When you're in winter's favorite town, the snow-covered mountains surround you, a historic main street charms you, and every day brings a new adventure. Welcome to Park City, Utah. Naturally, winter's favorite town. 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 Joshua Sheets. I am your host today on the show, broadcasting to you from the wonderful little Central American nation of Costa Rica. Or as the Canadians would say, I guess, Costa Rica. Or as the Costa Ricans themselves would probably say, Costa Rica. And really glad to be talking to you today because I want to share with you some ideas around extended travel, extended family travel, or nomadism.

And I think you're going to enjoy today's show and the many shows that will be coming in days to come on this topic. Because not only is this something that I have, as is my want, researched to death, it's also something that I have done and have significant experience in doing, probably from a more unique perspective than many people.

My wife and I travel with four young children, which is not particularly common. And it does bring with it some unique challenges. I won't shy away from sharing with you about those challenges and some proposed solutions. But it's something that I do really enjoy. And at this point in time, we have, I guess, almost three years of nomadism.

And that nomadism has taken different forms along the way. But I've learned lessons at each stage that I want to share with you. I will not shrink from talking about the difficulties of this particular lifestyle. I'll share them, try to share them quite clearly. There's often a temptation when you're talking about something that you do to make it sound just awesome all the time.

Right? Oh, how is the new job? Oh, it's fantastic. When in reality, you're sitting there thinking, this is probably not the best for me. We all want to talk positively about what we do. And I'm no different. I want to talk positively about what we're doing. But I also want to share with you very realistically the good things and the difficult things so that you can understand if it's right for you.

We are currently nomads. I don't think we'll be nomads forever. And to me, this is where I want to start. I want to say that when you think about moving around and you think about traveling, I think you will go through different phases in your lifestyle expectations and in the way that you want to live.

And I think you should expect that. I'm not quite sure why travel is as attractive to many people as it seems to be. For years in my work as a professional financial advisor, I would ask people about their goals and dreams for retirement. And if you'll go out and survey a dozen of your friends and ask them what they would like to do in retirement, the majority, if not the vast majority, will say, oh, we want to travel.

We want to travel. This is a very common aspiration. I don't know if it's always been this way. Throughout most of human history, humans have not traveled far away from their family, friends, loved ones, and local tribe. That's a fairly new phenomenon. However, it is a fairly reliable phenomenon that as cultures around the world are raised from poverty to wealth, one of the things that many people choose to spend their excess money on is travel.

And it's something that many of us love to wax eloquent about how important it is to us and how much we've learned from it. And it's quite common in the places that you and I are probably from that we know many people who just really love to travel and they just do it all the time.

I was reflecting during a difficult day of travel on why is this? It's a lot of work. Travel is a lot of work. Why is it that we like it so much? And yet, while it's difficult, I still like it. I choose to continue doing what we're doing. And the more I do it, the more I realize the things that are difficult about it, and I fine tune the way that I personally desire to live based upon the new information, the new learnings.

But yet, I still desire, I still have this enjoyment of moving around, of seeing new things, seeing new places. And I know that I'm certainly not alone. We live right now in a very unique moment. Right now, of course, being May 19, 2021. This unique moment is one in which travel is more accessible to more people than at any point in human history.

I have often, when talking about travel, emphasized the fact that the mode of travel does not matter. If you want to travel, you walk out your front door and you turn left or right and you start walking and you are now technically traveling. Anybody can travel. Anybody can walk out their front door, turn left or right and start traveling.

And I've often wondered what it would be like to do more of that kind of slow travel. Not slow travel in the sense of months on the road, but slow travel as in slowly moving across the planet. There are people out there who've done it. They walk across countries, across continents.

Some people ride bicycles across countries or continents or around the world. And I think those things are neat for those who enjoy them. So travel is accessible to anybody who wants to. But we live in a time in which travel is widespread. Far-flung travel is more accessible than it's ever been in human history.

We are in what I can only classify as a golden age of air transportation. I was just giving an interview a few days ago to a journalist who was writing a story on people who were expatriating and digital nomads, etc. And in that interview, I was reflecting on and emphasizing how the way that I live now was simply not possible 15 years ago.

It was not possible. And yet today it is eminently possible. It's eminently achievable by virtually any person who wants to do it. And that's a dramatic, it's a stunning thing to realize. And there are a number of factors that I want to talk to you because it's important that once you identify that these factors exist, you will understand how accessible this kind of thing really is if you want it.

So let's talk about some of the factors that influence the modern-day travel movement. The first thing is certainly a massive plummeting in the cost of transportation. Truly, air transportation has been completely revolutionized. I often look at magazine articles and ads for – I like old ads. And so I look at an ad from the 1950s for Pan Am or something like that.

And you see these ads from the 1950s and they just look awesome to me, right? There's a sharply dressed couple, husband in a suit, wife in a beautiful dress, sitting in their seats on their Pan Am flight, being served roast beef, fresh roast beef and fresh wine by the stewardess who looks just fantastic in her nice dress.

And you think, "Wow, wouldn't it have been awesome to live in that golden age of travel where I could be treated like a king and a queen while I jet around the world?" It was probably pretty cool. But there's a reason why the guy was dressed in a fancy suit and the girl was dressed in a fancy dress, because they were upper-class rich people who could afford to do it.

The common guy or gal could not afford in those days to travel. But now the common guy or gal can. The common guy or gal can pretty much travel anywhere in the world, especially now while the airline industry has been so buffeted by the worldwide pandemic that we've all lived through over the last year and a half.

So this is a remarkable time in human history. You can fly between most continents if you are flexible for a few hundred dollars. I'm right here in Costa Rica at the moment. Costa Rica is an amazingly well-connected tourist hub. You can regularly fly to Costa Rica from the United States for a couple hundred dollars.

Costa Rica is well-served by the budget airlines. Spirit Airlines flies here. JetBlue flies here. Southwest flies here. It's well-served by some other budget carriers internationally. Wingo flies here from Colombia. Volaris flies here from Mexico and just from all over Central America. There are a number of vacation airlines that fly from Europe directly to Costa Rica.

You can fly directly from Amsterdam, directly from Frankfurt, directly from Madrid. Those tickets are often priced a little bit higher. But you can get to Costa Rica from the United States for a couple hundred dollars round trip. You can get here from South America or from other places in Central America for a couple hundred dollars.

It's really incredible. And it's like things just keep getting better. When you look at travel transportation trends all around the world, in my lifetime, it has just gotten better and better and better. JetBlue finally just finally started taking tickets for their long-anticipated service to Europe, which means that now you can fly from JetBlue directly to London for right now there's tickets for $300, $400, $500.

And these aren't mistake fares. These are just standard tickets that they're selling, part of their introductory launch. But this is an amazing trend that an average person, a common person, can fly from the United States to London for a few hundred dollars. Once you're in London, of course, all of Europe is available to you.

It left less than $50 on the budget airlines if you know how to pack lightly. It's just incredible. It's still – there's still, of course, many higher-priced places around the world. But I've been watching all through this pandemic. I watched flights from the United States to Japan for $300 a few months ago, a month or so ago.

Just this incredible sale to Japan for 2021, 2020 – sorry, 2022 travel, late 2021, 2022 travel, when you anticipate that, of course, Japan would have opened their borders. It's just really incredible. I booked tickets from the United States to Europe in a couple of months for $165 one way.

From the United States to Europe for $165 one way. We live in a time where it's just amazing connectedness. And so the average person can simply go and learn a little bit about booking decent-priced airfare and get on an airplane and go. The other thing that has completely transformed travel is the information age.

Now, this is on a couple of different levels. First, you cannot overemphasize the tremendous impact of the smartphone. I was talking to this reporter and I said, "When did the iPhone come out?" I think it was 2007, right? 2007 was 14 years ago from now. That was when the iPhone came out.

What's interesting to me, being here in Costa Rica, is that I was in Costa Rica in college in 2005. When I flew to Costa Rica, I was pretty well fully disconnected from the United States. I got on an airplane in Miami, Florida, and I flew to San Jose, Costa Rica.

I called my family maybe three times over the course of three or four semesters. Once a month or so, we of course could send emails back in the dinosaur age. From time to time, I did go to an internet cafe and I had a laptop and I would connect my laptop and send out a couple of emails.

It wasn't like we were unreachable, but I was pretty well disconnected. I did not have a smartphone. I did not have a phone that I cooked. I didn't get cell phone service in Costa Rica or anywhere. I did have a laptop that I could go and use Wi-Fi and you'd do a Skype call, which was novel and innovative at that time.

But I was not connected. I felt like I was a million miles away, even though of course I was a two-hour flight away. It wasn't that big of a deal, but I felt like I was a million miles away. That all changed from 2006, 2007, 2008 onward. Now, of course, the first smartphone was not the iPhone, but the iPhone was a stunning development.

I signed up for Facebook in Costa Rica in 2005. I vividly remember I was at the Hotel Presidente in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica. I got an email from a friend of mine in high school. It was like, "Hey, check out this cool new thing that's only available to college students." They'd sent me an invitation because it was by invitation only.

I clicked on there. I still remember the first message that I had with someone on Facebook. It was my friend. I won't say his name, but I still remember it. It just firmly imprinted on my mind that I distinctly signed up for Costa Rica. Sorry, I signed up in Costa Rica.

My friends and family all signed up or my friends on that trip all signed up in Costa Rica. We did it to share pictures around of our travels together. That was the pivot point, was 2005 when all of a sudden now we were more connected. We were able to stay in touch more easily, and the things continued.

Well, I remember a few years later, about 2009, I was back in Costa Rica in 2009 or so, and I remember that the world had completely shifted, had completely changed. Where now, of course, most of us had phones. We weren't traveling so much with the cell phone signal, but Wi-Fi was becoming more ubiquitous.

You could sign on to Wi-Fi and you could be connected. Of course, we all had an app on our phone that would ask to connect. "Hey, here I am checking in in Costa Rica." I just thought, "Man, this doesn't feel so far away anymore." I went and I talked to the directors and teachers of the study abroad program that I had participated in, and I asked them, "Are things changing?" It was rather obvious that things were changing dramatically.

Whereas since I was in Costa Rica in 2005 when people disconnected, now a student went abroad and that student was every bit as well connected to their friends and family back home as they were, and the teachers were struggling with how do we get the student to disengage from the United States and actually engage with what's happening here on the ground in Costa Rica.

And things have only accelerated since then. What's accelerated? Well, of course, the smartphone. There's a whole revolution there. The smartphone has become ubiquitous for all of us, but the smartphone drove a tremendous embrace of Wi-Fi connections, of easily accessible Wi-Fi connections. So now you go virtually anywhere in the world and there is abundant connectivity for free on Wi-Fi signals.

Five years ago, it was totally different than it is today. And then now we have more and more global phone carriers. And so you can easily have – I mean, for crying out loud, you have Google Fi with a couple dozen shekels per month, and you've got your Google Fi line that gives you global access.

T-Mobile is probably the best carrier in the United States for people if they don't want to do Google Fi, 60 bucks a month. And you can have an unlimited plan that you can use all around the world, 60 bucks a month. And it practically serves something like 160, 170 countries.

That's incredible. And so you have this – even just this cell phone infrastructure that works just pretty well flawlessly and seamlessly. And you see that happening all around the world. I'm seeing billboards here in Costa Rica for the local cell phone company that advertises that all of the Americas are included in their plans, from the tip of Argentina to the tip of Alaska on just their standard plan.

And that's the same way really all around the world. And so this connectivity has meant that you can travel and, of course, work, which we'll talk more about. But it's also meant that you can have access to information. And that's what it means to live in the information age.

You have access to information. If you were traveling 40 years ago, you would have just simply gone somewhere and then figured it out. I love to read Kevin Kelly's travel logs from his time traveling in Asia in the 1970s. He didn't know anybody, didn't speak the language. He just go and figure it out.

And you're going based upon signs that you see and information you can find out from local travelers, right, the bar at the local hostel where you find out where to go and who to go with, et cetera. Well, then, of course, there was a guidebook revolution, and you could see backpackers all around the world with their tattered copy of The Lonely Planet listing where they go and where to stay and where to eat and what to do, et cetera.

Well, now it's gotten even more intense where if you're going to go somewhere, you're going to go to Costa Rica, what do you do? All you need, and I repeat this again and again, all you need is a passport, a credit card, and a cell phone. And ideally, the cell phone is going to have global connectivity.

Why? Well, with the passport, you've got your legal documents straightened away, especially if you have a passport where you don't have a lot of visa requirements to file individual visas. Passport takes care of your ability to move across borders. A credit card allows you to pay seamlessly across borders, and the cell phone allows you to get information and book things.

So you pull out your JetBlue app and you say, "How can I fly to Costa Rica inexpensively? Oh, look, here's a flight," boom, or Spirit Airlines, or you pull out your kayak app or your Kiwi app and you figure out, "Okay, how do I get here inexpensively?" You book it, you bill it to your credit card, then you pull out your booking.com or your hotels.com or your Marriott app or your Airbnb app or whatever it is that you want.

You find a property, you click "Book." Then, of course, when you get here, you have an Uber, although they've got kind of funky with Uber from the airport. Uber is technically illegal in Costa Rica, I guess. But you get your Uber app or your DD app or you grab your taxi and you use it.

It's just so simple. Life is so – international travel is so simple. You need to do a currency conversion, pull out your XE.com app and do your currency conversion. It's incredible. It's absolutely amazing. So the world that we live in has so fundamentally changed, and yet I wonder if people even – I mean, hopefully you realize it.

And for me, this is one of the unique insights that I personally have given my age. I am a millennial, which means that by the definition of millennial that I'm a digital native. But what's interesting is I'm what they call a geriatric millennial. So I remember the world before the absolute transformation and after.

My father was always involved as a computer program electrical engineer. So he was on the early edge, right? We were the first people and everyone I knew to have a computer in our home. I remember the time he came home and showed us his laptop, which was the size of a dictionary, but he was just amazed at what could fit into this dictionary.

I remember in 1998 I traveled with my father and my mother to the United Kingdom, and I remember being in the hotel room in Wales and him plugging in his computer and downloading his email. And so I remember the world before all this stuff, and now – so I'm really amazed at it.

It's never – it just still feels like magic to me, but I'm also totally comfortable. It gives me a unique insight into it. So what has happened because of this? Well, of course, it's become easier to travel, but now people are integrating travel into their lifestyle in new and unique and interesting ways.

And so with the pandemic, you see that virtually anybody who is a knowledge worker can work remotely. You've had this lightning-fast transformation of massive companies into being 100% remote workers. As I told you in the beginning of the pandemic, I told you this is the single biggest lifestyle opportunity that you have right now is to make sure that you crush it working remotely so that going forward, if you want to work remotely, you can prove that you can do it because that opens up the world to you.

I shared how I recently reread Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek book, and I was reading, I think, the 10th anniversary edition of that. And yet still, there were pages, several pages in there about how to negotiate remote work with your job. When he does a 20th anniversary of that, those whole pages are going to go out.

It's going to tear them out. There's no point in it anymore because anyone who wants to work remote can easily just say it and do it. And so this has opened up not only other places in your city to live, not only other states to live, but other countries.

You can get on an airplane, and if you can work from Miami, Florida, and you can commute to New York City on occasion if you need to, then why can't you work from San Jose and commute to New York City when you need to? Same one-hour, I guess, one-hour time zone off, but same difference.

And so it's just amazing. And so with the growth of knowledge work, the growth of ability to people work, now what was once difficult, I remember I used to buy books on work from home opportunities. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, but now you don't need that anymore.

You just need a useful career and a computer and a cell phone, and boom, you're in it. You can do it. And so it's opened up travel in a really amazing way for anybody who wants to. Now, this fundamentally opens up the chance to transform your physical location life if you want to.

And there are different ways that you can do it. There are different styles of travel. What we're doing now, you would probably call the digital nomad, that I work, I have my computer in front of me, I have my microphone in front of me, I have my cell phone in front of me.

I have the ability to record this podcast, to upload it to you, to do my other work and upload it. And so I'm a digital nomad. I'm earning my income from the road, and because I work digitally, I can sit down anywhere, I can set up my laptop and I can work.

Café, co-working space, hotel room, Airbnb, I'm good to go. And what's really interesting is I'm on the front edge of the curve in terms of even how hardcore this can be. I've experimented so much with different technological solutions, but I literally at this point have the equipment that you can sit me down and I can just set up a table somewhere, a park bench table, park picnic table or something, middle of nowhere, and I can be live on the internet recording high-quality media stuff whenever I need to be.

It's amazing, really, really amazing. It's so good that you can quite literally, for many of us, you can quite literally earn your living with nothing more than a smartphone. I travel and have more gear than that because it makes my life easier, makes me more productive, but you can, many of us, quite literally earn your living with nothing more than a smartphone.

And I know I sound enthusiastic. I am. Because this is amazing. It really is. It opens up tremendous opportunities to you. It opens up the opportunity to you to live a rich life now instead of deferring it. It lives up to many people, "Okay, I want to retire and travel when I'm retired." Okay, that's great.

And while I think that's actually in some ways better, let me interrupt myself to say this. Whenever I do what I'm doing now, which is travel and try to keep a business going, I often wish I were fully financially independent. I often do. I'm not yet financially independent, working towards it, saving, working, making money, investing, et cetera, but I often wish I were.

Because working on the road does add an additional stress. It does add an additional difficulty to your life. And I often think, "Man, how cool would it be if I just had 10 grand a month coming in, 10 grand comes in as dividends from publicly traded companies, no work, it's true passive income, totally relaxed.

How awesome would that be?" And I think pretty awesome. I think I get boring myself. I like the work because it keeps me interested, but there are a lot of times when everything's messed up, nothing's working, and you're like, "Man, I just wish I had 10 grand a month deposited in my checking account, then I'd be good to go." Or, "I wish I had my trust that would pay my Amex bill for me every month, and I'm good to go." So, I think, is it better?

I think it's probably a little bit better. But back to the old 80/20, right? If I can get 80% of the way there, which is really how I feel, right? I feel like I've gotten 80% of the way there with just simply working from the road, building a business that's a good fit for me, building a business with certain characteristics and attributes that are better than other kinds of businesses.

I feel like I'm 80% of the way there. But yet, I've gotten there far faster than waiting until I'm 40 years old or 60 years old or 70 years old and a multimillionaire to do it. So, why not take 80% now, especially given the fact that I can make the plan work so that I can get the full 100% down the road, right?

Why not? But I lost my train of thought. The travel opens up these new and interesting lifestyles that have benefits. So, first of all, it can be fun. And if you want to travel just because it's interesting to you, I think you can. I met a guy when we were RV traveling that I thought was such an interesting story.

A lot of people who RV travel, they'd have different approaches. But my family and I, we were in Wyoming, this little RV campground, a municipal campground, really in the middle of nowhere. And we pulled in and we're kind of walking around meeting people. And there's this big, beautiful class A coach there, this really nice Tiffin motor coach, big, fancy, black.

I mean, just one of the really nice three-quarter-million-dollar rigs. And I started talking to the guy. And the guy comes out and we start talking, you know, the typical "How are you? What do you do?" kind of thing. And I find out he's not retired. He and his wife actually had a house in Denver.

But what he did was he bought this coach because he enjoyed traveling around in the coach. He worked full-time as a customer service representative for doing remote customer support work for a technology company in the United States. So he had a very muscular internet connectivity system with a MIMO antenna system for his cell phone, MIMO multiple in, multiple out, high-quality fast access, a satellite backup, et cetera.

He had all the tech. And inside he had just a standard home office setup. And he was on the clock during standard working hours providing customer support on the clock. But what he enjoyed the most was when he finished up his workday at 5 o'clock, instead of being in the same town, the same house, the same routine, et cetera, he was always in a new town, a new place.

And so he would go out and try a little café for dinner and explore a little town and go see some little out-of-the-way museum. He sometimes traveled with his wife and then they would spend the weekends exploring some little town. And I just thought, "How cool is that?" He's just decided this is a different way that he wants to live.

And so you can open up opportunities just to enjoy a different lifestyle if you want to. There are geo-arbitrage opportunities, right? You can earn in dollars and spend in pesos. That's pretty powerful in some places depending on where you go. The ability to earn in dollars or earn in euros and spend in pesos or spend in, what is it here in Costa Rica, colones, can be a pretty neat opportunity sometimes.

It opens up international diversification. That can open up some tax efficiency depending on how you plan, right? I just spent four days at the Nomad Capitalist live conference in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. I'll share with you a separate report on what I earned there. But depending on where you are, this can give you the chance to dramatically reduce or eliminate your taxes.

I think this is great for U.S. American citizens. This can now open up the ability, maybe you earn $108,000 a year. Well, if you just physically go outside of the United States for 330 days a year, you can eliminate your federal income tax on about your first $108,000 of income.

That's pretty cool. If you set it up properly, depending on the kind of work that you do, you may also be able to eliminate your employment taxes. That's also pretty cool. It can be sometimes a 15 or possibly maybe 20% reduction or increase in your spendable wages because of your physically leaving the United States.

The example I gave to the journalist was pretty simple, right? Think of that guy that I just mentioned with his motor coach. He's got a cell phone. Canada and Mexico have just as fast, in some cases faster, cell phone speeds that the United States does. A satellite internet may or may not work.

I don't know what system he was on. But he can take his motor coach, and if he just simply spends – both Canada and Mexico offer 180-day tourist visas to U.S. Americans. So he could go and he could spend 170 days in Mexico during the winter. Then he could drive leisurely through the United States up to Canada and spend 170 days per year in Canada during the summer.

And in both of those cases, he probably shouldn't, as an RVer being there less than 183 days, living as a tourist, he probably shouldn't be setting up a tax residency in either of those countries. And yet he can also eliminate his U.S. income taxes on his first $108,000 of income while living the lifestyle that he wants to live.

That could be pretty cool. Now, U.S. has in some ways a much better infrastructure for RVers than either Canada or Mexico, but you get the point. The point is that you can do some geo-arbitrage there. And so when you start putting these factors one on top of another, potential tax savings, potential lower cost of living to earn in dollars, spend in pesos, it's pretty neat, pretty cool.

And then the adventure side of it. We do a form of world schooling. At the Nomad Capital Slide presentation, I talked with the author of a book that I enjoyed on world schooling. We met, we were both on a panel presentation together, and we met there and then she gave a talk on world schooling.

The author is Ashley Dimock-Ditello, and she wrote a book called World Schooling, How to Revolutionize Your Child's Education Through Travel. And so that can be neat, right? You want to teach your children multiple languages, you want to be in multiple places. Pretty cool, pretty cool ways to do it.

And so the point is to say that these opportunities are real, they're genuine, they're open to you if you are interested in them. If I were to analyze the last five to ten years of my life, I think for themes, as I do regularly, one of the themes that has been constant in my work, my professional work as a financial planner is simply this.

Why wait? Why? Why wait? I often say to people, right, you're rich. Now when are you going to start living like you're rich? I've talked to so many and consulted with so many millionaires who've never sat down and realized, "I'm a millionaire." And I'm like, "Okay, well, when are you going to start?" If you're not going to start living like a rich guy at a million dollars, when are you going to start living like a rich guy?

Now you define what that means, but the point is in your head, why wait? Why? Why? Sometimes you wait for strategic reasons, but a lot of times, why wait? Why? Why wait? You don't have to. You don't have to, I promise you. You need at least a few thousand dollars, something, right?

You don't technically need it, I guess. You could argue you don't need it. Life's a little bit better if you're not totally broke. So you need some money, you need a passport, you need a cell phone. And frankly, you could probably figure it all out from there. Now, let me pivot and just talk a little bit about, I guess, a few logistics.

Because while that probably works for a single guy, I got a little bit more responsibility. I wouldn't do it with a few grand and a cell phone, right? Just too many people depending on me. I could do it, but I wouldn't do it because it's just uncomfortable. I'm a little more conservative than that.

So when you're a single guy, single girl, right, you can just travel. It's simple. Save a little money, you can go. When you do have children, it does add a few more complications, a few more wrinkles. Without question, it adds more cost, sometimes substantially more cost, depending on the way that you do it.

There's a big difference between what we've done in the past, RVing, versus what we are doing now, airplaning and hotelling. Now, you can mitigate some of those costs, but the point is with RVing, you're generally not having a multiplying effect per head. Usually you have a vehicle, a camper, and a campsite fee.

Food costs a little bit more, but often it's not six times more, if you have four children like we do. Gas doesn't cost six times more because you have four extra children in the car. Your campsite, even though some campgrounds do charge per head, they don't charge six times more per head.

And so you can moderate your costs quite a bit in some styles of travel like RVing, like driving. Airplanes, it's hard. I buy six airplane tickets at a time. Every dollar counts. That's significant. Hotel rooms are difficult because you outgrow one hotel room. Most hotels will not let you book one room for more than four people.

You can find some bigger, right? You can get some suites where you can do it, but most won't let you book one room with more than four people. I've had good success, because my children are quite young. I have had good success of booking one hotel room with double beds and then just simply saying, "Listen, my kids are really young.

I don't want two rooms." But that's not going to last forever, right? There's going to be a point in time pretty soon in which you just always got to book two hotel rooms. Airbnbs are nice, but still you pay more for the bigger houses than you pay per head in a lot of cases.

And so there are some costs involved. The biggest challenge that I find with children is not cost on the expense side. I find it's cost on the income side. Children need more hand-holding. They need more entertaining. And that takes away necessarily from work time. When we traveled around the United States, we had three children in an RV.

And we went out. We didn't know how long we were going to go. We wound up traveling for six months. The reason we didn't travel longer was twofold. Number one, we conceived a baby, decided to do birth tourism, decided to leave the United States. So that's kind of a pressing date function for when the baby is going to be born.

Baby is going to be born by some day, one way or another. The second reason was my wife was not having as much fun as I hoped she had on that particular trip. My wife is awesome. She is really cool. And she's very adventurous. She's very capable, able to do a lot.

But the annoying thing to her with traveling in the RV with very young children is that the very young children required a lot of supervision. And it's simply a lot more work for a mother to supervise young children in sometimes dangerous, sometimes unknown, and always changing circumstances than it is to be in your own home.

A parent with young children knows that your own home is generally the most relaxing space. It may be baby-proofed, child-proofed in some way. You know that you've taken away the expensive vase. You've put away the dangerous chemicals. You've put the knives on the knife board up high where the baby can't easily get them.

And while certainly you can come into the kitchen and find your toddler standing on top of the refrigerator, you at least know what the dangers are. And if the house is secured in some way, it's a pretty relaxing place to be. You can send the children to play in the other room.

They know where the toys are, and they're engaged with that. The road is not that way. The road can be that way to a certain extent. So when we were RVing, we had a trailer. It wasn't a huge trailer, 30 feet. It wasn't tiny, but it wasn't huge. And so you can have toys and have a space, but still, it's tough to have babies underfoot and have toys everywhere, etc.

The outside with campgrounds for very young children is full of all kinds of unknowns. There's roads with people going by. There's cliffs. There's streams. There's just the fact that children want to be near their parents. And so unlike where your backyard where they're comfortable, they're secure, they can go out and perhaps play for 11 minutes, with young children, they can go about 60 seconds.

And then, "Mommy, Mommy, come play with me." And so it was a lot of work for her. Now I think that changes dramatically with having older children. When we RVed, our eldest was 5, 4, 4 or 5, 4 and 5. Now our eldest is 7, coming pretty quickly up on 8.

And so that makes a big difference. We also have more children now, more children that are older. So now they actually can do better. If we went and camped in an RV at this point in time, I would be much more comfortable sending the older children out by themselves in a constrained area, this campground loop, etc., and they would be fine.

And they would enjoy their adventures. In fact, I think we will RV again at some point in the future because we're moving into a phase where that will be much more fun. But it wasn't a ton of fun for my wife with younger children. Because it wasn't a ton of fun for my wife with younger children, that required more from me.

The biggest challenge for me in RVing was, "When am I going to work and where am I going to work? When and where am I going to work? I got to get work done. When and where am I going to do it? I need to work." And I wasn't able to be as productive as I wanted to be.

And so that was difficult. So when we left the United States, we did a little bit of travel and then we set up a base, right? We rented a house, set things up. And that was very, very important for my personal productivity. It was also important for that phase of our family life where just my wife, you know, she does a lot.

She does more than a lot, homeschooling, taking care of house, etc. It's a lot of work. And so by her having a more comfortable surroundings, that freed me up to be able to do more work, to get more work done. Now, we're possibly at a different phase, right? Our youngest is now two.

We don't have a baby. It frees things up to travel a little bit. And the older is now able to do a lot more. My biggest concern about our full-time nomad travel is simply going to be the same factor. It is simply going to be, well, how much work is this for her?

Because if this is too much work for her, I need to work. I may not need to work 70 hours a week, but I still need to work. So if I'm going to work, then where and how am I going to do that? Which is easier now, right? We've got co-working spaces more common.

But more importantly, how is she going to have what she needs to take care of the children? That's your biggest single--as a husband and father, that's your single biggest logistical problem. It's not, okay, how do I get an Internet connection? That's easy. Single biggest logistical problem is what does my wife do with the children so that she can handle it herself so that you can be freed up to work?

So you've got to give some thought to that. Now, what I'll tell you is it doesn't all have to be perfect. And here's one thing I have come to appreciate about the ability to be nomadic. In a lot of cases, the ability to do something is virtually as good as actually doing it.

Knowing that you can quit the job is probably almost as good as quitting the job because you're in a tougher space and you always know, "I could quit," right? Financially independent or I have savings or I have another job offer. Knowing it is a long way towards actually doing it.

And so one of the things that I love about being nomadic is that being nomadic can have different definitions along the way. Just like we argue about what it means to be retired, you can argue the same thing about what it means to be nomadic. Being retired can mean, "All right, I'm not working right now." But then you can be unretired as quickly as you want to be.

In the same way, being nomadic right now, we've got six tiny suitcases and a backpack of work gear for me. But anytime you want to, you can always just stop and be un-nomadic. And if you compile these opportunities you have, you add in your internet connection, right? That's anywhere in the world.

Time zones can be a bit tricky. But if you have a job, you have income source, the definition of where you live can be a very fluid concept. When we were in Mexico, we were staying in hotels, moving very regularly. I did not get very much work done over the last two weeks because hotels are very, very difficult.

They're stressful. They're small, right? We rented some nice suites that worked, but still they're small. I had to be very careful not to leave the computer where the children can knock it off or things like that. There's not a lot of noise separation, not a lot of anything like that.

It's just they're not as comfortable. And so I didn't get much work done. But now we're in a house, right? Rented house. So, okay, I can be here. Now I've got a month. My wife has a place to be with the kids. Can just simply be here. Then we'll go into hotels again.

Then I'll rent another house. And so in today's back to the ease of traveling today's world, you can go on Airbnb right now and you can look at what houses are available for a three-month rent in any place in the world you want to check out. I want to go to Japan.

Okay. Well, what can I rent for three months, six months hence in Japan and how much will that cost me? And the amazing thing about this revolution, which is even newer than all the previous revolutions, right? The sharing economy, the Airbnb world, is that now you can get whatever kind of property you think would be better for your family.

And the wonderful thing about an Airbnb is that it comes ready to go. It comes with the power turned on. It comes with the water connected. It comes with the internet bill paid. It comes with the TV on. It comes with the furniture in there, some toys, some dishes, et cetera.

And so really you can be a nomad one day. You can not be a nomad for three months. You can be a nomad again and not be a nomad, et cetera. It gets just so simple in today's world. I tell you this because I know that if you ever have been interested in this kind of thing, the thing holding you back is almost certainly not an actual logistical problem.

It's almost certainly a fear of, well, what would we do if? And I have that same fear. My wife and I have talked about, okay, what do I do if this doesn't work? Well, the answer is simple. We'll stop. If this doesn't work, we'll stop. And it's important that you give yourself permission in advance to stop.

One of the things that I have that's been valuable about my not being super public with our travels over the last few years and what we've done is that one reason why I did that was that it released me from performance pressure. I didn't have to fulfill some grand scheme.

I didn't have to say we're traveling for a year and then six months in, in our case, we quit. I could do what -- I never put a time period on it. We just quit because that seemed like the best thing for our family to do. Now, obviously, any person can quit and change at any point in time.

Like we're not children. We're not saying, oh, we have to do this because we said it. Like you could say something and then you can unsay it and change completely tomorrow. But it does help you to solve your problems, make things easier for yourself. And so one of the things that we've actually done right now is, okay, we don't know, right?

We don't have a timeline. But I can promise you this, if what we're doing is not working, I will quit and we'll go back to something that is working. And if you build for yourself a location-independent income, if you build for yourself enough financial reserves that you're not beholden to this week's paycheck, and you start acting and build some reservoirs of experience, you start to realize you're actually pretty free.

I don't expect to be a nomad for the rest of my life. I really don't. I found that I think what I like -- what I think I will like in the future is I think I will like the idea of just simply having multiple bases. Not just multiple homes, multiple places, but multiple bases, certainly.

Because that allows me to have the community that I crave, the impact, the connections, the stability that I like. I don't think I'll be a full-time wandering nomad. I always find it interesting that God cursed Cain to being a nomad. That was Cain's curse for killing his brother Abel.

He said, "You're going to wander the earth." And Cain said, "That's unbearable. They're going to kill me if I'm a wanderer." And God gave a sign that said, "Don't kill Cain." So I often wonder, is being a nomad actually a blessing or is it a curse? But what I love about the decisions that I've made, the things that I've done, is two things.

Number one, I love the sense of personal freedom that I have. It's hard for me to imagine a greater sense of personal freedom than I have right now. Which is, as someone who cares about freedom, really a cool feeling. It feels really good to just have a sense of accomplishment.

I've built a tremendous sense of personal freedom. And I find that that personal freedom is enhanced with fewer possessions. Even just simple things like the logistics of having furniture, having a car, and having a house and all those things. I find that I feel really free when I don't have those things.

For the good of my family, I'm not anticipating living the rest of my life from suitcases. If I were a single guy, maybe I would do that. I always loved those stories about some guy who lives in a suitcase and just rents hotel rooms. I don't know, rents the VIP suite in the penthouse.

Some people like it, right? I enjoy reading Jack Reacher novels of Jack Reacher traveling around with a toothbrush in his pocket and buying new clothes every three days. Maybe it's just more interesting in fiction than it is in reality. But I do think that when I'm in that situation, I feel really free.

Because I just get the sense of like I can go anywhere. People have asked me, "Joshua, what are you going to do if Europe doesn't open up?" Like I'm planning to be in Europe this summer. I got plane tickets. "What are you going to do if Europe doesn't open up?" My answer is, "All right, I'll go somewhere else." I'll spin the globe.

I'll go to kiwi.com, see where I can travel cheap today. See if I can get in. Can I get a visa? Can I get access? I'll give them my credit card number and we'll go somewhere else. That's a cool feeling. That's a really cool feeling. And if you care about freedom, you should consider that.

You should consider what would it take for you to be in that place where you could genuinely be... where you could just genuinely have that sense of personal freedom. It's a really cool feeling to be in that place. I love it. I love it. I hope I'm presenting to you a balanced perspective.

I love that sense of personal freedom while also recognizing that I'm probably not going to live this way forever. Because this way brings its own challenges. It's easier with children. Books and toys aren't for the good of the children. They're for the good of the parent. Certainly, yes, obviously you want your children to read books.

But what they do is they give you a break as a parent. But I love that sense of personal freedom. So if you've ever desired just to kind of have a tremendous sense of personal freedom, think if something like that might give you some of what you're looking for.

Remember I did that series of shows called "Seven Rings of Freedom" and I talked about some of these things that make you free. Well, being a nomad, you kind of get that sense of freedom, that ability to go anywhere. And for me, that's always been interesting. You read stories about the gypsy caravans, able to go wherever they wanted to go.

You read stories about the cowboy, able to point his horse in whatever direction he goes. Or you read stories about Abraham, able to move his tents wherever he wants to go. Realistically, I think we honestly have far more freedom today than any of those people did for the reasons that I stated.

I really do. Even though they didn't have to deal with border controls, right? Passports and border controls are a very modern concept. Up until World War I, you never had to have a document saying who you were. You never had people putting up, you know, guards on these imaginary lines we call borders and any of that stuff.

So you can take the pessimistic view if you want and cry about the world that was lost. I prefer to just focus on how great things are. You know, for all of that cowboy's freedom, he really had a tough time making a living from a land. I live a lot better with an airplane ticket and a credit card and a computer connection than that cowboy ever did.

So you choose what you focus on. So that's the first thing I love. I love that genuine sense of freedom that I currently have. Second thing that I love is closely related. I love the sense of resilience that I have from having done this. As I shared with you some months ago when I announced that we're going traveling, to me, one of the most important and valuable reasons for you to go through some kind of significant life change, like I've described, at some point, is to realize that you can do it and to realize that it's not as difficult as you think and to realize that most of the prison bars are bars that you have welded into your brain and they're not real.

And the day you choose to get out your cutting torch, instead of your welding machine, you can start getting those bars out of your brain. I remember when I first bought a house, there was a time at which I was joyful about owning the house and then there was a time I felt trapped by the house.

And I sold the house and got untrapped. Now, I could buy a house and I wouldn't experience the same feeling of trappedness as I once did because I've already gone through the process of buying a house, getting rid of the house, and I've realized I can do this. I can buy a house full of furniture and I can sell a house full of furniture.

I can put my kids in a school. I can take my kids out of a school. I can go here. I can go there. I can start a business. I can close a business. And having done something, being a person of varied experiences frees you. It makes you feel freer.

And you can appreciate the things that a lot of people forget to appreciate because they don't have a varied life experience. Whenever I'm in a house, I distinct--I'm convinced I enjoy it more than most people who live in a house because I can compare that house to the difficult living circumstances of an RV.

I used to joke with my wife when we were in the RV. We had a fairly other small--again, smallish RV, pretty basic kind of economy-level RV. And the front door was not big. But then we had dogs and babies. So we put a baby gate across the front door to keep the dogs and babies in, not going out the screen door.

And that was even smaller. And so I couldn't fit through the front door straightforward. For me to go in and out of the front door, I have to turn sideways and go through sideways. And I used to joke with my wife, "Someday, I'll be able to afford a house with a door that I can fit through." Now, of course, it's a joke.

But then we moved into a house with a door I could fit through, and I just--like, look how rich we are, babe. Like, we've got this house with a door that I can fit through. Now, it's silly. It's just a silly joke. But I genuinely appreciate how easy it is to go in a door.

I appreciate all the room and a bedroom or things like that because you've had something else. On the other hand, at every stage now, I can look and say, "You know what? Someday, probably not too far away, I'm going to do the RV thing again because I'm going to really love the movement, the beautiful places, the fun things that you can do, just those--being together.

I love that." And so now I can enjoy the hotel room. I can enjoy bouncing around the world, going here, going there. I can enjoy the Airbnb rental for the fact that I move in, rent a furnished house, and move out as soon as I want. That's pretty cool.

And so this knowledge of having done different things, not only am I free, point one, but point two, knowing what I could do makes me feel freer. Up-to-date example, Rob Murgatroyd, who's an interesting guy I've followed for a year. He and his wife used to have a lifestyle design website called Jet Set Life.

And they've continued on and he has a podcast. I can't remember what it's called. But kind of an interesting guy, former chiropractor, now kind of a mentor business guru guy. Rob Murgatroyd and his wife have decided that they're going to move to Italy. Now, they spent several weeks in Italy last year, then they moved to California, set up a house and everything.

But they decided they're going to move to Italy. And I don't know Rob. Rob doesn't know me. I know of him. But I've been enjoying watching their journey. And what's funny to me, I take a little bit of joy, it's just funny to me how difficult it is for them to move to Italy because they haven't done it before.

And so he's like, they're going for it. He just started a new course on living your dream life. And they're going for it, which is great. I love to see that. But what's funny to me is because they haven't yet done it, for them going for it involves a whole lot of hard work.

It's like, well, what are we going to do with this stuff? And how am I going to get my wife's Peloton to Italy? That's his big problem. How are we going to move our stuff? We've got to get a container, all this stuff. And I'm chuckling because I feel I could.

We're doing it. We've done it. I told my wife, we moved to Italy, we're ready next week. But it's not because there's anything different about Rob and me. Rob's a capable guy. It's just simply that I've done it and he hasn't yet done it. But once he's done it, the next time it's easier.

The next time it's easier. The next time it's easier. That's what's cool. That's what's exciting about doing something is that you realize, hey, I've done that. That wasn't so scary. I bought my first investment. I bought my first Bitcoin. I bought my first piece of gold. I bought my first house.

I bought it. I sold it. I didn't die. Wow. I bought my first plane ticket. I traveled abroad for the first time. I started a business. Hey, I went bankrupt for the first time. Well, that wasn't so bad. All right, I can go on. I always think of Dan Sullivan, bankrupt and divorced on the same day.

It's like, all right, well, now I've done that. Now I'm not so scared. I'm going to live the way I really want to live. Experience is powerful. It's one of the reasons why I want to live myself. I want to live a life rich in experience. To me, that's what living a rich life means, living a life rich in experience.

And if you'll intentionally cultivate for yourself a diversity of life experience, it will make you a stronger person. A person who grew up poor and stays poor will continue to be trapped in their poverty because they don't have the experience of knowing that they can have another way out.

A person who grows up rich and who stays rich will probably be trapped in their wealth because they don't have the experience of knowing they can still be okay without it. But a person who's been poor and a person who's been rich and has been poor and has been rich, that's a person who's going to be pretty robust in their thinking.

They're going to appreciate the blessings of poverty and they're going to appreciate the blessings of wealth. That's what I love about what we're doing right now. I love it. I like the freedom of it. I'm excited about it. I'm not going to live this way forever. It might be two months.

I don't know. It might be two years. I don't know. Go on a date at a time. But I love the adaptability that I've created, that my family has created, and it helps me to feel really invincible. Hopefully not in a wrong bravado way. I'm not talking about I'm impossible to kill or anything like that.

Just makes me feel tough because I know I can flourish in many circumstances. That's a cool feeling. Knowing that you can do something is pretty cool. Honestly, quite frankly, forthrightly, my wife and I decided to sell everything and travel the world probably in about a week. It just seemed like the right thing.

We talked about it. Okay, we'll do it. Now, remember that when you're working with a family, you're leading a family, it's not just about you. I might be the person who can change the quickest on a dime, but I've got to see my wife and my children be able to adapt.

It's different. I'm not planning for one person. I'm planning for six people. That's six individual people with different needs, goals, desires, dreams, et cetera, and they need to be respected. What's interesting to me is I can chart that adaptability that I mentioned. I can chart that even to the point of first time we decided to travel, we spent months talking about it.

This time it was a week, and yet I'm not scared of going the other direction either. Happy to buy a house, happy to "settle down" in that sense because you can appreciate the good things about that. That's, I think, the fullness of what I want to say for today.

I had planned to talk to you about some of the logistics of how you actually smooth this stuff out. I'll share that for you in another time, another day, another show. But for today, I guess I want to leave it there, simply to say, recognize how cool the world is that we live in.

If you want to travel, I promise you the only thing holding you back from actually doing it is the prison bars that you have built in your own head. The day that you decide to tear those bars down is the day you can move in the direction of that dream.

I don't think that travel is for everybody. In the past, I never understood why there would be people who could say, "I don't want to travel." Right? "Why would I want to travel?" Today I understand it. I actually understand it. But I'm not there. Maybe I'll be there in the future.

I'm not there. If in the future I get there, I'll be happy to be there. I'll tell you about that. But if you do want to travel, just recognize that you can do it. We live in a golden age, a golden age of opportunity, a golden age of travel.

I wish I could get more people to see the golden age. So many people are just stuck in this perception of the world where it's like, "Everything's going to hell and I can't change anything about it." Well, there are a whole lot of things in the world that are going to hell, but you can change something about it.

I'll be back with you soon. When you're in winter's favorite town, the snow-covered mountains surround you. A historic Main Street charms you. And every day brings a new adventure. Welcome to Park City, Utah, naturally winter's favorite town. Join the experience at visitparkcity.com.