Talking with Your Partner about Your Nomad Life Dreams

Although I had known for at least ten years that I’d eventually live a nomad life, my husband (Steve) certainly had never thought about a real, full-time, nomad life prior to meeting me. Talking to him about going nomadic and how to live a nomad life was a ground-breaking conversation. In order to have it, we had to sort through retirement thoughts and travel dreams.

My whole life I’d dreamed of traveling. After all, mom and dad threw us in the back of the family car for our annual two-week roadtrips. I started my travel writing career at age 8 as the family scribe of those trips! I could envision faraway lands. Exotic foods. And never returning to the USA, even though I loved my home country. My young brain could only imagine all the things to see and do!

I knew travel would always be a big part of my life. As I got older, I learned about retirement tools such as compound interest, 401ks, and company vesting. I jumped into these money earners as soon as I could, always keeping my eye on an earlier retirement so I could travel the world.

Meanwhile, Steve had done his “road trip in a van” adventures in college, and as a career sales person, he’d grown to love his mileage perks which he hacked for vacations and non-work travel. He had also had a job where he didn’t own a home, traveling from worksite to worksite for 18 months. He had good nomad chops, yet didn’t think of his nomadic way of living as a nomad life. Traveling salesmen weren’t digial nomads, yet.

Plus, Steve had never given much thought to retirement. His parents had retired to Florida; wasn’t that what everyone did when they could?

Retire and Travel as One Thing?

Fortunately, when I talked about my dream of retiring and traveling, he didn’t flinch. He was curious. We started talking. We explored the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of the issue. Who was easy. Steve and I.

Getting through all the 5 Ws and one H of what would become our “nomad life” took time. Creating a dream that worked for both of us required lots of listening. There were some hiccups. After all, we had to work through two ideas. One: retirement. Two: travel.

No Flinching Here. We Started With “When” for our Nomad Life

Originally the retirement conversation started as a plan to live abroad once our youngest daughter finished high school. Serendipitously, her graduation date and Steve’s retirement date coincided. Although I was anxious to become nomadic sooner (read about my 4-month nomadic adventure to Latin America in 2019) and my finances allowed for it, my parenting role did not. I felt the parental pull to maintain a home for our daughter until she left for college.

We set the date. Fall 2021.  We found our “When.” But what would we be doing and where would we go as retired travelers? At this point in our decision making, we didn’t quite understand how our nomad life would look, we just knew when it would start.

The Why of Nomad Life Becomes Why Not?

As we started discussing the ideas of living abroad as expats, we soon learned that several countries had cities that met our criteria. That criteria for a nomadic life abroad included:

We couldn’t pick just one location. Quickly, our live-abroad plan turned nomadic. With so many wonderful cities that met our criteria of how we wanted to live our lives, we began to think, “What if we just spent our time visiting those places?” Barcelona, Malaga, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, Puerto Vallarta…Why not invest at least two years traveling to cities that met our criteria and make an adventure out of it?

Why fly back and forth to our house to return to good-weathered cities on our list? Why not just go from one city to the next? Our “Why” had been found regarding our nomadic retirement.

How Could We Afford a Nomad Life of Full-Time Travel?

The conversation turned to the “How” of the question. Steve and I openly talked about money between the two of us. Because we had come into our marriage from divorces, we had decided when we first met to keep our money in our own accounts. We maintained our own budgets, we split expenses on household items, we each paid our own kids’ expenses, and we shared travel expenses.

We started to research how much we should budget for our retirement life as nomads, and we came to an agreement about how much we would each contribute monthly (which we’ll discuss in later posts.) Once we determined our budget, we looked at the lifestyle it would support, and committed to the plan. I was ready; Steve needed 18 more months before he felt comfortable financially.

We also learned about ways to save money on different categories in our budget while we traveled. We wanted to include housesitting, credit card hacking, and volunteering as ways to enrich our lives while also protecting our bank accounts.

Where Did We Want to Go in our Nomad Life?

These conversations lead us to the next big conversation about “Where.” We knew that we wanted to depart the US on a flight paid for by mileage we’d earned through loyalty programs/credit card sign up bonuses. In order to get seats with reward travel, we would have to book our flights almost 300 days prior to our departure. With a departure of September 2021, we would have to figure out the first part of our nomadic plan and book its first flight in October 2020.

Thus, in September 2019, we holed up in an Airbnb in the Colorado mountains to watch the aspens turn color and to draft out a rough itinerary. A friend had developed this amazing spread sheet of the world’s temperatures, and we started working it. Since we had both traveled extensively (I’d been to over 53 countries), we wanted our travel to be about places we would like to live for a month (see criteria above), not necessarily about seeing additional wonders of the world. We’ve seen many of them already.

We listed the countries and built a super rough itinerary. We knew this itinerary would 100% change, but we wanted to create some infrastructure and direction to our logistics. And truly, we just wanted to understand where we would need to book our first flight.

This was our itinerant idea.

Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Colombia, Belize, Honduras, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan, Israel, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico

Yes, we knew that this wasn’t a straight line, and we’d cross the equator a few times. But we organized this based on weather (we want to stay between 50-80 degrees), staying in each region for about 3 months, hopefully housesitting many times, and discoverng the best of these areas. Thus, our “Where” was defined. A nomad life was just one flight away.

But What Would We Do in Our Nomadic Life?

Finally, we worked on the “What” question. What would we be doing as we traveled? This part of the conversation went on for quite awhile and continues to evolve. Of course we planned for tourism and sightseeing, but we knew that full-time tourism wouldn’t be sustainable. We wanted a slower pace.

For me, I continued to write this blog, author books, and generally live a nomad life writing when I want about whatever travel/nomad topic fits with our lifestyle.

Steve, on the other hand, struggled with this question. Like me, he worked his whole life and raised kids. I had gotten a jump on his retirement, settling into a schedule of hiking, writing, working out, cooking, parenting (for a bit longer), and making friends. He dreamed about options. Perhaps he’d create a consulting business, develop a love for surfing, or maybe even start a podcast. He didn’t know, and I was confident he’d figure it out. So, “What” was pending for Steve.

What Are We Doing Now While We Prepare for Nomad Life?

In the meantime, while Steve worked, I took on two projects. One was my 50 Hikes 50 States Project, which coincidentally, allowed us to gather more airline points, while also visiting other cities in the US that we might want to retire to. If the international gig didn’t work out, if the world imploded from COVID, or we found we just wanted to be in the US, we actively looked at different US cities (meeting the criteria above) in case we landed back in the US for full-time living.

Needless to say, we planned.

And those plans continue to change, which was project two.

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See you on the trail,

Chris