Lessons I have learned through world travel

I have had several conversations as of late where someone has brought up something and I’ve said that “I learned that via world travels.” Or that world travels made something clear to me that this person had mentioned in a conversation. So it made me think why not hop on a podcast and discuss some of the lessons that I have learned through world travel.

I will start this off by saying there are going to be many many generalizations in this episode. And that I am not some guru, I am not an expert on culture, I am just a chick who has gone to a lot of places and had some experiences, and so I’m sharing those, and what I have learned from them. You are free to take from that what you wish. Or, take none of it at all. That is up to you.

Oh number one, strangely enough has to do with money, perception and options. 

When Nate and I took off for world travels back in 2018 everyone assumed we were rich. Some people abroad, and many people here in the states. I get that there are questions when you see someone traveling full-time. Do they own a house? Did they sell everything? Do they still have cars? All of these are very valid questions. And we ask those questions as well. The answer is that if someone wants to travel the world they just do what needs to be done in order to make that happen. Some people own a home and rent it out as an Airbnb, some people sell literally everything and buy a plane ticket. Or some people own a home and save up for several months or years and then take a year sabbatical to travel. Some people keep their jobs, some people quit their jobs and some people get jobs overseas. The moral of the story here is, you have options. And it just comes down to entertaining what it might take for you to do the thing, and if that is worth doing the thing or not. 

I’ve mentioned this before, but I was making $2500-$4000 a month when we left for world travels. Now my goal was of course to increase that monthly revenue as we traveled and I did. But we also booked some of our accommodations and flights and things of that sort for seven months leading up to our travels. Again that was what we had to do in order to feel secure in our decision to travel. We sold some stuff, a friend moved into our condo and took over rent for us. We sold one of our cars and kept a car that we don’t have payments on.

So there is no one size fits all answer to "how do you travel the world?"

When it comes to money, perception, and options, it’s cheaper to live in a lot of other countries than the United States. You can get jobs there and still be a resident of the US, and have no monthly payments or debt besides maybe your phone. The amount of ways that exist are the ones that you’ve exposed yourself to. That is lesson number one. There are almost always more options to consider.

With that, like I said, sometimes those options are not worth it and you know we are free to make the decision to not pursue the thing because the sacrifices too big. But we made $2,500-$4,000/mo and met people traveling on $5/day. That’s extreme and would not be possible in counties in Europe for example.

Moving on.

Humans want to be understood and want to understand

The question I get often about our world travels is in regards to the language barriers and if we were nervous about those. The answer is yes, we were somewhat nervous about them, but we had traveled to Spain previously, and Puerto Rico. That’s all the traveling we had done before taking off for a year. And between Google translate and playing a bit of charades, it is clear that most humans want to understand you,