is like after paying off her student loans and what not… so it could be a while. But it will happen someday. Then I picture us spending the nice months of the year in our favorite city, and the rest traveling.
Who knows.
First off, I love you site. I have been contemplating a RTW for some time and just learnt that you help people with routing. How does that work? Please pm me. If there is any way I can contribute, I would be glad to, when ready.
I don’t have a service and I’ll never charge, but most importantly I will never book flights for other people. I don’t enjoy it.
However, I will help you in anyway I can that’s not booking.
^ respect & Thank you. Also, next time you guys find yourself in south India, hit me up for a place to crash in cochin.
I have always wondered since no insurance what do you do if you get sick? Do you just go to Mexico or Spain where you can go to the pharmacia without needing to pay for a doctor then?
Great article. While reading it I started to think that you both must have amazing packing skills traveling full time out of only carry on luggage. Have you ever written an article about your packing techniques?
Just discovered your blog, and I’m looking forward to reading more. I’d also be interested in your take on health care and packing tips…. I’ll look through previous posts to see if you’ve addressed that. Thanks again for your work on this blog.