How We Quit Our Jobs to Travel Full Time

Seeing my dad sitting on the kitchen table, counting the days until his retirement, I said: “only a few months away for you to be free, papi”. It had been a few rough years for him, having to leave Venezuela and then jumping from one shitty job to the next. Living in middle-of-nowhere Texas and working as a Safety Manager responding to incidents in the middle of the night. My dad was old and tired, but he needed that retirement payment from social security. So he stuck it out.

Fear can be a very powerful motivator. You see, I didn’t want to end up like my parents. I was afraid to work for 40 years straight, and even then be concerned about money. More generally, I have always been in conflict with the American expectation of working without a break your entire adult life. The expectation that should go from job to job without reconsidering what you want in the next phase of your life. The expectation of always being “resume building” and “climbing the ladder” – always pressured, always online, always stressed. If you do this, the hours you spend at work will accumulate to be the majority of your life, way more than the hours you spent with your loved ones, way more than the ones you spent dancing, kissing, cooking, hugging, eating, loving… Phew, that is a lot of hours.

How we did it

Save Money

I am sure you have heard this before, and that is for a reason. It doesn’t matter how much you make, just put money aside every single paycheck. Get it out of your paycheck and into a different account (automatically if you can) as soon as you get it. And then forget that account exists (sort of, keep reading).

Get Help from an Expert

My very first manager told me I should get a financial advisor, and this is one of the best pieces of advice anyone has ever given me (thank you, Mike!). Having a financial advisor focused on retirement planning has made a tremendous difference in our life. This is not about investing and moving money from one risky stock to the next (although of course you can do that too), this is about long term planning. Besides the expert advice an advisor can bring, having a third party perspective has been revolutionary for us. Our advisor has encouraged us to make decisions we wanted to make but didn’t feel confident we could. Those decisions, such as saving for this trip and making other big life changes, have changed the course of our lives.

Commit to a date

When do you want to be able to quit your job and travel? Decide on a specific date – at least a specific year – and commit to it. Everything else you do will revolve around this date, so it’s important. Tell your family and friends about it, *share it*, make it real. Once that date is approaching (a year out or so), don’t start making excuses! IT WILL NEVER BE THE PERFECT TIME. You didn’t save all the money you wanted? Travel for less time, or to less expensive destinations. You recently started a new job? kill it for the next year and then negotiate a leave so you can come back to it. Inflation is through the roof making flights hyper expensive (like now!)? Stay in places longer, travel by land more. Just.stop.making.excuses. 

Set a money goal

1. 1. What areas of the world are you interested in seeing? For example, South East Asia is much more inexpensive than Western Europe, (most of) Latin American is less expensive than Australia, etc. 
   2. What type of accommodations do you want to stay in? Are you ok with hostels, or would you rather an airbnb or a hotel? 
   3. What do you want to do while you travel? Do you like to eat in fancy restaurants, holes in the wall, or a bit both? Do you like going on tours, and if so, are you ok with group tours or do you want private?

All the above will help you determine how much you will likely spend on your trip, and how much you need to aim to save.

Don’t stop living your life

FAQ

• How long have you been planning for this?
  • We started saving for this about a decade ago. You could, of course, quit your job and go travel the world without having saved much money at all, and then find jobs along the way. Plenty of people do this and there are lots of blogs about this. This is not what we did. We, specifically, wanted to *not* have to worry about money while we traveled.
• Where are you going?
  • We don’t have a specific itinerary, but in general terms we want to see parts of the Balkans (Greece, Croatia, Bosnia), Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan), Western Asia (Iran, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), and Latin America (Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil)
• How are you choosing where to go?
  • We have traveled a lot (66 countries combined) and have spent a lot of time in certain areas of the world, such as South East Asia and Western Europe, so with this trip we want to explore areas we don’t know much about (or feel like we should know more, such as Latin American)
• What will you be doing in every place you go?
  • It will depend on the destination! But we are passionate about food, nature, and history, so things related to those for sure🙂
• What are you packing?
  • This has been SO HARD (specially for Carla, who is notoriously bad at it…). But we decided to take carry-ons! We will be creating content on this topic in particular, more on this soon!
• How will you manage your budget?
  • Honestly, not very scientifically. We saved money for the trip, and we will divide that budget into 12 and monitor it as we go. We are hoping we can also make some passive income from renting our home and car while traveling, but we will see. I am sure we will have a better answer to this once we are on the road and spending money 
• What will you do after the 1 year of travel?
  • WE DON’T KNOW. That is the whole point. We want to take the year to decompress from lots of years of working non-stop, and reconsider what we want to do next. Maybe even figure out how to make a business out of our biggest passion: TRAVELING!😉