How I’ve Traveled Full Time For 20 Years (And Make\/Save Money)
Today, I have a great guest post to share from Patrick Schulte from Bumfuzzle. Patrick quit his job around 20 years ago and has been traveling full-time ever since. He and his wife have circumnavigated the world by boat, and have also driven from Alaska to Argentina as well as Europe in a 1958 VW van. Here is how they made it happen. Enjoy!How I've Traveled Full Time For 20 Years
Life was much simpler when I was content with living the American Dream.
I walked to work from my downtown Chicago condo, traded commodities for a few hours, came home, walked up the street to pick my wife up from her job, walked to a restaurant, walked home, watched tv, went to bed. On the weekends we might take in a Blackhawks game.
That was life.
Relaxing, easy, and comfortable.
We had plenty of money, a nice home, a convertible, didn’t want for anything, and we were still in our twenties.
We should have considered ourselves lucky, had a baby, and moved to the suburbs. That would have been the appropriate next step. Throw in a white picket fence and we would have completed the package.
Instead, within just a few months, we were floating at anchor on a 35’ catamaran in the Bahamas.
It was the kind of dramatic left turn that makes the car’s passenger door fly open in the movies.
My wife and I had decided that we needed an adventure in our life. We gathered up our savings, sold all of our belongings, bought a boat, and set off to sail around the world.
Financially this didn’t make a lot of sense, especially twenty years ago when being a digital nomad was nigh impossible.
But we were young, had no debt, and were loaded with confidence. We figured we’d pick up right where we left off, but four years older and with loads of great stories.
We did get older, and we did rack up lots of stories, but we also decided somewhere along the way that we would never go back to the American Dream. We’d been away from that lifestyle for four years, we’d visited 40 countries, met people from every single point on the personal finance spectrum between $1 and $1 Billion, and returning to our old life no longer held any interest.
That, however, left a gaping hole in our original plan of going back to work in Chicago and starting fresh.
Fortunately, I had been a self-employed commodities trader, and in the past few years, while we were off galavanting around the world, everyone else had been working overtime to turn just about everything into an online job, trading included.
We’ve now been full-time world travelers for twenty years.
In addition to sailing around the world, we’ve driven around much of it. We’ve lived in a handful of different vintage vehicles, and are currently anchored in Aruba aboard our third boat.
Along the way I’ve earned a living through stock trading, as well as writing two books, and starting an online investing business to teach others who are interested in living a similar lifestyle.
How did we do it?
Track Your Spending
I’m not the first to say this, and I certainly won’t be the last. But it’s so important, and yet so rarely done, that it bears repeating. It is impossible to make positive financial progress without knowing, in detail, what is in the negative column.
For many years my wife carried a small notebook with her everywhere we went. She wrote down everything we spent, and I do mean everything. We could be in a market in Eritrea, buy ten cents worth of fruit, and she’d whip that book out to note it.
I know most people will find that level of tracking to be too much, and maybe it is a bit too extreme, but after doing that for years we never once had to look at our finances and wonder how the balance fell that month. If there was an anomaly, we knew about it, and we could adjust accordingly. Over time we could estimate our monthly expenses for things like food and entertainment almost to the penny before we’d even gone through the book for that month.
By knowing where your money is going, you can make changes that can make a significant difference. Those differences might not be obvious on a daily basis, but when multiplied by a month, or a year, the amounts can be staggering.
In my book, Live on the Margin, I talked about “extending the burn.” Making changes to your spending habits can easily stretch the finances for a one-year trip into an eighteen-month trip, without any discernible hit to your level of enjoyment.
Start Investing…Yesterday
The stock market can be a scary place for a lot of people, and that keeps them from reaping its benefits.
According to a Gallup poll, in 2021 just 56% of Americans owned stock of some kind, whether through individual investments, or retirement accounts like a 401k or an IRA. That number is down from nearly 67% in 2002.
Many people left the stock market during the Great Recession, and haven’t returned, to their detriment.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 89% of the stock.
Wealth, like it or not, is directly tied to participation in the stock market. It’s imperative to your financial well-being that you are investing.
The earlier you start investing, the better. The stock market always has, and always will, go through periods of boom and bust, but on the whole it has always ended higher. Putting time on your side will make creating and holding onto your wealth that much easier.
To that end, I opened accounts in my kids’ names at a young age. I make regular contributions to it, and sit down with them regularly to pick new stocks, discuss their holdings, explain different investing concepts, economics, and myriad other financial topics that will help them in their adult life.
While sailing around the world it was my passive investments that supported our travels. During that time the stock market increased roughly 50%. My savings grew just about every day.
Even if the principal declined—due to the spending being done to finance our travel—at least the remaining principal wasn’t stagnant.
A checking or savings account simply isn’t going to keep up.
Build First, Before Getting Aggressive
After sailing around the world we returned eager for more adventure. We restored a 1958 VW bus and set off to travel around the world, again.
We lived in that bus for the next two years as we drove from Alaska in the north, to Argentina in the south, and then all over Europe.
Our passive investments had done well for us while we were out sailing, but now on land, with more ready access to the internet, it was beneficial to be a bit more aggressive. Being a lifelong professional trader allowed me to do that, but it’s not the right choice for everyone.
Recently, coinciding closely with the popularity of cryptocurrency, online trading forums, and no-fee stock trading apps, there has been an explosion in small trading account holders. The most widely known is probably Robinhood.
Generally speaking, the increase in new brokerage accounts is a good thing. However, a closer look shows the median account size of a Robinhood user is just $240. If this number begins to grow significantly in the years to come, that will be great, because it will indicate that these new users are focused on their future wealth.
However, numbers suggest otherwise so far.
According to the Federal Reserve, Americans in the top 10% saw their stock market investments grow 43% between January 2020 and June 2021, while the bottom 90% saw their wealth grow at a much lower 33%. Not surprisingly, Robinhood users are some of the most active in the market. Their lower returns then reflect that.
33% is still good growth, but the wealth disparity continues to grow.
I suggest that those new to stock market investing work on buy-and-hold growth strategies early on. A reasonable target is a $20,000 portfolio before deciding whether or not they want to become more aggressive with their investing.
In addition to building up some wealth, investors need to really be sure they are comfortable, or even good at, trading more aggressively with a portion of their money. If you are new to trading, I highly suggest you search out a sort of mentorship from a professional.
HEY, I’M Francis…
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