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My latest MoneySense Retired Money column expands on a blog written by Devin Partida on my site while we were away in Malta and Italy. In there you can see three photos from our trip, including the one shown here.
For MoneySense, I reached out through Linked In and Featured.com to bounce this idea off various Retirement Experts and Business Owners in North America.
The full Retired Money column can be accessed by clicking this hyperlink: Financial Independence and Travel: Can you have both? The column runs a normal 1200 words or so but the actual responses ran about five times that long, which you can find by clicking on this link also on Findependence Hub. (It ran over the weekend, as did the MoneySense summary of it).
Naturally, I agree with Devin’s original topline conclusion: that “maintaining Financial Independence while traveling is entirely possible with a proper strategy.” As some of the sources indicate, technology and the Internet means most professionals or so-called “Knowledge Workers” can really practice their craft most anywhere in the world that has Web access.
Digital Nomads
The colourful term “Digital Nomad” is often used to describe such globe-trotting workers. Of course, travelling the world by Baby Boomers like myself is relatively straightforward if you spent decades building up pensions and a Retirement nest egg. Ideally at the end of 30 or 40 years of “working for the man (or woman)”, you end up with the lovely combination of relatively endless time and sufficient financial resources to indulge your globe-trotting desires.
Leisure
But the MoneySense column also passes on several tips that can be used by those who are only semi-retired, or even decades from Retirement but who have embraced the so-called FIRE movement: Financial Independence Retire Early. There’s even a term I hadn’t encountered until I researched this piece: Bleisure, which is of course a contraction of the words Business and Pleasure.
The column also touches on our family’s personal routine of attempting to avoid the worst of Canada’s long cold winters: ideally most of January and February, if not a good chunk of March.
I can’t claim to have tried all the strategies outlined by these experts, many of which are versions of “Have your cake and eat it too.” These include Renting Recreational Vehicles (RVs) for extended travel stretches, and making your home base a Maintenance-Free Travel Community which essentially facilitates a “lock and leave” approach to foreign travel.
GeoArbitrage
Several experts expand on the idea of GeoArbitrage, which is simply the idea of moving to places where the cost of living is much lower than in most major North American cities. Some argue that a well-chosen location can work out to be less expensive than staying put in an expensive Canadian or American city.
House Sitting abroad is another trick that can bring in revenue abroad. FIRE pioneers Akaisha and Billy Kaderli of RetireEarlyLifestyle.com described how to get the most out of housesitting in this blog.
That’s a version of the idea of building income streams that can travel with you. In short, many of the suggestions are new variations on the old idea of practicing Frugality and the kind of traditional common-sense approaches to saving espoused by Personal Finance gurus like David Chilton, author of The Wealthy Barber. As one of the experts in the column suggests, “Make Travel a regular fixed expense you plan on incurring every month” rather than treating it as an item paid for with ‘loose change’ after all of other ‘necessary’ expenses have been paid. To me, this evokes Chilton’s classic advice that you should “pay yourself first” by allocating set percentages of paycheques to savings.
