Travelling

[Malene]

I love to travel, but still want to be part of ERE. I'm only 26, so I have some time to save and invest.

My question is, is it possible to travel while doing ERE? Do you have any advice or experiences?

[prognastat]

It depends.

If you are going full on ERE and trying to live close to 1 Jacob travel hacking becomes very hard to pay for tickets so you'll become more limited to slow travel and staying in low cost locations for longer to reduce the % of total spending spent on travel or you could do something like van-living to slow travel through the country(but is harder to go further away for travel).

If you are more like MMM in spending then you might be able to get some cheap/free flights by getting good at travel hacking.

Doing the standard western style travelling of buying expensive tickets for a 1-2 week trip to a high cost destination is definitely not ERE though.

[Jean]

It depends. Biggest expenses while traveling are still housing, eating and transport. Free housing is easy if you're social or like sleeping outside. Transport only costs if you want to go fast and far. Eating costs about the same everywhere when you avoid restaurants. If you Can live for 6000/year at Home, their is no reason that you couldn't do the same while traveling. You'll have to put on New efforts in every country though.

[7Wannabe5]

The biggest problem with travel is acquiring or maintaining employment if you are still in accumulation mode. If you are already FI or choose intermittent/semi-employment version of ERE, your flexibility will almost certainly make travel very inexpensive.

[Jean]

During accumulation, i would count Travel in Time by which they delay your FI.

[thrifty++]

Potentially. You could do slow travel minimising costs while staying in few locations and doing it cheaply. And also doing some sort of remote work or side hustle or business. I prefer slow travel myself a I like to stay only in few places and get to know all their nooks and crannies well. Quickly sifting through lots of countries on planes, buses and trains costs lots of money and doesn't interest me at all.

[chenda]

I know several people in the travel blogging business. It's a real business where you can make good money and travel for free. But its a real, time demanding job, you have to be good at selling yourself on social media. It's a marketing role, and you can sometimes leverage it into a business. And being a young attractive female undeniably makes it easier.

I can give you more information if you're interested.

[Loner]

I met a girl in Georgia or Armenia some years ago. She was a british actuary, maybe in her 30s. She said the best thing she ever did was to live like a student after university. She hinted at being FIREd. She traveled the world, including places like Irak, where she had made friends with a family to whom she sometimes sent money, IIRC. Once in a while, she went back to the UK to do some contracts. She had nurtured contacts who knew she was skilled, and did those freelance gigs here and there, when she felt like it.

If you travel in hostels, you can often get free nights if you accomplish some work for them.

Traveling while ere can certainly be done. Look up Paul Terhorst, he and his wife have been doing so for a while. I do not know their story but Jacob refers to them often.

[classical_Liberal]

@slowtraveler and @vicktor k have journals and are slow traveling while accumulating. Also check out @jeanpaul journal. He accumulated first, then started slow traveling, but has done so with less than 200k starting (low accumulation time) and listed his costs in various countries.

[jacob]

@Malene - It depends on what you mean by travel. I traveled a lot during my accumulation phase but maybe not in the touristy way. When I finished my MSc in Denmark, I moved to Switzerland for grad school. That's where I began to save 80% of my income (the ~25k/yr stipend). In grad school, I was lucky enough to have a supervisor that encouraged the development [as future independent researchers] of his students, so I was sent to many (10+) different places/countries to give talks for seminars and conferences starting already a few months in. This was mostly physics oriented but also included some free time to explore. I've been to the top of Mt Fuji, the Alps, an Austrian castle, CERN (largest particle accelerator in the world), ski-resorts with some Russian minister of energy, other stuff... On one occasion I was doing so many conferences that I got an interrail pass instead of a regular ticket. I never paid a dime out of pocket for this (in fact, the per diem which was normal but generous to my spending level meant that travel provided an extra boost in income). I also did a couple of extended research visits (3-5 weeks each) to the US where I rented a room.

When I graduated, I moved to the US for my first postdoc position (third country I've lived and worked in) and continued the "travel to conferences" lifestyle. At this point, all that traveling was beginning to get "old" and feel like work---no excitement anymore, all airports beginning to look the same. Today, I avoid travel ... well, more accurately, I don't actively seek it out. In the past 15 years, I've lived in three different US states in 4 different ways (rented house x2, rented apt., own house, and own RV).

Fundamentally, there are ways to make travel part of your life rather than something separate that one pays for and enjoys a few weeks per year (tourism). The risk is that it becomes too much of a good thing. I still think the ideal ERE solution is to pick a career where travel is part of the job description. About 1/3 of my physics class does this. They're mostly software salesmen, academics, and high-level managers in transnational companies. The ones who don't are HS teachers, mid-level managers, and staff scientists in local companies.

Also see the last column of the Wheaton table. Note this is not an accurate prescription as much as a representative descriptive examples ...

[Kriegsspiel]

Doubleplus 1 to what Jacob said. Get jobs in different places, or one job that sends you different places (or a combination, which is what I did).

[Seppia]

If you can, as suggested move into a career where travel is part of the job.
I’m also very fond of visiting different areas of the world and shifted my career in a way that helped me achieve that.
Sales is the obvious field, but others may work as well.
I started working in France and moved to Paris for about 5 years, then with my first job change I moved to southern France taking care of all Western Europe.
After a few years I took a job in NYC that allowed me to travel across all the USA, and I now moved to another company based in Italy taking care of the Asia pacific area.
If everything goes according to plan I should move somewhere in the area for a few years (HK, Singapore and Sydney are the likely candidates, in that order).

Depending on how my financial and family life evolve, in somewhere around 4-7 years I may either “retire” or look for a job based in South America (the only area of the globe that I’m missing significant experiences in).

By doing this not only I got paid to travel, but I also saved a lot on vacations.
Main reasons are:
I could attach vacation at the end of a work trip, so we only have to pay for my wife’s ticket (that sometimes gets bought with miles earned working)
I get so many points with hotels that about 2/3 of the hotel nights come for free