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154R | Inception

Tim and Amy from GoWithLess join Brad and Jonathan to discuss their unique travel strategy. Plus, tips on how to design your dream life.

Build Your Dream Life

Rethinking your current life and finding ways to create your dream life is an admirable goal. As you go through the different stages of your life, a dream life might change. However, you can always take steps to make your life more enjoyable.

Even seemingly small changes can significantly impact your happiness. For example, Jonathan recently invested in home exercise equipment to avoid the stress of running to the gym.

With two small kids at home, a two hour trip to the gym is just not ideal for his family for now. Now Jonathan and his wife are able to enjoy exercising together in the garage while their kids are napping. It may seem like a small change, but it contributes to their overall happiness in a positive way.

As you progress down the path to FI, you might start to see potential changes in a new light. One example may be that you want to request a work from home arrangement to reclaim some of your commute time. The more bandwidth you reclaim, you can start to apply that new bandwidth to the things that matter to you most.

Life has ebbs and flows, ups and downs. And you have to just accept that and roll with it.

Although your priorities may change over time, it is great to have the bandwidth to tackle those new developments with energy. If you can approach life with a positive mindset, your outlook can change dramatically.

The experience is the experience but how you choose to react to it is what ultimately matters.

Reduce Your Financial Stress

In your financial life, creating bandwidth can allow you to raise your threshold for an emergency. As you continue to raise that bar, your stress level may start to drop noticeably.

Take action to move further away from the paycheck to paycheck cycle. Work towards an optimized version of your dream life every day. You might be blown away by the results.

FI 101

We just completed recording the video series for FI 101. Thank you to everyone that submitted feedback on the beta version of the course. Sign up for the pre-launch here.

Related: Beginner’s Guide To Reaching Financial Independence

College Questions

After this week’s episode with Brian and Seonwoo, you likely have a much better idea of how to utilize the FASFA. If not, check out that full episode here.

Do you have any other questions about college? Please let us know by sending us an email at [email protected]. We will bring together your questions in a future episode soon.

Playing With FIRE

Playing with FIRE has officially been released as a rental on all the major platforms. You can find out more information about supporting its release here.

House Sitting With Tim And Amy

Last time we talked to Tim and Amy from GoWithLess, they shared their favorite frugal travel option- house sitting. At that point, they had never considered traveling full time but this year they are selling their home and jumping to full-time travel. Let’s see how they’ve made the leap!

Selling Their Home

The first step to traveling full time is selling their home. Although they have downsized in the past, this latest downsizing mission has been more difficult. They plan to fit all of their belongings in a 5×5 storage unit.

Although it is an emotional journey to sell all of their belongings, they think the opportunity to travel full time is well worth it.

House Sitting

After reaching FI, they can afford to travel within a reasonable budget. However, they wanted the opportunity to slow travel and dive into local cultures. House sitting will allow them to keep their expenses low while seeing the world at their pace.

Currently, they spend around $40,000/year in retirement. Each month, they pay around $1,000 to maintain their home. Without any family nearby or pets to think about, the cost of maintaining this home seemed too high. Especially because they were away for more than 100 nights for the last two years. Tim and Amy plan to house sit 75-80% of the time, so their overall costs for the year shouldn’t increase by too much.

With their house sitting plans, it is a win for everyone involved. Tim and Amy get a free place to stay. The homeowners get a reliable couple to watch their home and pets.

How To Start House Sitting

If you are interested in house sitting, now is a great time of year to get started. With the holidays approaching, there are more houses than house sitters. It can be the perfect opportunity to build your resume and collect positive references.

Consider doing shorter sits in your hometown. As a local, you have the option to meet with your homeowner beforehand to make sure they are comfortable. After you build your resume, it will be easier to land house-sitting gigs.

Before you get started, make sure you are comfortable with the slow travel model. Since you are watching someone’s home and pets, you won’t always be doing the touristy thing. If you want to buzz around town all day, then you may want to book an Airbnb for a few nights. Also, it is important to be flexible. Sometimes house sitting arrangements fall apart at the last second. You need to be flexible enough to roll with the changes.

If you do enjoy house sitting, then many amazing opportunities may appear. For example, the couple plans to house sit in Berkeley, Maui, Sonoma, Orlando, Scotland, France, and England this year alone! It might be the perfect way to travel frugally.

Watch the whole episode here. 

How To Connect

If you want to learn more about Tim and Amy and their house sitting knowledge, then check out their content. They post a video to YouTube every Wednesday on their channel, GoWithLess. They also have a blog, GoWithLess.

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