Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Ruchites. I am your host. Today on the show, I want to share with you how to make travel less exhausting.

Now that's the title that I'm choosing to go with, but frankly, I could expand this title in a number of different directions. How to make life less exhausting. Let me begin with a story as to what stimulated me to think about this. My family and I, my wife and our four young children, ages seven and under, are currently on a tour de monde.

We're traveling the world. We have been traveling for several months now. We started in Mexico. From Mexico, we moved to Costa Rica. From Costa Rica, we moved to the United States for a few weeks, then from the United States to Europe. We spent some time in Portugal. Then we flew to Malta, spent several weeks on Malta, then back to Portugal.

In Portugal, I bought a car, and we have since traveled across the Iberian Peninsula into France with some time in Spain, also in Andorra along the way. We are now currently in France. Over the past few weeks, I have enjoyed our travels. It has been neat to take my children to some new destinations, show them some new things.

I keep a track, and so far this is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. We're now in our eighth country on this trip. It's been really fun to see my children learn new things, do the world-schooling thing quite a bit. It's been really neat. We're driving across Spain.

Look, there's a castle. Look, there's a castle. Look, there's a castle. It was really neat. It was neat to be in Andorra and get a chance to show them the little alpine wonderland that is the little microstate of Andorra. Now being here in France, it's been really fun. It's also been very, very tiring.

And a few days ago, I was just kind of done. I was sitting and talking with my wife, and I was feeling exhausted. And I don't usually get exhausted. I'm one who enjoys a pretty good reserve of energy. Consider myself to be fairly indomitable and not to pay much attention to how I feel.

Just press forward. I have good stores of energy, et cetera. I'm in good health. And I was just done. And I started thinking and talking with her about why. Why do I feel this way? And what I finally realized was that I was just worn out with making decisions.

I was worn out, completely and totally worn out with making decisions. Let me describe this to you so you understand why. In the style of travel that we have currently chosen, we are traveling in a very open-ended way. We started our trip, and we have no fixed dates on anything.

I have a list of a dozen or so destinations to which I'm trying to get for a dozen or so different reasons. And I'm hoping to get to those. But if I don't get to them all, it's okay. And if I get something different, I'm sure I'll find something interesting about that.

We have put all of our stuff in storage. So we got some suitcases, and that's it. Everything else is sitting in a storage locker. And that's great. We don't have any fixed location. I honestly don't know where I'm going to be from day to day. And our style of travel has been no forward tickets purchased, flying basically on one-way tickets into each place, choosing a hotel a few nights at a time, possibly as much as a week at a time.

But really no plans beyond a week at a time. And I love many things about this style of travel. I enjoy the spontaneity. I enjoy the sense of freedom. I enjoy knowing that if things get bad here, I can go somewhere on the exact opposite side of the world and be there in less than 24 hours.

That's exciting to me. I don't recommend this for novice travelers because there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty and you have to learn to be okay with that. But I've gotten pretty good, I thought, I think, at handling that sense of uncertainty. But what is part of this travel lifestyle is you are continually making fresh decisions.

Let me describe a fairly typical day. I wake up in the morning. Usually I wake up early before my children. My children all wake up at different times. My wife usually sleeps a little bit later, but I usually wake up early in the morning and I spend time in the morning reading, thinking, writing, et cetera.

So where do I do that? Well, I like to get up and if we're in a hotel, go to the hotel lobby. I like to find some beautiful place to be. But then on a daily basis, what about the children? Do I stay in the hotel room so that I can engage them and keep them quiet and have more time for the others to sleep?

Or do I just go and let my wife deal with it? Either works, but every day it's a new, fresh decision. Where do I go this morning? How much longer are they going to sleep? What time do they go to bed, et cetera? Then breakfast. Where are we going to have breakfast?

We're a breakfasting family. Maybe in the future we'll be able to be a fasting family, an intermittent fasting family, but at the moment it doesn't seem to be the right decision for my children. So where are we going to have breakfast? Are we going to have breakfast in the hotel?

Are we going to have breakfast out? Well what breakfast is offered at the hotel? Is it a good deal? How much are they going to charge me for four little children? Are they going to charge me adult prices times six or are they going to give me a deal?

And then what's available? Usually I don't know. So do we just walk down the street or do we go and do I look in an app? Do I pull up Yelp? Do I try to find out what's there? What do we do? Do we eat in the hotel room?

Are we in the hotel room where we're going to have the children sit? There's not enough, it just goes on. What are we going to do this morning? Well I've got work, we've got school, we've got sightseeing. What seems to be the best for today based upon where we are, based upon how much time we have, based upon the energy, based upon what's available?

Then all of a sudden lunchtime rolls around and children need some food in their bellies. So what's the best way to handle that? And then naps, are we going to do naps or are we going to not? And then the afternoon, same exact thing again. Where are we going to go out?

Are we going to stay in? What are we going to do and why? And then dinner, are we going to eat, etc. And then where are we going to be tomorrow? And then at night everyone gets in bed and then I've got to think where we're going to be two days from now and why.

Now you can see when I articulate it in this way, there's a lot of decisions. And it's basically at every step a new decision. Sometimes it's a lot easier if your decisions are made for you. For example, it would be in some cases easier if I were a totally bare bones budget traveler.

Well then I would just always stay in the cheapest hotel. But I'm not a totally bare bones budget traveler. I enjoy some luxury in my life and I enjoy some comfort for my family. And so I usually try to choose a place that's kind of middle of the road, mixing some luxury exotic experiences with some low end experiences.

But then what's the right place for here? And so even just continually choosing a new hotel, it's exhausting. Because I make that fresh decision of how fancy versus how simple, how big, should we go with a full house, do they have suites here, how do we know we're getting a good deal, should we get a small hotel?

It just goes on and on and on. On the food, same thing. I like to enjoy the gastronomical, the local gastronomical scene. Well, it's kind of annoying, you don't want to eat every meal in that way. So you're continually making these decisions as the point. Do I work today?

Do I not work today? If I work today, I can get something done. But where am I going to go to work? Where am I going to get something done? It's really tiring. It's really tiring. And so what can you do? Well, first of all, you can solve this.

So once I realized what was happening, I very quickly I said, "Okay, this is why I'm really tired. We're going to stop some of the decisions for a while." And it had been at that time a particularly heavy period of decisions. I just bought a car and there's everything associated with that.

Choosing a car, am I going to get this done? And what's the right thing for me? And how big and how small? And how much should I spend? And just how long am I going to use it? I don't know. And so that was a whole extra set of decisions that were piled on.

So choosing a car was one thing. But I quickly said, "Okay, what we need is we need some time." Now we've done some longer term rentals on this trip so far, but it had been a while, right? Because we've been traveling quite a lot and keep getting worried about new COVID restrictions.

And so finally I said, "That's it. We're just going to book a house." So I went and I booked a house for a month in France. I chose a house, big house, plenty of room, plenty of beds, plenty of space outside for the children to run and said, "Okay, that's it." And immediately once I made the decision, there was a significant sense of peace.

I don't have to choose a hotel for a while. I have it done for a month. In addition, of course, I chose a house and the house means that you can buy groceries. And instead of making do with your own food in a hotel room, you can buy groceries.

I don't just like to eat at home for some financial reason. I find it just a genuinely better experience. I don't enjoy going out to restaurants all the time. I enjoy restaurants as, okay, an occasional thing, but it's just not fun. I don't enjoy going out to restaurants all the time.

And then also here in Europe where sometimes the service is different than what you get in some other places, it's just a little bit annoying. And so I prefer to be at home and so chose a house or it could be simple. There was also a significant improvement once I picked a car.

Okay, done. Got a car, done. So we're going to change. We're not going to spend so much time on airplanes. We're going to drive and we're going to have a house for a long time. And that made everything improved. So I've solved a significant amount of that stress. I do think frequently, in fact, on an almost daily basis, I think about the long-term decisions.

I wonder, I ask myself, is this the best solution? And I would tell you, if you're thinking about long-term travels, long-term family travel, I want to try to describe accurately what it's like. I'm not going to do that at all in today's show, but I want to describe accurately what it's like so that you can have some sense of whether it might be for you.

I like to go and test things myself and get a good sense of whether it is for me or not for me based upon trying stuff. So I like to go and test things. And I enjoy family travel. I enjoy long-term family travel. But I also see the value of not living this way as a lifestyle.

There are many times where I think about all the good things, about living a more conventional lifestyle, buying a house in the suburbs, settling down. It doesn't feel like it when I was younger, probably would have felt like a failure. Settling down is a failure. I'm not living my principles of radical going for it.

But at this point, it doesn't feel that way. It feels like that would be really nice. That would be a really nice lifestyle. It would be really enjoyable. I understand more why so many people like it. Not everybody living in a house in the suburbs is there because they're forced to be there.

It's a really nice lifestyle. There's a very good chance that I'll end up doing that at some point in the future, perhaps even not too distant future. Nothing is decided. At the moment, I have no idea where I'm going to be two months from now. But I see the benefits of a stable, steady lifestyle.

By the way, this is not original with me. For example, this is usually called decision fatigue. There's this idea in success circles that if you can minimize the number of decisions that you make on small trivial things, then you can maximize the amount of energy that you have for larger, more important things.

Based upon my personal experience, I think there's some truth to it. The common examples are usually, "Here's why so-and-so eats the same thing for breakfast seven days a week," or "Here's why Mark Zuckerberg wears a gray t-shirt and a pair of jeans and a hoodie every single day." The idea is he's only got so much reserves of decision-making power.

Willpower is often how it's talked about as well. So by minimizing the need to choose what you're going to eat for breakfast, by minimizing the need to choose what you're going to wear, you have more time available for that really big important business decision or investment decision later in the day.

Maybe it's true. I believe there's some truth to it, especially based upon my personal experience. I'm not trying to go that far, but what I'll point out to you is that this lifestyle, this travel lifestyle, long-term travel lifestyle, is indeed, has a lot of decisions. And I don't want to say it's stressful because I really feel like that word is overused.

I don't care to say, "Oh, this is stressful." I prefer not to say, "I'm stressing me out." I don't like that terminology. I feel like it's weak and that most of the stuff is just not true, right? This is not stressing me out. I don't mind saying I feel stressed about this, but this cannot have any impact on me because I have full control over my mind and I'm never going to surrender the sovereignty that I have over my mind and give away my ability to think and to decide and to choose how I enter life to some external source.

That's a ridiculous thing to do, to give some external thing, often an inanimate thing, power over you. The fact that my tire blew out is stressing me out. Nonsense, right? The fact that your tire blew out was a simple fact that your rubber encountered some kind of object and now you have a flat tire and how you respond to that is entirely within your control.

There's no reason why it needs to stress you out. So I hate to use that term stressing me out. Sorry, personal rant there. But there is a real truth to the fact that a continual travel lifestyle will generally involve a lot of decisions about things that you may not have to—a lot of decisions you may not have to make in other approaches to life.

And that is something that can be very tiring. Again, I want to be careful. Not totally tiring. I find there's a sense in which it's energizing. There is a sense in which it's energizing. It can also be quite tiring, as I have experienced recently. This also clarified to me why I like certain forms of travel more than others.

I think with tremendous fondness back on my time of traveling in an RV, especially with my children, we go through and look at pictures of the trip, try to help cement those memories so they're not totally lost. 90% of them are lost, but we try to cement some of them with 10% by going back and showing the children videos and photos of our trips.

And I think with tremendous fondness on RV travel around the United States, like we did in 2018. And I realized that this is one of the reasons why I love RV travel so much. That when traveling in an RV, there are far fewer necessary decisions on a daily basis.

If you travel in an RV, although you are traveling, you always know where you're going to sleep. You always know what bed you're going to sleep in. And the cool thing about an RV is, in the majority of cases, it really makes no difference whether that bed happens to be parked on the side of a road somewhere, or in a friend's driveway somewhere, or in a beautiful National Park campground somewhere.

It's just a bed. Once you close your eyes, it all looks the same. And I sleep just as well in a Walmart parking lot as I do in a beautiful private campground. Now I enjoy my morning coffee differently in a beautiful National Park Service campground than I do in a Walmart parking lot, but my sleep is no different.

I don't have to make a fresh decision about what bed I'm going to sleep in. Similarly, I don't have to decide what level of comfort is adequate for my family, because I've already made that decision. I've already chosen, this is how large of a rig we want. This is what level of comfort we want.

It's already done. The only decision involved with RV travel is, where are we going to be tonight? And that's a very low stress decision when you know, no matter where we wind up, we have an option. In fact, this is something I love so much about RV travel. There were several times on our trips that, for various reasons, we couldn't get where we wanted to go, and we just quite literally parked on the side of the road.

Found a spot that was safe, meaning away from the flow of traffic, no danger of being driven into in the middle of the night, safe in terms of any surroundings were appropriate, and then pulled over, parked, and went to sleep. And that's such an awesome thing about RV travel.

It removes all of the stress for me from picking. That's different than choosing hotels every couple of nights. The other day, we were in Barcelona, and we were planning to be there. I wanted to extend our stay slightly. And so I went down, and usually in most hotels, I'll book, usually start with two nights, and then if I want to stay there longer, I'll usually go ahead and extend it.

But you always know they might not be able to. In this case, I booked two nights, decided I wanted to extend for two more, went down to reception, asked to extend. They didn't have any rooms available. And so it was no problem. I went up to the room, told my wife, "We got to go.

We got to check out." And we changed the whole plan. I sat down on my bed and made some new reservations and moved on. So it wasn't that bad. But you know, especially being a father with children, you know there's this continual pressure. I'm not going to sleep in a bus station.

I can't sleep on the street. I need a hotel. And if one is not available, I'm okay. Whereas with an RV, everything is available. You always know I have a bed. And a bed is fine wherever I do. If I can make it to Tucson, great, we'll go to Tucson.

If I can't make it to Tucson, no problem. We'll just park short of Tucson. And there's always a place to park. And then we'll press on to Tucson tomorrow. No problem. Same thing with food. That's the other thing is those continual decisions of where are we going to eat and how much are we going to eat.

And you never know. You're always in a new restaurant. So you can't know reliably how much you need to order. My general ordering principle with my children is I order a few dishes and then we share them around. I can't abide children's menus. So I always order a few entrees and we share them around.

But when you're always in a new restaurant, you don't know the size of the entree and you're trying to dance this delicate dance between choosing an entree of a certain size and gauging the size of your children's stomachs. And it's a little annoying and fine to do on occasion.

But when you do it three times a day, it's a little bit annoying, I find. Whereas with the RV, you can always have food with you, which means that most of your meals you can prepare yourself, which means that you have more freedom to enjoy the dining experience as a dining experience rather than as a calorie ingestion experience.

And so it was really clarifying for me that I really, really like RV travel. And I think the fundamental reason why I like RV travel is simply this. It's having to make fewer decisions. I have a hard time seeing how any family would want to do this kind of busy, busy, move, move travel without some changes on an ongoing basis.

It's fine on vacation, right? It's fine for a week or two, although you're going to get home from the vacation pretty tired, I think. It's fine and enjoyable in that situation. And there are many places that I would love to see in that way. But if you've been thinking about a travel lifestyle, I don't think that you want to move a lot.

So kind of from good to great. I think the best thing is spend a little bit more time and book things probably a little bit farther ahead. I think the strategy of choosing an Airbnb for two weeks and then having a few days of buffer and then having another one lined up for two weeks or however long, I think this is a really good strategy.

So you know you have those two weeks, you know where you're going to be at least for that significant time. I like, I mean when I got to the house here, just felt totally relaxed. All the decisions made, don't need to worry about a lot of the stuff going forward.

So I think that's kind of stage one. I think stage two is better, is to have your own accommodation. Whether that's a vehicle-based travel, right? An overlanding truck, an RV, a rooftop tent, something where you know you're going to be sleeping in the same place every day and having the ability to carry food or a sailboat also would work.

I think these are far simpler and better models for probably all travelers, virtually all travelers. Again, not someone who needs to jet around the world continually, but for family, definitely the way to go. And or the third thing is having bases, right? Your own house, your own house in a few different places that you return from and doing kind of a surge approach.

I think these are just much more appropriate styles of travel. I do think that you can expand this concept beyond simply travel or even family travel. I think that having a lifestyle in which most of your decisions are made, especially if those decisions become habits, habits that create and promote the kind of lifestyle that you want to have, really has tremendous benefits for many of us.

To have a place that you live that's stable, having good routines, frees up your creative mind in some cases. This may be a delicate balance for some of us. I personally, personality wise, I often get a little bored with that, without some fun and exciting challenges, changes, et cetera.

But I think for a lot of people, that's the best approach is just simply live in a fairly structured situation so that you don't have to make so many decisions and that frees up your creative energies for in a little bit more of a productive way. I have not been as productive as I have wanted to be.

Part of it is infrastructure, right? You never know where am I going to be on a certain time. The single thing I've solved most of the technology challenges. I can work most places. I can do that. The thing I can't solve is simply the needs of my family. And it's not like a, they're relatively, they're just normal, right?

And so if I have a phone call scheduled at three o'clock, but we get an hour delayed schedule and I'm not sure where I'm going to be, I can't say, just sit here in your seat and do nothing for an hour while I step outside of the car and take a phone call.

And so when we're actually actively moving, I can barely take a phone call. I can barely keep to a schedule, which is why I've tried to eliminate as much of that stuff from my schedule as possible. But the point is that if you minimize the number of decisions you have to make on a regular basis, then I think that it really can free up a lot of mental bandwidth.

And it's provided me a clarifying theme to understand why it is that I personally like vehicle-based travel so much better than non-vehicle-based travel. It's decision fatigue. It's having the big decisions made. Once I bought a car and we moved to car-based travel, much more relaxed. Again, hotel, right? Because you always know, "Well, if the one in the middle of town is full, I'll go on to the next town.

No big deal. I'll go outside of town." If you don't have your own car, that's a different proposition. And so my stress level went down with the vehicle, bought a house, stress level went down, and here I am feeling good, ready to share this with you. Hope that you enjoy this and look forward to talking to you in future days.