Our Guide to Long Term Travel: How We Live Abroad for 3 Months a Year.
This blog should be about 10 pages long if I were to go into every detail about how we do long term travel! For the sake of time, I’m going to break it down to the basics.
Figure out a career that you can do remotely, or potentially off and on (think seasonal job):
This is probably the most important factor in feasibility. I am not saying that this is easy, it took Alex and I years to figure out careers that we could do to make this happen. Our first couple of trips, we would simply quit our jobs when we left, and ask to be rehired when we returned. We eventually started careers where we worked for ourselves! Alex would shut his company down for 3 months (during the winter-slowest time) and I continue to do real estate remotely using an amazing partner agent.
Rent out your home while you are gone:
Doing this will allow for a lot more flexibility in your finances, but I will admit that it comes with its own challenges. We keep our house decorations and furnishings minimal, and we put personal items into storage when we leave. It is work, but the payoff can be worth it! Check out current rentals on AirBNB and Zillow in your area to figure out what your house might rent for.
Stay in a country that has a lower cost of living:
Instead of hopping around every few days like a backpacker might, choose to stay in one place for at least a month at a time. This will allow you to find a rental property that is ideally cheaper than your rental income that you will be getting from your main residence back home. The reason why we stay for so long is that if you rent daily or weekly, it can be quite expensive at hotels or AiBNB’s. When you’re renting for a month, people often give much better pricing. Don’t be afraid to ask for a month-long discount! Many AirBNB’s already offer this.
Create passive income:
The way that we did this is by purchasing multi-unit properties in Tacoma such as a duplex or a house with an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit also known as a mother-in-law). The benefit of buying multifamily is that you can live in one unit while someone else rents out the other unit. This offers additional income to help cover your mortgage and expenses while you travel, and builds valuable equity over time. We bought and renovated several properties like this over the course of the years and we were able to rent them along the way as we traveled each year.
