“There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.” -Seneca

Hi there!

My name is Brian. I’m in my early 30s, and as of April 31, 2018, officially homeless! OK – perhaps “nomadic” is a better description of our current situation, since my girlfriend of four years, Alyssa, and I sold the bulk of our household items, put all the rest in to storage, and got approved by our employers to take a one-year sabbatical to travel the world and live abroad.

With dual master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, I worked at a global engineering firm from 2009-2018. I’m currently on personal leave from my job and planning to return in 2019.

While I grew up in the area of northern Massachusetts and obtained my undergraduate degree in upstate New York at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I’ve never lived more than about 35 minutes from where I grew up, not including my semesters at college. I have a wonderful, supportive, and loving family (to be perfectly clear, this trip is definitely not trying to get away from them!) that still lives in New England.

A Little Background

Going back over the years, there are probably two defining themes that I see in my life as I reflect on how I got to where I am today:

1. A passion for travel, new experiences, and meeting new people
2. An insatiable appetite for learning new skills and always striving to question my current assumptions

Over the next year, Alyssa and I plan to share our travels on this blog, as well as the various insights, travel tips, and other key takeaways to provide some value to all of our followers from this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We have a more detailed post about the specific reasons why we plan to take a year off, but as a quick teaser, some of the reasons include:

1. To take a “mini-retirement” now and enjoy life, while we still have our health and the good fortune to do so
2. To uproot our current perspective of the world by living in foreign cultures for a year and being open to new people and new experiences
3. To work on some areas of personal and professional development that would not otherwise be possible (or be very challenging while balancing a typical 9 to 5 job and personal life)
4. To take advantage of some tax optimization strategies that would otherwise not be possible for the typical, middle-class worker
5. To validate some financial assumptions in terms of the amount of money we would require to be financially independent (i.e. not have a 9 to 5 job), through living frugally while still enjoying life to the maximum

My Financial and Lifestyle Philosophies

As far back as I can remember, I have always tried to be as financially frugal as possible. Whether it was starting a raspberry farming “business” with my brother when I was just 12 years old (including a portfolio of business documents that I found recently, documenting that my mother was in fact one of our employees for picking at the fantastic rate of…$5/hour!), running mini “circus” challenges in our house that we would charge our parents $.25 to play a few years earlier, or asking friends and family to give me savings bonds for Christmas as a 8-year old (seriously!!!), saving money for the future has always been an interest of mine.

Thus, when I started working in 2009, I saw this as another income source to stash away as much as I could as fast as possible, hoping to have a large sum to retire comfortably on in my 60s. However, as the years progressed, I started questioning some of my basic assumptions about retirement. As the world evolves at an ever-increasing rate, past assumptions of a “typical” life (e.g. working until retirement in your 60s, increasing your consumption along the way to match an increasing income, saving just enough to comfortably retire and support your family) are being shattered every day by people “retiring” in their 30s and 40s to work on their true passions. The question arose in the back of my mind: is it possible that I could “retire” in my 30s?

In order to be financially independent, the general assumption is that your daily passive inflows of cash (i.e. passive income) must exceed your outflows of cash (i.e. expenses); in other words, if you wanted to, you could sit around on your couch all day and binge-watch Netflix for the rest of your life and never have to work another day (not that any of the people that get to that point would be the type of person who would do that!). More often than not, early achievers of financial independence typically work on giving back more with their free time, pursuing a passion project without the stress of needing to make ends meet, or taking up new creative pursuits.

Thus, the next year of travel, in addition to the reasons posted in the above background section, is really meant to be an experiment for me in terms of whether some of my assumptions about living without a steady paycheck are actually valid.

I’ll be posting about some of the interesting tax strategies that I plan to take advantage of this year due to our year of travel (e.g. 401k to IRA rollovers, Traditional to Roth conversions, credit card benefits and rewards strategies, etc.). I’ll also be posting more about my experiments with various alternate sources of passive income, such as Peer to Peer Lending, Cryptocurrency mining, index fund investing, crowd-sourced real estate, and other topics. And of course, I’ll be posting about techniques and strategies for minimizing costs while maximizing unique experiences and opportunities while traveling.

We’ll be posting about a lot of our financial tips and tricks here, both for preparing for the travel, as well as how we actually travel and how we plan to spend about half as much in our entire year of travel compared to our relatively frugal lifestyle back in New Hampshire. 

Half as much you say! Is that even possible!? Not only possible, but very, very doable. We’ll also be traveling and living in many well-developed locations such as Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, so you could actually do it for much cheaper in other areas of the world, such as South America or Asia.

Thank You!

More than anything else, we are both eternally grateful for our chance to travel the world. While it took a lot of hard work, planning, and commitment, we, perhaps more than many others, fully understand that we would not even be thinking of this opportunity today had it not been for our families, friends, mentors, and others that helped us get here. To all of you, we express our deepest and heartfelt thanks!

At the very least, we hope that each of you will be able to take away at least one nugget that can allow you to either save money or increase your ability to have wonderful, enriching life experiences over the next year. Ideally, I hope that a few of you will come away with new perspectives and questions of your own, helping you to see that there are opportunities in this life that you hadn’t even previously been aware of.