The Cost Of Traveling The World Full Time In Retirement Vs Living In The US

[00:00:00]Guys, welcome back to the channel. Today we are sharing with you the costs of traveling the world full-time in retirement versus living in the US.

[00:00:12]We're going to break down all the costs for you. And we've been doing this now for eight years. And we've got a pretty firm handle on what it used to cost us and what it now cost us. And we can give you kind of the difference. And a lot of our early misconceptions on this, why we maybe didn't do this sooner and why people think the wrong way about this is that you're really comparing apples to oranges here. It's two different things.

[00:00:36]Because when you travel the world full-time in retirement, you're really getting alocart pricing. You're just picking and choosing what you're paying for, what you're doing, and you're just living that way. Whereas, when you're living your life still in America, you are paying full price, full everything all 12 months out of the year. For example, you have a car, you're paying for that car. You don't just get to turn the insurance off when you aren't going to be driving it on certain days uh or using it much on certain months. And when you go on vacation, you're still paying your mortgage. You're still paying your rent. You don't get to turn that off. So, when you're traveling the world full-time, you actually have this uh little cheat code that means that if you go on a vacation on a cruise, you're not also paying rent somewhere or paying uh for a car that it's sitting in a parking lot. Not only that, like in America, if you were to go on a cruise, not only are you paying for your car, paying for car insurance you're not using, you're also paying to park that car at a cruise port. So, when you really deep dive all of this, it adds up astronomically the cost of living in America versus traveling full-time. So, our baseline, uh, we were living in Atlanta, spending about $8,000 a month. Now, that has probably gone up if we were to go back and try that. People tell us it's more expensive in the last eight years in America. Uh, and we believe them because we've gone back to visit and seen that.

[00:02:01]But uh it is going to be shocking the the costs that we give you that we are spending now.

[00:02:08]>> Yeah, it's it really is a cheat code kind of this alakart style life as opposed to double paying for everything.

[00:02:17]You enjoy your vacations more, you enjoy your stays more. Um and you just get so much more out of it because you can do so much more because you're saving so much money along the way. It was so shocking to us when we, you know, finally left and started traveling full-time. The numbers were just like, why are the numbers so low? What are we missing? What what are we not calculating into this equation? And the number just seemed to cut itself in half automatically and in many places even less than that. Um, it just was really mind-boggling to get through that. All right. So, we're going to group these into different countries and how much we spend, how much you could spend living there. At this, this is important. It's at the same lifestyle level that we were living at in Atlanta for the 8,000. So, the first grouping is the $2,500 a month countries. And those are Cambodia and Vietnam. And I know it sounds really low to be able to say you can live on that, but you can. It's very cheap. It's very expensive. And also when you talk about like your housing cost, uh like your hotel, the Airbnb, that's a total cost.

[00:03:27]So, uh you don't have to pay for water, internet, electricity, trash, landscaping, pest control. You don't have to pay for any of that. So, that's where you're making all this money up.

[00:03:38]Uh that you're not paying for cars, you're not paying for car payments, car insurance, oil changes, repairs, tires.

[00:03:44]It's crazy if you really add up how much you're spending. Uh, so $2,500 a month.

[00:03:49]Cambodia and Vietnam. Those are the two cheapest uh that that most people go to.

[00:03:56]Really good quality of life there for that money.

[00:03:58]>> Yeah. Uh again, it's so shocking when you get to these places. And I know what you're thinking. You're like, Cambodia and Vietnam? That doesn't sound appealing. Let me tell you right now, they are extremely appealing once you go there. If you haven't watched some of our videos from these places here on the channel, check those out because these places are absolutely incredible. They offer top tier of everything. Um, and everything is just so easy and chill, especially in some place like Cambodia. It's such a calm, chill place and you have top service and you have, you know, great things available to you. you feel safe, uh, you know, and you just feel really calm and at peace. Same thing in Vietnam. Such a great place to go and you enjoy the area. And again, there's so much available. You want to go shopping, go to the mall, you want to go get groceries, go get your groceries, order food, cost you almost nothing. It's really amazing what you can get in these countries. you start to feel like uh you know you're a king or queen in these places.

[00:05:10]>> Uh next countries up are going to be the $3,000 range. So 3,000. We've got one country on the list. Malaysia, that is a great place to go. 3500. We stepped that up just a little bit in these countries.

[00:05:22]These are our actual expenses that we've paid. Uh that's going to be Thailand and Mexico in the 3500 range. And then there's one little step above that, which is the $4,500 a month budget category. That's going to be Japan, South Korea, Italy, uh a few other places in Europe like that. So that's that's that kind of mid-range 3,000 to 400. You can run the whole gamut in there.

[00:05:51]>> Yeah. Uh it's again that's the beauty of this lifestyle is that you can offset months where it's 4500 with months where it's 2500. Um and you can just kind of go back and forth as you please and still have great accommodations, great food, great things to do. Um and there's just so much you can do in each one of these countries that you're really not going to get bored. Next up is going to be ones that are breaking over, but still not to the Atlanta scale, but 6,000 and up. This is going to be Switzerland, Norway, places like that where things are definitely more expensive. You are feeling it. You are checking the prices. In these other countries, you're not even looking at the prices of things. You're just doing what you want like, "Oh, I I don't even know how much that was, so it doesn't matter. It'll never be expensive." uh Switzerland, Norway, you are definitely checking everything that you do because it's pricey. Uh and and those are just countries we don't stay in a lot. We could because it's still cheaper than Atlanta, but you know, we prefer to go to the ones that are a little more inexpensive.

[00:06:57]>> Yeah, we like to go where we get a little bit more bang for our buck type situation. But again, it's nice to be able to go to these places and fully enjoy them and still be able to go back knowing, you know, to the other countries where it's a lot less, knowing we're going to be able to save a ton of money anyways. So, you don't feel as bad, you don't feel as guilty. Whereas, if we were to vacation to Switzerland or Norway from when we had our home in Atlanta and we're making, you know, paying for all our stuff, um, we would have been like really pinching. But for this lifestyle, it doesn't feel as bad to be honest to be paying, you know, 6,000 a month in these months. We could fully um enjoy it.

[00:07:38]>> Uh then we get to the $10,000 a month category. Now, this one, this is the shocking and the really telling part.

[00:07:44]There's only one country in the $10,000 up category, and that's the United States. When we go back to the United States, it's actually more expensive to live this way than when we live there.

[00:07:56]Which is why all of you are living the way we used to on the 8,000. It's actually well over 10,000 to run that now. Uh, and the reason is is because you have a car payment. You pay $300, $400 a month for your car, pay car insurance. When we go back to the United States, we have to rent a car if we're going to use a car for a month. That's like $2,000 a month. Then your housing is going to be more. You're staying in a hotel. You're staying in an Airbnb. The United States is not set up to live monthtomonth. Every other country in the world pretty much is. So this does not work in the United States as easily as it works the rest of the world. But it also gives you uh if you live in the United States, this misconception that every other country is set up like the United States. So you look at it and say, well, I couldn't live like that cheaper here, so I can't anywhere else either. But that is where the disconnect is. And it is so much cheaper in other countries to live monthto-month than in the United States. Uh so that's just one that kind of shocked us. We went back and really were stunned at how much we were spending when we home.

[00:09:06]>> Yeah, it's crazy to think that um it's cost less. If I wanted to, I could I could live in Norway or Switzerland, and it's less than it costs me to live in the United States. It's just kind of it really just boggles the mind when you start putting those numbers together.

[00:09:26]It's like, wow, it really does cost a lot. every single thing cost way more um than anywhere else because like you said it's not set up for like a monthto-month you know type living moving from state to state or moving from place to place uh you know there's a lot of people who do like you know RV uh van life type thing and it they they know especially those who do it in the US you know um that it's it's just not set up that great for you go from place to place and it just the the numbers just keep racking up and um it just gets more and more expensive as you go along.

[00:10:03]>> Then on top of that, we we have done over the years quite a few bucket list trips. Uh we've done some business class flights lately. You may know we went to India for two and a half weeks. We went to Saudi Arabia. We're going to Antarctica soon. These are costs on top of that normal budget that uh we probably would not be able to do had we still just stayed in Atlanta. In fact, I'm sure that we definitely would not be able to do them. But they are costs on top of that. But that is just like again when we go to Antarctica, we're not making a car payment. We're not paying for a house. We're on the ship. So when you're on a cruise, you're not paying anything. We're not buying food. None of our food that we left at home is going to waste. Uh there's so many little things that make this so much more affordable. And uh that's the thing about it is that it is so much cheaper.

[00:10:52]And when you really start to dig down into why it's cheaper, it comes down to that we've utilized uh the system that uh we've been using, which is credit card miles, points, uh getting good deals, going to places when it's a good time of year. And this has really helped reduce the cost of travel.

[00:11:13]>> Yeah. Gosh. Uh it just is such a huge difference to be able to even consider doing some of these bucket list things um that you just wouldn't be able to do otherwise because you are able to save so much money along the way um with this lifestyle and uh you know just being able to use things like the points and all that to enhance the entire situation with better flights, better hotel stays, staying in suites, getting meals you know, covered in the different areas is absolutely incredible. Um, it's just such an interesting uh experience to go from, you know, living in the US to living on the road full-time. Uh, people still ask us so many questions about it.

[00:12:01]And that's actually why we put together a course, um, Retirement Travel Jumpstart.

[00:12:07]We have this course we put together and a community that comes with it. The community I think is such a huge part of it because we can get in there and chat with those who are in the course and they ask questions and you know they bring up scenarios. It's nice because so many different people are doing this lifestyle in a little bit different way.

[00:12:25]And so it gives people perspective and ideas on what might work for them because the the whole point of it is not trying to convince everybody to do it like we do it, but to do it in a way that works for them and that is ideal for them and that um helps them to reach the goals that they have of, you know, where they want to travel to or what travel experiences they want to have. Uh and then the other part of this is that we have been able to monetize our travel by doing things like YouTube. Well, primarily through doing YouTube and that has made a big difference for us because I'd say for the last 5 years, our entire budget, our entire travel has been fully covered by YouTube. So there's not a dollar that leaves our pocket to live our life, which is kind of crazy. So basically any money you have uh set aside for retirement is just compounding because the YouTube actually pays for everything uh and then some. So that's another thing uh that you can consider is that there are ways you can still make money while you're retired and on the road. And it's not just that like people set out to make a bunch of money because that's not really how it started for us. We started this because uh we just wanted to do it and then it turned into that. And that's what happens to a lot of people is that this wasn't originally the goal. Now, if you set out for it to be the goal, you can probably get there quicker than we did. And that's why uh we do have a YouTube course telling people how to do that.

[00:13:57]Link in the description to that as well.

[00:13:59]But it's a great way to offset the travel. And it really just makes so that this just makes so much sense. I mean, we're living so much cheaper each month uh than we would have in the US and that is being paid for basically by our travel. So, there's really no no downside to doing this like this.

[00:14:19]>> Yeah, it's kind of wild when you think about it because, you know, we started the YouTube originally the thought was, you know, it would give us something extra to do cuz we were just like, well, what are we going to do with all this extra time now that we're out here on the road? We don't we retired. We didn't have any projects, any work to do. Um, and then we just started recording and said, "Oh, well, we'll share it with our family and our friends." And then, you know, long story short, here we are, uh, on all of our channels. We have, I think, over 600,000 subscribers, over 700,000 subscribers across all of our monetized channels. And we did learn so much along the way. Um, and like we said, we put together that YouTube course, but I think another key factor here is just being able to go back and enjoy the trips that we did and enjoy the videos that we made of the trips that we did. Um, that has been so much fun. Every once in a while, we're just like, "Oh, you remember that trip? Let's watch that video." We pull that video out and watch it because it's so much fun to kind of relive that as well. But you get the bonus of we also get paid for having done that trip as well. So that's really nice on top of everything else.

[00:15:33]>> Yeah. So to wrap it up, the cost of retirement has not been high compared to what it was in the US. And I think that's that's the takeaway here is that you can do this. You can actually save money doing it whether you know no matter how you do it, you can you can lower your cost of retirement by traveling the world. And so uh guys, we hope this has been super helpful for you. If it has, please give us a like on the video. If you haven't subscribed to the channel yet, please do that. And we will see you on the next video.