We Quit our Jobs to Travel - How Are we Going to Pay for This?

Isn't full time travel expensive? How are you going to pay for that? You must have a trust fund to travel full time!

These questions pop up all the time in conversation with me and my husband, Ben, who quit our promising corporate jobs to travel full time on our sailboat, Wanderlust. We often hear, “When I win the lottery, I’m going to travel to xyz.” Most people think that traveling requires loads of cash or luck. But the truth is, traveling doesn’t need to be expensive, unless your dream is to stay in Hiltons and drink fine wines. Then, you should probably wait until you win the lottery.

After we did some investigation, we realized that our dream of being full-time beach travelers should not be more expensive than our daily lives in Kansas City as long as we were willing to make some big lifestyle changes. In fact, full time travel should be cheaper, considering a few key points in our plan.

Get a Little Perspective

To get a little perspective, let’s not forget that our ordinary 9-5 lives had a cost, and our expenses were very high. We paid a mortgage, utilities, and we paid for going to the movies and restaurants. Ben and I came to the realization that we were spending thousands of dollars per month to live in a place we only semi-enjoyed, spending very little time outdoors or doing the things we loved. If we were to take that same monthly expenditure in Kansas City, and use it as full-time travelers, the experience would be a thousand times greater for our money. We added up our monthly spending and were awed at the cost of "regular" life, supporting a house, cars, and all the stuff inside the house. By living smaller and simpler, costs are cut dramatically.

Plan Ahead Financially, and SIMPLIFY

We’ve been financially planning for this voyage for over a year, and ended up with the cash to buy our boat and travel not from luck or the lottery, but from hard work and intense saving.

Personally, we generated a large part of our travel fund by spending the last 2 years busting our butts to renovate our 1931 Tudor, and thanks to a good housing market this summer, we made a small return on our investment. The liquid cash from the sale of our house will allow us to buy a boat, but we'll need more in order to have a monthly budget.

In addition to flipping our house, we’ve saved money like absolute packrats, opting to forego social events and many purchases to add a few bucks to the travel budget. All of our financial decisions in the last year have had to pass the test, “Will it help us towards our live-aboard goal?” If it didn't help us travel, we didn't buy it, period. That's right, we didn't buy any new clothes, furniture, gadgets, anything, except food and toiletries, for a whole year.

In addition to not adding new stuff to our lives, we sold clothes, tools, electronics, and furniture. We hadn't realized the mounds and closets full of things around our lives that truthfully were holding us back from traveling... Clothes we hadn't worn in years, gadgets that got one use per month, tools that rusted away in the garage. All just baggage. By decluttering, selling, and not purchasing new items, we were able to free ourselves from the burden of stuff, make extra money, save loads of cash, and make ourselves much freer to take off into the wild blue whenever we wanted.

It took over a year of planning, saving, lifestyle changes, and plain old hard work to come up with the finances. Planning is important!

Manage Monthly Travel Expenses

We had to take into account that our incomes would terminate because we didn’t plan to continue our jobs. Therefore it would not be possible to maintain the same monthly expenditure. Our monthly costs must actually be significantly less than our previous 9-5 lives in order for this plan to work for an extended amount of time. The good news is that by default, our expenses are cut significantly just by the sheer fact that our possessions are few. Now, we have no mortgage, no utilities, no wardrobes for work, and no car payment.

Furthermore, we realize that the more we cut our everyday costs, the longer this journey can go. We’re camping instead of staying in a hotel, and cooking instead of eating at restaurants so that we can spend more time traveling. No bars, no movies, just experiencing the outdoors, for free. Every purchase is purposeful, thought out. We could buy some new gadget, eat out at a restaurant, or instead, we could spend an extra two weeks traveling, beaching, and sailing. Suddenly all the stuff we used to want has little value in comparison.

Flexibility is Key!

Ben and I have to understand that life aboard will require flexibility in the budget. Although we have a well thought-out financial plan, we can't predict the future. If a big ticket item comes up like an engine or sail repair, we’ll have to either shorten the timeline or look for work in one of the beautiful locations we’ve traveled to. If the worst thing that happens is that we have to work in a beautiful beach location to make cash, I think we’ll live. :)

With all these points in mind, we predict our monthly full-time travel budget to be just 25% of the expenditure we had with a house, cars, wardrobe, and utilities in Kansas City.

So… myth busted! Traveling can be cheap, and involves little luck if you’re willing to take the plunge, and make the lifestyle changes. It can be difficult to give up all that "stuff," but the reward is freedom, and some awesome experiences!

Thanks for reading!

Quinn, Ben and Ruca

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