Afford Anything - Slow Travel is Cheap Travel - with Nomadic Matt

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

#202: In 2006, Matt Kepnes worked at a hospital in Boston, and he felt miserable. He dreaded fighting traffic, spending his days under his offices’ fluorescent lighting, drinking stale coffee. He decided to take one year off -- a “gap year” -- thinking that after his sabbatical, he’d resume another 40 years of punching the clock. He worked 60-hour weeks in order to save money for his sabbatical year. He saved $30,000, then handed his boss a resignation letter. Matt traveled for 18 months, returned to Boston, and realized he had lost his willingness to punch the clock. He couldn’t sit still in an office any longer. He re-packed his bags, bought a one-way flight to who-knows-where, and reinvented himself as a travel writer known as Nomadic Matt. He lives on a budget of $18,250 per year, or $50 per day. In the last decade, his travel information website, NomadicMatt.com, has become one of the most popular travel blogs in the world, drawing millions of visitors. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, National Geographic Travel, and the BBC. He’s a New York Times bestselling author, and he’s traveled to more than 100 countries. In today’s episode, Matt and I discuss the art of slow travel. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode202 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that doesn't just apply to your money. It applies to your time, focus, energy, attention. It applies to anything in your life that is a scarce or limited resource. And so the questions become twofold. Number one, what's most important to you? Not what does society say ought to be important to you, like a fancy car or a big house?

But what actually matters in your life? Does travel matter? Does spending more time with your family matter? Does having more meaningful work matter? what is your highest priority? That's the first question. And then the second question is how do you align your day-to-day lifestyle, the way that you spend your money, your time, your energy in a way that reflects those priorities?

Answering those two questions requires a lifetime of practice. And that is what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. We are normally a weekly podcast. We air a new episode every Monday morning. but once a month, on the first Friday of the month, we release a first Friday bonus episode. So welcome to the July 2019 first Friday bonus episode.

In today's episode, Nomadic Matt joins us on the show to talk about how he has spent the last 13 years as a full-time traveler. Back in 2006, Matt Kepnis worked at a hospital in Boston and he was unhappy. He knew that his future was not going to be in health care. He had gone back to school to get his MBA, and he thought before he made the career transition from health care to whatever his MBA might lead him to, he thought, you know what, I'll just take a gap year. I'll just take one year off and go travel for a while. So he saved up some money. He saved $30,000, quit his job in health care, and took off to go travel. He thought that he would only be gone for a year, but he ended up being gone for 18 months.

And when he came back to the United States and then got a job, he hated it. So he quit that job and went back out on the road. And now he has been traveling full time for 13 years. He makes his living from his laptop as a digital nomad. In today's podcast episode, we talk to Nomadic Matt about how he saved that initial $30,000, how he made the decision to travel even while he still had student loan debt, and how he manages to travel on a budget of $50 a day, which is about $18,000 per year. Matt is a New York Times best-selling author, and his writing has been featured in the New York

Times, CNN, National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal, and BBC. Matt has one of the most popular travel blogs in the world with millions of readers, and he has traveled to more than 100 countries. If you have ever been interested in the money management of full-time traveling, you're going to enjoy today's episode. Here he is, Nomadic Matt. Hey, Paul, how's it going? It's great. How are you doing?

Doing well in this fine evening in Paris. Oh, fantastic. I'm glad you're enjoying Paris. You've been traveling, speaking of Paris. You've been traveling for 13 years, correct? Yeah, since July 2006. It's been a long time. So I want to talk about spending 13 years as a full-time traveler, but let's go back to the origin of all of that,

because in 2006, in July 2006, before you began traveling, you were working in health care in Boston. Tell me about how that began. How did you come to work in health care, and then how did you come to quit and become a full-time traveler? So I had graduated college in 2004 during that mild recession in 2003 or so. And nobody really wanted to hire history teachers. I went to school to be a history teacher.

So I needed a job. My mom knew somebody at the hospital. A nepotism goes a long way. I got a job doing some basic admin stuff and sort of worked my way up a little bit as you could in a couple of years. during that time, you're supposed to take a vacation, right? You have vacation time, you go take a vacation. So I took a vacation to Costa Rica, 2004, fell in love with travel. 2005, took another vacation to Thailand.

I had never been in a backpacker. I never studied abroad in Europe or stayed in hostels. But they were fascinating. Here are people who were just traveling and doing whatever they wanted and meeting people from them around the world. And I just really loved their lifestyle. And so I decided that I would quit my job to go travel. I was getting an MBA at the time.

And I knew healthcare wasn't going to be my career for life. So when the MBA was finished and I started looking for another job, I figured, why don't I use this as sort of a bookend, go travel for a bit, then come back and start my career. And so that was when you quit your job in health care and went on what you thought would be just a one-year sabbatical, basically, a one-year gap year. Yeah, my goal was to travel for a year. I had it all mapped out.

I leave in July, 2006, come back around July, August, 2007, then start looking for a job. Then I come back to the end of January, 2008. which was not a good time to look for a job, given the recession and all. And I sat back down in the cubicle, and I was just not into it. I said, I want to keep traveling. I'm not ready for this yet. I would like become a writer solely because travel writer sounded like a job that I could do

that would allow me to travel. I knew nothing about the field. It just seemed like, hey, you know, if you are a child, Travel writer, you get to travel. Started a website called The Democratic Matt, and really was just there to be sort of an online resume where people could see my bylines and hire me. And then in May June of 2008, I went away again. And then here we are today.

So you came back to the United States in early 2008. Did you get a job at that time? Yeah, my cousin, nepotism again, owned a temp agency. And so while I sort of figured out my life, I got a temp job, ironically, back in a hospital covering this woman who was on maternity leave. So they plop me down in her chair and said, don't break anything. Just answer the phones and direct calls and sort the mail. So I had a lot of free time on my hand. I used that time to turn my website.

But I was back in this office again with five coworkers. I saw him every day, nine to five, and I was like, this is exactly where I had left. A month ago, I'm in Australia, and now I'm getting ready to go to a cubicle and put on my tie again. And it was just like, no, no. I had grown as a person, and I wasn't going back into the same life. I was going back into The Matrix. So let's talk about that first trip that you took, because at the time, time that you took it, you had just finished your MBA. So you had a decent chunk of student loan debt,

and you had also been working while simultaneously being a grad student, so you didn't have a whole lot of money. So let's talk about your financial picture at the time that you quit your job and went on a one-year trip around the world. How much debt did you have and how much savings did you have at the time you left? I had about $40,000 in student loans, which I'm still paying off, and I saved $30,000. And how did you save those $30,000? So it was all the money I had been saving since I started working because I had some money in a 401K, and my employer had a match. But I also worked hourly on the weekends and at nights. So I would just work, work, work, work, work.

So, you know, when I came home in January 2005, I told my boss, hey, I'm going to quit, but I'm going to quit in six months. And then I would spend the next year finishing my degree. That's why I left in 2006. So I worked for another six months to quit. The hospital always needed staff to cover, you know, if somebody's sick. And so I would just work. If I was in school, if I didn't have anything to do, I would work. Do you have an estimate of how much you worked at that time?

Yeah, I probably worked about 60 hours a week. There was a guy who also worked a lot, and we would battle it out. So who worked more that week? And I always try to edge them out by a couple of hours. I mean, it's a sick thing to think about, you know, I can work more than you can. But, well, you had a big family. And I was trying to save as much money as I could. So, you know, temporary pain for long-term gain.

All right. So you worked 60 hours a week. You saved $30,000 and then you quit your job and went off to travel. Did the fact that you also had student loan debt concern you or did you figure that you would be able to make your monthly payment on that while you were simultaneously exploring the rest of the world? Yeah. So when I made this plan to quit, I also queued up this spreadsheet. And, you know, I about every guy. I booked under the sun and did everything possible to research costs. And so I sort of created a spreadsheet as to how much money I would need, how much money I wanted to come home with, and I knew I would have to pay student loans. So I factor that into my cost equation. The plan was always to make the minimum monthly payment, whatever I could set as the lowest, I would make that payment regardless of anything else.

What was your budget while you traveled? Were you living on like $1,500 a month? I lived on about $50 a day. $50 a day. Yeah, so that's about $1,500 a month-ish. Yeah, and it's $18,250 a year. That was that, you know, that's a daily average. You know, when I'm in Thailand, I'm spending, you know, $20, $25 a day. You know, in Paris, you're spending a lot more than that. And so it's sort of averaged out that way. I actually recently found my original notebook.

I had all my savings and all my cost in there and had all my notes from the road. And it was really nice to see. I've been looking for it for a long time. It also has all my redone budgets in it, too. I've always been changing them around. What are some budget tips that you have for people who want to travel on $50 a day? Now it's a lot easier to do so because the Internet has created this great community where back in 2006, There were no Airbnbs or sharing economy websites, no Ubers, no discount tour websites or Rye sharing websites.

So it's become a lot easier to find information that allows you to travel cheap. These things that you sort of had to hunt down, all that information is out there on the web. A couple of key specific points is one, you need to be flexible with where and or when you go. If you want to go to Paris, the first week of June, and that's it, whatever is the price of a ticket is the price of the ticket. But if you're a little bit more flexible as to maybe when you go to Paris, you might find a flight deal, or maybe you just have to go away in the first week of June, but you're not married to Paris. So you might find the flight deal somewhere else. The difference of a day can mean the difference of hundreds of dollars. It's always best to be a little bit flexible in your travel plans.

So essentially flexibility is the key to affordable travel. Yeah, it sure is because, you know, I mean, there's so many deal websites out there like Scott's cheap flights, the flight deal, holiday pirates. These websites spend all day every day just looking for great travel deals. And so if you see one pop into your inbox, you know, and it's Vegas to Paris, 300 bucks are on a trip. But is that in July, you know, but, okay, it's not June, but you really want to go to Paris. So you're going to take that flight because that's a great deal. And so if you're a little bit flexible, or maybe there's a $300 round trip deal to Shanghai. And you're like, hey, going to Shanghai now, find a cheap flight.

So if you have that kind of flexibility, you can always find a deal. It's also really important not to travel when everybody else is traveling. If you're like dead set on going to Hawaii during Christmas, you and everybody else wants to go there. So you're going to pay the price. Right. So go during the off season. Yes. What are some of your biggest expenses as you travel? Because you've been traveling now for 13 years, and you've transitioned from the hostile backpacker circuit to being more of an established expat in a community.

Tell me about how that affects the way that you both live and spend. In other words, not only how does it affect the way that you spend your money, but how does it affect the way that you spend your days? A traveler's biggest expenses are always food and accommodation. Everything else is negotiable. So if you can eat cheap and find cheap accommodation, you can pretty much travel. There's always some free activity going on in any city. You always just walk and find stuff. But if you're eating at restaurants, every meal, that's going to get expensive. If you're in a hotel every night or private dorm, private room to hostel, that's going to get expensive. of what you really have to understand is yourself. For me, I don't really care about a combination.

Yeah, I mean, if you want to throw me in the writs, I'm not going to complain. But if I have to pay for it, I want the cheapest. I'd rather save that money for food, which is really important to me. So my food budget is always bigger than anything else. That's the one thing I will not really go cheap on, especially now that I have an income coming in.

To me, food is important. I will sacrifice everything. else so that food gets a larger percentage in my budget. As a traveler, if you can lower those two costs, that's going to have the biggest impact on your budget. And as I mentioned before, there's so many ways to lower those costs now. With the combination, hostels are like cheap hotels these days. They're not what you imagine them to be from the movies. They have incredible amenities, pods and curtains and comfy beds, private rooms, private showers. And then, you know, have Airbnb, which is great at lowering costs, home shares, home exchanges. So there's a lot of

options to lowering your cost on accommodation. Food-wise, I always tell people, just eat how you eat at home. There's nothing in the rulebook because there's no rule book that says you have to eat out every meal. You have to go to a restaurant. If you really want to know food, you're going to eat everywhere, right? Go to a market. If you really want to understand a culture's relationship with food, go to the local markets, go to the supermarket. That will give you a much better understanding of what local cuisine is like than just popping into a bunch of random restaurants. They go cooking class. Go eat cheap for breakfast, make some sandwiches for lunch, do dinner specials or do lunch specials and cook your own dinner. Don't always feel the needs to eat out. There's this weird

just feeling that if you're traveling, you can't cook because that's like, how am I even know the local cuisine. Well, you know, everyone here in Paris, they cook their own food. The entire city doesn't eat out every night. People cook. Go to the market. Then you can really understand what locals are eating because you see it. That's the ingredients that they use in their cooking. I imagine one of the aspects of long-term travel, which is what you've done for the last 13 years, is that you're not simultaneously paying for two lives. You don't have a home in the United States or a car in the United States or lots of bills in the United States

that you simultaneously have to support. When you're traveling full time, then you only have one life, one set of accommodations, and it's wherever you're at. Exactly. As in Paris, all my expenses are here. When I go home,

all my expenses are there. When I quit my job to travel and sold my car, no car payments anymore. Didn't have to worry about car insurance. or gas. I don't even know what gas prices are. I haven't owned a car in 10 years. When I canceled my cable, cable bill is gone. Once you go on the road, you actually find out life is actually much cheaper when you travel than it is at home. I mean, if you think about a year's worth of expenses as $18,000, most people spend way more than that, 50 bucks a day. You know, if you think

of, like, as total costs. So it's not like I'm just spending $8,000. 18,000 on day-to-day. I mean, that's everything for a year. Right. And so your money goes a lot further on the road. It goes a lot further when, especially Americans, think it does. Because we don't have a travel culture. We have a vacation culture.

You go away for two weeks and you go to a nice hotel or a resort or a cruise or fancy places around Europe. You stay in like two-star hotels and you come back home and you tell your friends that. internalize that and books and movies and just what you hear in the news. And suddenly we have this way of thinking about travel that nobody else in the world really thinks about. We don't have a travel culture and we're not really exposed to a lot of this. And if we are, we're told it's weird. You mean you're going to like stay in somebody's home as weird. Or you're going to ride a chair with someone you don't know. It's weird. Right. And so a lot of times when people assume that travel is expensive, they take vacation culture and apply that framework to long-term travel culture, when in fact,

long-term travel is a completely different lifestyle. And it is a lifestyle that is cheaper than living in the United States. Yeah, so much cheaper. When you're on a vacation, you have a fixed start and end date. You're going away to Europe for two weeks and you want to see Berlin, London, and say Paris, because here I'm in Paris. So I'll use it as a reference to a lot of time. lot so you're not really concerned about making your money last because you know it only has to go until 14 days from now when you move a lot your costs go up because you're always on the move so your transportation costs just go way up but when you're traveling you have all the time in the world but not all the money in the world so you really have to shift your focus it's not about seeing a lot

quickly it's about moving slow and saving and understanding that less is more And that's a philosophy I try to take to people, even if they're, they only have two weeks. Don't try to squeeze everything in. The more you rush, the more it's just going to drain you, and the more it's going to drain your bank account. Right. The more you rush, the less you see. But if you travel slowly, you really can absorb a culture and a place. Yeah, exactly.

And I totally get why people want to see, you know, 10 European cities in two weeks. When are they going to get back? I don't know. But if all you do is just rush through, you're not really seeing anything. You're just checking off. Like, yeah, I've been there. But what have you seen? Just because you were physically there.

It doesn't mean you actually were there. And especially if your idea is to not travel with a ton of money, you guys slow down. Slow travel is cheap travel. Cheap travel is slow travel. The faster you go, the more you'll spend. As you've been traveling, you've probably met quite a number of families who are traveling. What tips do you have for people who are listening who want to travel long-term with their children? When you're traveling with your kids, you know, those costs sort of multiply,

right? So a great website for family travel is mommy points. M-O-M-M-M-Y-P-O-I-N-T-S. It talks all about, like, vacationing with your kids. One thing, if you think of like, how you're going to get four beds in the dorm. Well, if you add up those beds, you're better off just getting an Airbnb. So family travel, you've got to get an Airbnb because the per person cost is much lower than anything else. When you have four plane tickets to buy, that's where travel hacking and points of miles really comes into play because even if you can only offset two of the four tickets or two of the five tickets, whatever, there's still two tickets you can offset. So it's really important to do points of miles.

Utilize, and this is a good tip for everybody, the tourism board, when you go to a city, walk into the tourist information booth and ask them, we're some family-friendly but cheap activities because it is their job to know everything that is to know about the destination you just came to visit. They sit there every day and they tell visitors what to see, what to do. And they're also locals. And more often than not, people that are working tourism offices tend to be older, and they probably have kids themselves. So they're going to be a great resource because it's also important how you frame the question. What should I do? It's not the

question you ask, because they're going to look at you and say, what should you do as a tourist? Well, go and see this touristy stuff. If you say, what do you do with your kids? They will direct you to the things the locals do. The locals aren't spending tons of money with their kids every day. They're going off to the parks and the playgrounds and finding the fun, family-friendly activities that don't cost a fortune.

So that's always a good way to phrase any question when you travel. Hey, what should I do is, hey, what do you do for fun here? Because then you're getting the local answer. It's a subtle shift, but it creates a vastly different answer. There are a number of people who are listening to this who are interested in quitting their nine to five job and traveling, but they've never traveled long term before. And they're not quite sure if they even are going to have the stamina for it. You know, there's always that doubt in the back of your mind of what if I think I want to travel, but after three months or six months, I burn out. How do you plan for long term travel if you've never done it before and you're not sure if you're even going to enjoy?

it once you try it. The beauty of travel is that it teaches you about yourself. And I've met a lot of people who have found out that they don't like to travel and they go home. And there's nothing wrong with going home. If you do it for three months, four months, and you're like, I'm not really digging it. Travel burnout is real. It happens to everybody.

The longer you travel, the more frequently it will happen. after four weeks of like constantly moving, I just want to stay at home for like a month and just catch up. You know, but before when I had just left, I could go months and months and months. You know, it was all new, it was all fresh. I had no responsibility.

Could you keep going? But eventually, you know, you hit this burnout phase. I mean, the reason I went home back in 2008, you know, I didn't actually have to be home until May because that was when my sister was graduating in college. But I came home in January, because I was just really burnt out 18 months. I was just tired of meeting people all the time

and having the same conversations and packing and unpacking and figuring out laundry and getting around. I was just like, you just want to break. And that happens. That's a natural part of travel. Travels work. Every day you have to figure out where to go,

where to see how they find a place to eat. You're basically restarting your life every day and that can really drain you. Travel is a battery. It's not in a limited wellspring, so you need to recharge it. And so, you know, if you're traveling, you don't really like it, stop.

Sit down, relax for a bit, recharge your batteries, stay in one place, watch Netflix, create some routine. After a couple of weeks go on, if you still hate it, go home. I know many people who have gone home, they miss their friends,

their family, they miss their boyfriend, they just don't like this style of travel, they're just not into it. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think people get caught up like, oh, I've told everybody I'm going away for a year, so I have to do the whole year. Otherwise, I'll seem like a failure. There is no failure in travel. You can't lose. Travel is a personal journey that a person takes for themselves. There's no winning or losing. If I go away for five years and you only go away for five months, it doesn't make me the better traveler. It doesn't make you a lesser traveler. It means nothing. It just means I went away for five years and you went away for five months. It doesn't matter if you go to Central America, Europe, or Australia, Russia, China, nothing matters.

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You have been a solo traveler for the past 13 years. How do you combat loneliness when you travel? You know what? You have this idea when you're going away by yourself. You're like, that's going to be great. I'm going to just be by myself, do what I want, when I want. and meet people, no one's going to hold me back. And then you go and you realize, hey, you're alone.

That's cool. And you're alone. And you're like, wait, I haven't talked to another human in like five days. What the heck? Then you really want to start to know people. And then you realize that actually there's a lot of other travelers out there. And you're just going to find them because like you, they are also alone. So this is why I like staying in hostels.

This is why I like the app couch search. thing, even if you don't want to stay in someone's couch, they have a lot of meetups. There's lots of events and stuff going on, so you can just go meet them. I went to a bunch when I was here in Paris, lots of language meetups. Walking tours are great, pub crawls, if you don't want to get crazy drunk. You know, it's just something that gets people together, you know, and people who are traveling like you. There's also lots of message boards and meetup forums online, meetup.

Meetup.com is a good one. If you're staying in a hostel, it's really easy to meet people because you're just surrounded by travelers all the time. So it's sort of like a hostel is a natural breeding ground for friendship. But if you're not staying at hostels, you don't really want to do that whole thing. CheckoutMeeting.Meetup.com. Check out couch surfing.

Check out what other sort of meetup groups are in that city. You know, if you're traveling with a family, there's this thing called the FEM Travel Association. They can put you in touch with locals. There's always people around, but you have to make the effort. This is the one thing I learned. In my head, I was going to live all these crazy wild dreams. I'd be at a cafe, and the next thing I know, people would see me eating alone.

They'd invite me out, and I end up in the south of France and we're partying on some guy's yacht. And then someone's like, hey, you want to come to Italy with us and drive the yacht to Italy? And crazy things would happen. I'd meet this wig dress and I'd butcher somewhere in the local language and she'd think it was cute. And next thing I know, you know, we're dating and all that jazz. That doesn't happen. And I find it really quickly is like, if you want stuff to happen, you have to go make it happen. Sitting alone in your Airbnb isn't going to get you friends.

isn't going to cure that loneliness. And going back to what I said earlier about how there's so much information online now, and now is a great time to travel because of it. It's also a great time to meet people because there's so many apps and websites and groups out there that facilitate people meeting in a way that didn't exist back in 2005, 2006. Yeah, I think that often I traveled. From 2008 to 2010, I traveled for those two years full time. And the amount of technology available today compared to back then is multiple generations apart.

Oh, yeah. I mean, 2005 is like the stone age of the internet. And it wasn't even that longer ago. Right. So let's talk more about money. You mentioned that you spent $50 a day as you traveled. But let's talk about how you made your money last. I spent so long saving it. You know, I had all these spreadsheets. I'm actually flipping through my old notebook as we speak, looking at these daily budgets, you know, from day 208, you know, on the road and where I spent $20, $23. The key to really make your money last is finding it down. What I really notice is that people who go home early have no idea where their money's going. So they started out with this set dollar that they have, say, $20,000. And then just go through spending. And they're like,

oh, my God, it's gone now. Get to go home. It's like, oh, where did you spend it? I have no idea. But the people who I noticed who last the longest on the road, every day, they write down what they spent. You know, I was recently in New Zealand. And I watched these two girls at dinner. go through their budget and, you know, they had receipts and everything. And I was like, oh, you guys write down everything. Like, yeah, that's how we know we're staying on budget. And I was like, these are my people right here. Because if you don't know where you're spending money, you don't know how are you going to save money. Same with creating a budget back home. You don't know what you can cut if you don't know where the money is going. So I always wrote down everything I was spending

so I could see like, oh, wow, the last couple of days I've been spending a lot of money. I should really pull back so I can get that average down again. Let's see, oh, I've been drinking a lot. Well, I'll do that for a couple of days. Or, oh, look, I've been eating out for the next couple of days I'll cook and taking a lot of tours. Let's not take a lot of tours. So it really allowed me to sort of track my daily budget and see what I was doing, how I was doing, and how much I had left. And so I think that is really the secret to long-term travel is budgeting.

And knowing yourself, too, going back to talking about how much I love foods, I love foods, if you're the type of person who likes to eat, budget more for food, if you're the type of person who has to have a really nice place to sleep, budget more for a combination. Again, there's every price you can want is online. So you can get a real good sense of prices just by researching online. And so the people who also go home are the people who just don't know the cost of things or even bothered to put any effort into learning. What do you do when unexpected expenses cause your budget to go significantly over?

I always had an emergency fund. So, you know, when I calculated, okay, I had $30,000. I knew I wanted to come home with five because I figured if I lived home with my parents for a bit, that would be fine. I needed two for school, the student loans. I spent 20 and I had a $3,000 sort of emergency slush fund. That ideally was for when I came back, but if something happened, it would sort of come out of that. So when I prepared for that, you should always prepare for the worst, expect the best. But, you know, if something like really bad happened, I would just adjust accordingly.

If I had to buy a new camera or something, I would be like, all right, for the next couple of weeks, I really just got to be cheap, you know, drinking. I'm going to cook my own meals. You know, maybe if I find a cheap place to stay, I'm just going to stay there. Long-term travel is not a vacation. It's like life. And you make these adjustments when you travel just like you do when you're in life. Because there's no end date.

or if there isn't that day, it's usually really far away. So it's like there's no end date. This is your day-to-day life. You're not on vacation. You can't worry about it when you get home because you don't have a home. Your home is where you are. And speaking of budgeting while you're traveling in the same way that you budgeted at home, you also mentioned that when you left your full-time job in Boston, you had $30,000 saved.

You mentioned that you earned this by working 60-hour weeks. So you were certainly working a lot. But how did you save money while you were working so much? And do you have any other tips for that? Yeah, well, I mean, one of the beauties of working so much is they don't really have a lot of opportunity or time to spend the money you're making. But I do a lot of sort of case studies on the website about budgeting. And so I take readers and I'm like, okay, let's, you say you can't travel, but let's make this happen. And so, I mean, for me, it was first, I track all my expenses.

And now you have things like mint.com that can do that. But just get a sense of like if I bought a water, I would write it down. Gum, write it down. And so over the course of a month, I really got a sense of, okay, what am I really spending money on? And then I divide it into want and needs. A need is my utility bill. Can't not pay the electric bill, right? A want was Starbucks.

Turned out I really had a really bad Starbucks. I had a phone plan that I wasn't using all like the bells and whistles on. So I was like, what if I can downgrade that? You know, can't get rid of the phone, but why do I need such a great plan? By putting everything into the want and need category and thinking of every decision within that mindset, allowed me to go, okay, well, I want to go out with my friends. Is that a want or a need? And by always being like, going to cut the wants, going to cut the wants, I got to just

core spending. I always spent on what I needed and got rid of all the wants. I would cook dinner. That was really important. Restaurants are very expensive. But then I used to play this game with myself. Because I was like constructing all these budgets, I had a sense of like how much I would need. And so I would always ask myself, if I'm going out with my friends or I need to go get this thing or see this movie or do something, that is three days in Europe. is what I'm going to worth giving up three days in Europe. Sometimes the answer would be yes. It's a friend's birthday. Somebody's getting married.

Spending that money was worth giving up a couple of days in Europe because the connection to my friends was great. But for just another night out, I was like, I want that extra night in Europe. One thing I think is important, as much as the hard numbers are really important, getting to the right mindset and thinking about your expenses differently will shift how you think about money and you'll help you stay quicker.

You know, I had this guy, we interviewed him on the website, he was making minimum wage and, you know, he did a lot of overtime too, but you know, he followed that same mindset. It's just like, I work. I bought only what I needed because I knew the sacrifice that I was making now was worth all those extra days on the road. And so it doesn't matter if you make minimum wage or $200,000 a year. There's money that you could save from your budget. Even if it's only a couple of dollars a day, there's still something there. It doesn't matter if it takes you a month or a year to save up.

I mean, it took me three years to save up. You know, there's money there. It's just you got to always think, if I'm going to buy this thing, it's worth giving up time traveling. Right. So you frame money in the context of time, and that helps you make smarter to say. about how you spend your money. Right. And I still do it today. If I go, I'm like, oh, I have to move somewhere and I have to go buy, you know, furniture. And someone's like, oh, you can buy this, you know, go see a couch. It's like a thousand bucks. Like a thousand dollars for a couch,

I could spend almost a month in Thailand all that much money. You know, so I still like think about money in terms of that way. But it's like the first thought I had because I trained my mind so long to think that way. Wanted needs and framing it. between every expenses, days not traveling has really taught me to think about what's important. Because I have plenty of friends who will tell me they can't afford to travel. And I'll be like, yeah, we just bought these really expensive sunglasses. They're like, yeah, but they needed those. I'm like, but did you really need them?

Or did you really just want them more than you wanted to go on a vacation? And so you really learn to prioritize. And for some people, travel is just like the desire that they have. Like, ooh, I want to travel. They don't really want to travel. The ones that with sunglasses more than they want to get on a flight to Paris. But once you really start thinking about what is I want and what is the need, you really understand what is you want and what you want your money to do for you.

I want my money to get me trips and good food. Everything else, I don't really need fancy clothes or a great TV or something. sunglasses. I want experiences. To me, that's the sacrifice. Cool. Well, thank you, Matt. Where can people find you if they would like to know more about you and your story? They can find me on my website, nomadic matcom, N-O-M-A-D-I-C-M-A-T-T, as well as more about my story on my new book, 10 Years a Nomad, a Traveler's Journey Home, which is all about the 10 years I spent backpacking around the world, sort of follows the theme of world trip, lots of how do you, your plan, the lessons I've learned, stories, how you make friends, what you do when you

fall in love, all those great things that you hear about when you can travel. So that's my new book. So travel tips on the website, travel stories on the book. Great. Well, thank you, Matt. Thanks for having me. We'll return to the show in just a moment. Attention, anyone who has a side hustle or an online business in which you send physical products to your customers. As you know, getting your orders out the door can be a real pain. It's time consuming. It's expensive. And how do you know if you're making the best choice or getting the best deal? Check out shipstation.com. It's a fast, easy, affordable way to manage and ship your orders. You can bring all of your orders into one simple interface that you manage from any device, even your cell phone. And you can do that no matter

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and type in Paula, P-A-U-L-A. That's shipstation.com, then enter promo code Paula. Shipstation.com. Make ship happen. Are you interested in starting a side hustle, starting your own business? You're going to need a website or a blog, and as you are setting that up, check out Bluehost. They offer high-quality and affordable hosting for blogs and websites. Normally, they cost $8 a month, but I've got a special deal in which you can get it for $3 a month. To get that exclusive special deal, go to afford anything.com slash bluehost.

That's afford anything.com slash bluehost, where you can set up a website or a blog for three bucks a month. Affordanything.com slash blue host. Thank you for spending this time with us, Matt. What are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are six. Number one. Flexibility is affordability.

One of my favorite quotes comes from J.L. Collins. He's the author of the book, The Simple Parenthood. path to wealth. He's also a former guest on this podcast. He says that flexibility is the only true security. And what he means by that in the context of financial independence is that we can make all of these plans around budgeting and money management and asset allocation within our portfolios and safe withdrawal rates from our portfolios and retirement. We can make plans and plans and plans. But at the end of the day, the only true security comes from our capacity and willingness to be flexible and to adjust course in whatever way that the situation

might demand, whether that means radically altering the cost of the way in which we live or being enterprising and entrepreneurial and being willing to hustle for our food, your flexibility is security. And that same ethos of flexibility. also applies to travel. As Nomadic Matt describes, when it comes to travel, flexibility is the key to affordability. A couple of key specific points is,

one, you need to be flexible with where and or when you go. If you want to go to Paris, the first week of June, and that's it, whatever is the price of the ticket is the price of the ticket. But if you're a little bit more flexible

as to maybe when you go to Paris, you might find the flight deal, or maybe you just have to go away in the first week of June, but you're not married to Paris. So you might find the flight deal somewhere else. The difference of a day can mean the difference of hundreds of dollars. So many years ago, I used to be a campus representative for the Peace Corps. To be clear, I did not serve in the Peace Corps as a Peace Corps volunteer. I worked for the Peace Corps office in Denver. I worked part-time for them for two years while I was in college. and I was their campus representative. So I would go to different college campuses and encourage people to come to meetups

in which they could learn more about serving the Peace Corps if that's what they wanted to do upon graduation. And when I would go and give these presentations in front of classes, people would often ask me, do you get to choose where you go? And my reply was always the same. What I said was, hey, think about three variables. There's where you go, there's what you do when you get there, and there's when you leave, like the month in which you leave.

So those three things where, what, and when all need to come into alignment. And if you're highly committed to one of those variables, then in order to have the best chance of getting that variable, you need to be flexible on the others. And that is an analogy that also applies to travel. When you travel, there's when you go, there's where you go, and there's how much it costs. So these three variables, when, where, and how much, if you're highly committed to one of those variables, in this case, that variable is how much it costs,

then to have the best possibility of that outcome, you've got to be flexible on the others. Everything is a trade-off and everything works in collaboration and tension with one another. So if you're firm about how much or how little you want it to cost, then be chill about where you go, when you go, and what you do when you're there. So that is key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two.

Travel is exactly like life in that the big three expenses are housing, transportation, and food. Now, in travel, if you use rewards and points and travel hacking, that eliminates or, at a minimum, greatly reduces your transportation costs. And that means that you're left with food and accommodation as your two big expenses? A traveler's biggest expenses are always food and accommodation. Everything else is negotiable.

So if you can eat cheap and find cheap accommodation, you can pretty much travel. And so if you think about the cost of travel in those terms, if you think about the big three, well, okay, transportation doesn't need a cost very much because of rewards and points in travel hacking. I have a page on my website, afford anything.com slash travel, where I point to some of my favorite resources for travel hacking. And then when you're left with food and accommodation, those two things, they don't have to be that much. You don't have to go to restaurants. You don't have to stay in hotels. You can stay in hostels where you'll meet other travelers. And there are family-friendly hostels where a family can rent a private room in which a couple with young kids can stay. Not every

hostel is like that, but many are. You can stay in low-cost guest houses. You can Airbnb, a private room in a home in which the family also lives in that home. And that's a great way not just to get your cost of accommodation down, but also to meet local people in the place that you're visiting. And when it comes to food, well, that leads to the third key takeaway. Go to the grocery store. Go to the grocery store in South Korea. Go to the market in Thailand. If you travel to the UK, visit a Tesco. That's part of the fun. Food-wise, I always tell people, just need to have you eat at home. There's nothing in the rule book because there's no rule book that says you have to eat out every meal. You have to go to a restaurant. If you really want to know food, you're going to

eat everywhere, right? Go to a market. If you really want to understand a culture's relationship with food, go to the local markets, go to the supermarket. That will give you a much better understanding of like what local cuisine is like than just popping into a bunch of random restaurants. So one of my favorite and earliest travel memories happened when my friend Kim, Kim, the firefighter, who she's been on this podcast several times. She and I were in Spain together. We spent a month and a half, six weeks there. And we would go to the grocery store in Spain. And this was before either of us really knew how to cook. We'd go to the grocery store and we'd buy these bags of frozen paella and we'd come back to this run-down little apartment in Madrid and just cook frozen paella over the, the stove. And then we needed to do laundry. So we Google mapped the word lavendaria, thinking that that

would lead us to a laundromat. But instead, we, like, then we packed this big bag full of, like, dirty clothes and we hauled it all the way over there on, like, the subway system, only to discover that actually it was a car wash. So then we lugged all of our dirty clothes back and then just washed them in the sink. Like, that's what travel is. Those are some of my favorite memories. It's travel is. living your normal life somewhere else. It's cooking and laundry done in a different location. And when you live that way, when you just live your life elsewhere, you get to experience the culture and the food and the people and the lifestyle of that location. You get to see who you are in a different context. And that is what makes travel so much fun. It's not about

taking a selfie in front of some tourist trap. It's about discovering yourself and creating yourself in a new context. That's the difference between a vacation and travel. And that leads perfectly to the next takeaway. Takeaway number four, the distinction between travel and a vacation. Your money goes a lot further on the road. It goes a lot further when, especially America. Americans think it does because we don't have a travel culture. We have a vacation culture.

You go away for two weeks and you go to a nice hotel or resort or a cruise or fancy places around Europe. You stay in like two-star hotels and you come back home and you tell your friends that and they internalize that and books and movies and just what you hear in the news. And suddenly we have this way of thinking about travel that nobody else in the world really thinks about. we don't have a travel culture and we're not really exposed to a lot of this. And if we are, we're told it's weird. Now, just imagine for a second that you stay in your hometown. Let's, for the sake of illustration, forget the travel component for a second and imagine that you currently live in Kansas City or Wichita or Cincinnati or wherever it is that you live, right?

So imagine that you don't leave your current town, but you wake up tomorrow morning and you decide that you're going to move out of your house, you're going to move into a nice hotel, a three-star hotel in downtown Cincinnati, and you're going to eat at restaurants for every single meal. If you did that, even in your own city where you currently live, or in your original hometown where you grew up, if you lived that type of lifestyle there, your cost of living would skyrocket. You would never live that way at home. So why would you assume that just because you're in a new city, you're supposed to live that way? It doesn't even make sense.

But unfortunately, a lot of people write off travel as expensive because they take their vacation experience. Vacations are, by definition, they're inefficient. If you check into a hotel, you eat at restaurants, it's an inefficient way to live. And when you do it for three or four days, then fine, it's only three or four days. But people take that paradigm and then they apply it to a three or four month trip, automatically assume that it's going to be expensive, and then write off travel as something that's tremendously expensive that only quote unquote rich people can do when in fact, as nomadic Matt has described, his annual cost of living is $18,000. Now imagine that. Imagine meeting somebody in the United States, meeting somebody in Indianapolis or Cincinnati. or Kansas City, who says, yeah, my annual cost of living is $18,000.

You would say, that's amazing. Congratulations. Tell me how you do it because that's a very cheap annual cost of living for one person. And when you travel, when you're in locations where the U.S. dollar goes a lot further, it's pretty simple. It's not hard to have an annual cost of living of less than $20K a year. The key to doing it is to live there and to live as efficiently as you, would live at home.

Like really, the whole magic of travel is that you're at home in a new place. That's the distinction between travel and a vacation, and that distinction is that fourth key takeaway. Key takeaway number five. Slow travel is cheap travel. Don't just rush through cities or countries. Go to fewer places and spend longer amounts of time in each place. I totally get why people want to see, you know, 10 European cities in two weeks.

When are they going to get back? I don't know. But if all you do is just rush through, you don't really see anything, you're just checking off. Like, yeah, I've been there. But what have you seen? Just because you were physically there. It doesn't mean you actually were there. And especially if your idea is to not travel with a ton of money, you guys slow down.

Slow travel is cheap travel. Cheap travels, slow travel. My rule when I'm traveling overseas is that one week is the minimum amount of time that I will spend in any country. I refuse to go to a country if I can't be there for at least one week minimum. And quite honestly, that's not long enough. That's the bare minimum. And so if people ask me, how many countries have I traveled to, when I give that answer, I only count countries where I've spent at least one week. And many places, I've stayed for between three weeks to a month or longer.

So Cambodia, I was there for three weeks. Lao, three weeks. Vietnam, two weeks. Spain, six weeks. Indonesia, two months. Australia, 10 months. So you get the picture. Thailand, I've been back there eight times and I've cumulatively spent at least six months there.

And what that means is that I'm efficient at knowing how to live a normal, ordinary life there. I'm efficient at knowing where to buy groceries, how to use local public transportation rather than taking taxis everywhere. You know, I've taken the bus, not the tourist bus, the local bus. And when I'm there, I fill my days with normal things like going to the dentist or getting a haircut. And so when I talk about how long I've spent in various places, I'm not saying it to brag. I'm saying it for the purpose of illustrating that by settling down in a place for a while, you become. efficient at living in that place. You develop routines, you meet other people, you make a group of friends there, you get to know what the good deals are, you reduce transportation costs because

you're not moving around very much. And that's why slow travel is cheap travel, and cheap travel is slow travel. And that is the fifth key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number six, Frame your spending in terms of your time. That $36 pair of sunglasses at REI that costs a day in Medellin. Like that costs one day of every expense. Your accommodation, your food, your coffee, your transit, every expense for a full day of your life

is equivalent to that $36 pair of sunglasses. So do you really want to spend $36? on a pair of sunglasses, or can you forego that purchase and instead spend an extra day in Medellin? I used to play this game with myself. Because I was constructing all these budgets, I had a sense of, like, how much I would need. And so I would always ask myself, if I'm going out with my friends or I need to go get this thing or see this movie or do something, that is three days in Europe.

is what I'm going to worth giving up three days in Europe. Sometimes the answer would be yes. You know, it's a friend's birthday. Somebody's getting married. Spending that money was worth giving up a couple of days in Europe

because the connection to my friends was great. Right? But for just another night out, I was like, I want that extra night in Europe. This works not just for spending decisions, but also for earning related choices

and for side hustles. If you start a thing, side hustle, even a small one, where you earn an extra $150 a week. Well, after a year, that's almost $8,000. After taxes, that leaves you with an extra $6,000. Save all of that, put it in a travel fund. Do that for three years. Now you've got $18,000.

You can quit your job and live on that for a year if you go to countries where the dollar stretches a lot further. So frame your spending and your side hustle income and your earn. in terms of the time that it will buy you. That is the sixth and final key takeaway from this conversation with Nomadic Matt. That is our show for today. I would love to hear what you think about this podcast episode. Find me on Instagram at Paula P-A-U-L-A, P-A-A-N-T.

And let me know what you thought about today's episode. You can also chat with other people in the Afford- Anything community by heading to our Facebook group. You can find that at afford-anything.com slash Facebook. That's afford-anything.com slash Facebook. Facebook, that'll take you to the Afford Anything community on Facebook. Our course, your first rental property, is reopening for enrollment from September 23rd through September 27th. So if you're interested in enrolling this course, that's the one week,

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That's afford anything.com slash real estate to download our free ebook and get more information about the course. If you enjoyed today's show, please do three things. Number one, share this episode with a friend or a family member. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, make sure you hit the subscribe or follow button in whatever app you're using to listen to podcasts. Thank you again for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast.

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