The Cost of Traveling Around the World for a Year
After returning from our year-long family tour around the world, most conversations about the trip eventually land on one question: how much did it cost? It’s funny watching people dance around it, afraid to offend or pry. Most ask veiled questions about what we did with our house or cars while we were gone. One friend just came out with it, “how much did you spend?”
The true, but somewhat evasive, answer is that we sold both cars, canceled our car insurance, scaled down our healthcare to an emergency-only policy, and rented our house for the year. Effectively, we reduced our monthly living expenses down to near zero. While traveling, our food, housing, experiences, and transport costs added up to roughly 30% more than we would have otherwise spent living our normal lives. We didn’t live extravagantly, the dollar is historically strong against other currencies right now, and many of the countries we visited are relatively inexpensive for Americans.
But neither my wife nor I worked during that year, making the whole trip a financially irresponsible decision.
As I wrote in my first blog about our tour, this decision was the output of a shared, long-held dream of ours to live abroad while our children are still children. And, as the window of their childhood closes, it was a now-or-never situation. This wasn’t the first time we chose the financially irresponsible path when faced with a “closing window” opportunity.
Going back almost twenty years, I was asked by my employer at the time, Netflix, to move to the UK and help launch what was supposed to be the first international expansion of the movie subscription service. For my younger readers, Netflix had just surpassed one million subscribers of its service that mailed movies and shows on DVD to its customer’s homes. Streaming, let alone producing its own content, wasn’t a thing yet. We didn’t just build a team and ink marketing agreements. We had to build out a distribution center, purchase and stock DVDs, and negotiate rates with the Royal Mail, England’s postal service.
Six months after we got started, and two months after my then-girlfriend and I moved into our flat in London, Amazon entered the UK market with a competing service. In response, Netflix decided to fold up shop, move us back to the US, and focus on competing with Amazon if they decided to enter our home market. Our time living abroad was coming to a very premature end. Staying in London meant leaving Netflix (and being jobless in one of the most expensive cities in the world).
We knew the next stage in our lives would involve getting married and starting a family. The chance to live in and travel throughout Europe, in our early thirties and without children, was a closing-window opportunity. We decided to stay in London.
The cost turned out to be significant. It took me five months to find another job and obtain the necessary work visa. Not only is Netflix one of the best companies I’ve ever worked for, my stock options were priced at around $5 per share (split-adjusted) when I left. Netflix’s share price would peak in 2021 at over $690. Ouch.
The next two and a half years were among the best of our lives. We visited over twenty countries across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The friendships we made and the experiences we shared shape who we are today.
Later, as we agreed it was time to start a family, we thought really hard about continuing our life abroad. My wife had an Irish passport at this point and we watched our London friends choose to build their lives and families in all sorts of far off places. By this point as well, I was building career momentum at Apple, which has offices all over the world.
Both sets of our parents, however, live in Northeast Ohio. As much as we wanted worldly, multilingual kids, we wanted more for them to know their grandparents and for our parents to know their grandchildren. In their sixties at the time, the window of opportunity for our parents to be in the lives of our children was closing. Apple doesn’t have an office in Cleveland, so I left the company to move home to live near our parents.
Apple launched the iPhone the same month I handed in my resignation. My stock options were priced at $2.50 (split adjusted). Current price: $190. Yep.
In Die with Zero by Bill Perkins, the author introduces the concept of “memory dividends” to reshape our perspective on wealth and life. Perkins suggests trading money for experiences that generate lasting and cherished memories, especially when those experiences cannot be fully enjoyed at a later point in life. Perkins advocates for investing in a portfolio of these moments, while striving to die with zero in the bank and, more importantly, zero regrets.
This approach makes a lot of intuitive sense but requires more than a little reshaping of our perspectives, especially if you grew up poor. Dave Chapelle has a bit where he credits his parents for doing “just well enough… so that I could grow up poor around white people.” While I didn’t grow up destitute, we were on that line. And when you’re on that line, you can see clearly how easy it is to slip to the other side. So you spend your adult life making sure that never happens. You grow up afraid that if you stop swimming, you’ll sink.
Whether or not you grew up poor, the American Dream is hammered into us from our youngest days. Work hard. Focus on your career. Be financially responsible. And one day, you’ll retire and then, then you get to live the life you want.
What they don’t tell us is that many of the experiences we forego now won’t be waiting for us when we get across that line. Our parents will be dead and gone. Our kids won’t be kids anymore. Our bodies may not be up to our dreams of pickleball domination.
Moreover, we might not even get across that line. If COVID taught us anything, it’s that there are no guarantees any of us make it to a healthy old age. People die prematurely every day, many with bucket lists full of unchecked items.
Our year-long vacation around the world ended up costing us a lot of money that we could have saved for other things or experiences in the future. To be clear, I understand that I say all of this from a position of privilege: I can work and earn money without the use of my hands or my back. I will have future opportunities to earn and save. That window remains open. Not all windows do.
Ultimately, there is no price I can put on the closeness we now feel after spending 4,965 waking hours together. And the memory dividends from that year will repay us and our children for many years to come. Hopefully, our children will come to appreciate and value the closing-window opportunities in their lives, further compounding those returns.
I think people ask us about the costs of this trip because they have similar closing-window opportunities but struggle with the conventional mindset around financial responsibility. I totally get that. Even now, I lose sleep about whether our decisions will ultimately doom our long term financial freedom. Then I look at pictures like these and know we made the right choice.
