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WE’RE IN OUR SECOND year as nomads, having sold our Texas home and driven away from our storage unit in November 2022. In the few years before that, we often talked about where we wanted to move, but could never quite decide.
When I retired in 2021, we traveled for most of the next 12 months. At the end of it, we still hadn’t decided where we wanted to live, but we knew we wanted a change, so we just pulled up our roots. We have yet to put down new ones.
How is this working for us? We’ve spent time in previously unknown parts of the U.S., England, Italy, Spain and Portugal, but our intent isn’t to “travel the world.” We were fortunate to do a fair amount of that during our careers. We have some destinations in mind, but ticking off a list or saying we’ve been to [insert number] countries isn’t driving us.
While we enjoy visiting new places, we’re also happy to revisit places we like and just be wherever we are. Our stops aren’t necessarily hot spots, just pretty places to spend time. When possible, we like to stay in one place for weeks at a time. As I write this, we’re enjoying our first visit to New Hampshire. We’ll be in France in September and England in November, but that’s the extent of our plans, and there are a lot of gaps between now and then.
We have considerable flexibility, though that’s been limited by visa rules. European countries that are party to the Schengen agreement—which most of them are—allow visitors to stay just 90 days in a rolling 180-day period without a pre-arranged visa. The positive is that we can travel anywhere within the Schengen area without visa or border formalities. The negative is that once we enter any Schengen country, the clock starts for the whole area. Fortunately, the U.K. and Ireland aren’t parties to the agreement, and the former graciously allows us to stay for up to six months.
While we’re outside the U.S., our car is professionally stored, along with extra belongings we don’t normally carry with us when abroad. This has a cost, and the storage location is a bit inconvenient. But overall, it’s been a good solution, and we intend to keep doing it. Meanwhile, we have yet to rent a car internationally, usually relying on public transportation, along with the occasional taxi.
We use a mail service that opens our mail and scans it. We rarely need to have anything forwarded to us, but that’s worked fine when we’ve needed to do it. All our bill paying is automatic, and we do our usual necessary business online, with appropriate attention to internet security.
We pay for an international cellphone plan with unlimited data. When we first started our travels, we avoided this expense, instead trying to rely mostly on apps that used wi-fi. This worked okay, but we found that having our phones fully functional at all times, without needing wi-fi, to be worth the cost. It enables us to use our phones for navigation, and it ensures our four elderly parents can reach us anytime.
We’re also part of a network through which we provide house- and pet-sitting services. This has been enjoyable, partially subsidizing our lodging costs, helping us meet local people and creating some interesting opportunities to experience wherever we are. When not sitting, we stay in vacation rentals, inns and hotels.
We’ve learned to live with very little and found that we don’t miss many things. We haven’t been within 500 miles of our storage unit since we left it. Unless we’re using our car and the items stored in it—which is rare—we each have a European-size carry-on bag and a day pack. Otherwise, we wear the same clothes again and again, and replace them when necessary.
The British culture of charity shops has been a fun and useful surprise. They’re everywhere, run by more charities than you could count on both hands, and often have good quality items. We’ve been known to buy something at a charity shop, use it for a few months, and donate it back or to another shop before we leave.
Unlike others who take long trips, we aren’t “coming home” afterward. That creates a few challenges. For instance, prescription medication has been a hassle. It’s tough to get our medications for longer than 90 days, and longer than six months seems next to impossible. We haven’t been out of the country for longer than that at a time, but we certainly could be.
We could have our mail service forward prescriptions to us when we’re abroad, but we haven’t tested that yet. In a pinch, we could get a local prescription wherever we are, but neither the doctor visit nor the medications would be covered by insurance. As a retired military officer, one option might be space-available care at a U.S. military base. But we haven’t tested that, and it’s obviously location-dependent. All things considered, it may be more predictable and less annoying to just plan to be in the U.S. often enough to get prescriptions renewed.
My wife fell down some stairs early in our travels, and luckily got away with only a broken foot. We were in the U.S., but we still had to turn to the only urgent-care clinic in a small town. We delayed our departure overseas and extended a planned stop in the Washington, D.C., area so she could get physical therapy. Had we been outside the U.S., our insurance would have covered the initial treatment, but I’m not sure about the physical therapy.
Dental care has also involved some hassles. Ever tried getting in for a cleaning while passing through a new town? Almost every practice in the U.S. wants to do a full exam for a new patient, which insurance is only going to pay for once a year. In many cases, they won’t schedule the cleaning until after the initial exam is done, so we would have to be there for some period. Our last dental visits were in England, where some providers follow a similar process, but others offer “direct access” through which a new patient can come in and pay cash for service. Our cleanings weren’t covered by our insurance, but getting them done was worth the cost.
When we last stopped in to see our parents, we established ourselves as new patients for dentists and primary care providers, so now we can at least get in the necessary checkups when visiting them.
Looking at our expenses over the past year or so, they probably weren’t much higher than if we’d stayed in our home. I have no doubt that, when we do settle somewhere, our expenses will be more than they were in our previous home, and more than they are now. Wherever we end up, our cost of living will likely be higher than it was in Houston, and we’ll likely still be traveling a lot.
Not long ago, my wife asked if I missed going on vacation. It was a great question. Think of the enjoyment of planning a vacation, anticipating upcoming activities and, of course, anticipating time away from work. The actual vacation is often also a time of eating and drinking a bit more than usual, maybe skipping workouts for a while, and shopping within wider limits.
This isn’t a vacation for us. It’s our life. We need to keep our eating, drinking, fitness and the rest of our lives balanced. We’re thinking about where we’ll be next, but that’s an ongoing task as much as eager anticipation. We’re not spending to excess. We basically buy no souvenirs, clothing or anything else we can’t eat, partially because whatever we buy, we must carry around. Someday, we’ll have a digital photo display.
So, do I miss vacations? Not really, but there are a few things I do miss, and a few more things that I’ve never had but sometimes think about having. In the former category, the one thing I miss most is my home gym. I could go on and on about this, but I’ll spare you.
Overall, we’re happy with our lifestyle, and we’re in no rush to change. For now, we’ll continue to happily repack our bags.
Michael Perry is a former career Army officer and external affairs executive for a Fortune 100 company. In addition to personal finance and investing, his interests include reading, traveling, being outdoors, strength training and coaching, and cocktails. Check out his earlier articles.
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Thank you for the wonderful article. My wife and I are using the UK as a base for European travel, will do so for the years to come and will be there in a couple of months. On the mail and communications side of things. Which service do you use in the US for mail scanning and do you have any tips from this experience?
Another option we have used for phone connectivity, we purchased a mobile wi-fi device (very small / compact) and we buy/top up on-line SIM cards which are affordable (e.g. £20 for 80GB) while there. The SIM cards run on local networks such as O2 and Vodaphone. We can connect multiple devices including phones / computers to the one mobile wi-fi device. We can use our phones day-to-day in airplane mode and they function well for pretty much everything we need including phone calls. We have T mobile which also has 5GB / month internationally included with our plan, but from experience when the 5GB is used up the speed of service really slows down, so we save that as a back-up.
Over the years we have been in the UK in the darker dreary rainy months but found that we simply don’t let that stop us.We have invested in good waterproof hiking gear and have a great time.