But where will you live?

Carrie and I have always enjoyed travel and have been all over the world. But we often lamented the short period of time we had and the difficulty in really getting to know a place. Our dream was to be able to travel in a way that allowed us to spend an extended amount of time in each destination.

As you can imagine, this is difficult to arrange in the conventional lifestyle of commuting from a home to an office. After I left my most recent office job in 2015, Carrie was able to limit her clients to those who required only a small amount of “face time.” Once we were free of the necessity of reporting to an office, we knew we were in a position to pursue our dream.

As our first step, we wanted to downsize our home. We chose to move to Florida in 2017 because the climate was more agreeable (to me, at least, as I hate cold weather!), housing is much cheaper, and Jim has family there. Going from 3,300 square feet to 2,000 felt like an enormous change and made us realize what a burden it is to own a bunch of “stuff.” We originally worried that the new place would feel too small—crazy, in retrospect!

After the last of our dogs passed away, we knew that it was time to really dig into our travel. We spent a month each in Ho Chi Minh City and Budapest. The Airbnb apartments we rented were much smaller—certainly less than 1,000 square feet. We quickly realized that our home in Florida was still much larger than we needed. And when I did the math on what our home cost us each night that we were actually there, I found that it was three times the cost of our typical Airbnb!

We started to seriously think about how we wanted to continue to evolve our lifestyle. After a lot of discussion and soul searching, we both decided that we wanted to try going “home free” and traveling indefinitely. So in the summer of 2019 we decided to sell our home, cars, and anything we couldn’t fit into a 5x5 foot storage unit. This blog is intended to chronicle our experiences and adventures living out of a suitcase.

We're certainly not the first people to do something like this. In fact, we know two other couples who also sold their homes in 2019 to travel full-time. However, we're a little different from many in how we plan to do this. Where some people spend only a few days to a few weeks in each location, we plan to spend at least a month in each location, often 2 months or more.

One key point is that we aren’t on a long vacation. While we don’t know how long we'll be doing this, we’re not going into it with an end date in mind. We want to travel and “live” in the places we go, not feel rushed to check off all the tourist sites from our guide book and hurry to the next destination. We’re renting apartments, mostly on Airbnb, with a full kitchen. We’ll shop for groceries and cook most of our meals at home. We’ll see the sights, of course, but at a leisurely pace and with an emphasis on learning what it’s like to live there, rather than see it only through the lens of a camera.

So where will we live? Wherever we are, that's where we live.

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