travel
Expat Preparation Means Minimalism, Living Leaner, More Badass
Another step in preparing to be expats, digital nomads, slow travelers, worldschoolers… whatever we want to call it… minimalism plays a part.
I’m going through each room, closet, area of the condo and deciding what I use, love, and want to keep.
Are there things that I like but aren’t used often? Are there things that spark joy but that I would’t buy again if I were deciding today? What am I attached to? Do particular items bring me happiness or do they just satisfy my ego? I think ego plays a big role for some things.
For the next year we will slowly rid ourselves of a lot of… stuff.
I’m partial to my Le Creuset collection (quality pots and pans), but I have to ask myself, “Is it worth paying storage fees to keep these?” What if we’re gone for years? That monthly storage rent adds up, and I could probably buy these things again for the same price that paying to store them for so long would cost. If we’re lucky, fingers crossed, my mom and mother-in-law will give us a bit of space to store things there.
My passion for minimalism actually started last year. I was tired of decision making fatigue so I started making fewer daily decisions. Ergo: minimalism.
- Have fewer clothes (I wear most of the same stuff day in and day out anyway) and less to look at in my closet, fewer decisions, more energy.
- Having fewer lipsticks, believe it or not, is less decision making fatigue.
- Having a regular rotation of meals and foods so that I’m not constantly thinking about what to make for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
- Having less to dust gives me more time and energy to do other things.
Recently, I downsized my purse, but it wasn’t without stress. After multiple attempts, I finally said, “Fuck it, I’m going lean.” I went from a larger purse packed with a large essential oil spray (cuz I might need it), snacks (cuz if I don’t have snacks I’ll be hungry), pens (cuz my kid needs to draw at the restaurants we don’t go to), various membership cards (rarely used), makeup, bandaids (cuz you never know), earbuds, cell phone, car keys, kleenex, handkerchief (cuz it’s pretty), and more ——> to ——> a tiny 6-inch purse that fits very little.
For the tiny purse, I opted for lip balm, lip/cheek stain (two in one – yeah!) plus my phone, keys, a small bottle of essential oil (I had to), earbuds (I use these a lot), wallet minus membership cards (those I’ll keep in the car). I decided to carry a few snacks in the car for desperate times.
I’m feeling badass as a result.
Risky behavior to be so spartan – or so I thought.
Turns out I love the freedom of the small purse. I might not have a bison bar in it, but forcing myself to be hungry once in a while isn’t going to kill me. It’ll make me stronger?
Minimalism is giving me a lightness, a leanness, and an overall badass experience. To know I require so little in the way of material possessions is empowering.
Let’s see. That’s more energy from less decision making fatigue. More time from less dusting. More freedom from having less.
Minimalism for the win.
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The Book, The New Global Student, Lit A Fire Under My Ass
I bought the book, The New Global Student, to inspire my family’s future travels around the world. I don’t recall how I came to know of the book, but when I read the description, I knew it was destined to be in my library.
From Amazon.com
In 2005, Maya Frost and her husband sold everything and left their suburban American lifestyle behind in order to have an adventure abroad. The tricky part: they had to shepherd their four teenage daughters through high school and into college. This hilarious and conspiratorial how-to handbook describes the affordable, accessible, and stunningly advantageous options they stumbled upon that any American student can leverage to get an outrageously relevant global education.
Sounds good, eh?
It is, though I didn’t devour the book in one sitting. Actually, I started and stopped the book a few times over the past year (or two?).
I guess I didn’t feel a need to rush through it, seeing as my daughter was only five years old at the time. I figured I had a while before I would take action on anything I was reading. Not only that, I didn’t see the reality that we’d be moving abroad any time soon, because, like, THAT seemed a daunting idea… so why rush reading through the book? I could take my time.
As I was reading it one day, however, I wanted to share some of it with my husband, Greg. So I did that. We were driving to my mom’s which was about 45 minutes from our home and I started reading some of the really cool things I’d highlighted. As expected, he loved what I was reading to him, and his excitement served to inspire my continuing the book.
Over the following weeks, I read the book at a faster clip. It became more and more exciting, as I imagined the life we could give Kamea… helping her become The New Global Student. Wow, the advantages were numerous and awesome.
So. Yesterday, I wrote that we’d always known we would travel the world. Honestly, though, I never knew when that would be. I really didn’t know how to make it happen. It seemed like a dream. It was a dream I felt would come true, but I didn’t know when “someday” would be.
I mean… how does one just up and travel the world or move to another country?
The New Global Student was enticing me with fun stories of families traveling all over the world (many of whom didn’t even homeschool, by the way). Still… while I was reading it, I didn’t really make a connection of how I could relate to the stories I was reading. For example, I read about families selling their houses, cars, and/or businesses. They sold belongings, got rid of tons of stuff, and then had money to move somewhere else in the world. One family even bought a sail boat and took to the oceans for their epic adventure (turns out that’s a thing).
Well, I didn’t have a business to sell. I didn’t have a house to sell either. I didn’t want to buy a boat (Greg gets seasick.)
Hmmm… I just kept reading the book, figuring that someday we’d figure it out.
At the end of the book the lightbulb came on for me. At this point, the author’s husband chimed in and itemized the savings and expenses the family incurred while living in Mexico. I was blown away by the savings and cost of living that was possible. The book also illuminated the notion that any age is a good age to start (with respect to kids), emphasizing that younger is good and totally doable!
I salivated at how much money we could save living in Mexico (or other parts of the world). Savings plus the obvious awesomeness of immersing ourselves in other cultures, learning languages, and helping Kamea be a Global Student was just too good of an opportunity for which to wait.
Turns out I wouldn’t have to… I realized that since we rent our condo, there would come a time when the lease ends and we won’t be obligated to pay that rent anymore. (Um, duh, Kristen. Why hadn’t I thought of this before now??) At that point, we could sell belongings (not a whole lot since I embrace minimalism these days), including cars. We could donate stuff. We could put anything leftover into storage (um, hello mom!).
Bam. We could take this dream of living abroad and make it happen when our lease is up.
I know this sounds silly, but it just never dawned on me that we could simply not renew the lease. The veil had been lifted. The light was turned on. I could see our worldschooling path before my eyes.
At this point, I closed the book, having finished it, and called Greg into the bedroom.
The topic of living abroad was not new to us, as I’d just been reading him The New Global Student a few weeks prior. But, when I told him that we could actually do it when our condo’s lease ended, I think I took him by surprise. I filled him in on the details, and told him about some areas in Mexico where we could begin our adventure… and the wheels began turning in his head.
Now, mind you, he wasn’t jumping up and down with excitement (yet) like I was; but, truthfully, I’d had a whole hour to chew on it before I told him. :)
He raised a few questions about whether he could transfer his work successfully to a laptop only. He already works from home, and I told him we absolutely could (exciting details on that for another blog post). However, to make it easier on him, the lease wasn’t going to end for a good long while. We had time to figure it out and make it work.
The fire was lit under my ass… my deep dive into living abroad research began. Expat life is within reach.
It’s been about three months since that conversation in our bedroom, after I finished reading The New Global Student. I’ve gone from knowing nothing (other than it was possible somehow to do this because clearly other people are doing it) to knowing quite a bit about the how, when, where, and why for our adventure.
I’ll share in the next post what I’m learning with my deep dive of research.
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How I Caught The Bug To Travel
When I met my husband, Greg, on E-harmony over a decade ago, I had the tiniest reluctance about any potential success for us, because his featured profile picture was him standing by the door carrying a suitcase and he mentioned a love of world travel in his profile.
Maybe it was silly, but I couldn’t help think to myself, “This guy likes to travel. Traveling dudes don’t like to be tied down. I can see it now. I’ll fall for him harder than he will fall for me. He will take off around the world, my heart in his hand. Better not respond to the eHarmony connection. It can only be doom.”
Not one to listen to myself, I pursued the eHarmony connection. (Luckily, he pursued back in spite of my not having a picture posted for my profile.)
I was destined to be with him, because although, yes, he loved to travel, and, yes, that was a picture of him coming (or going?) from a long adventure in Peru, he longed for a traveling partner in crime.
Fast forward some years and we married.
In Bora Bora.
Whisking me away to the most beautiful paradise on earth was a great way to get me interested in travel. (Smart fellow he was.)
It wasn’t long before we were talking about how we couldn’t wait to travel the world, laptop-style.
Working side by side, somewhere on a coast in Italy became a vision I couldn’t shake. I caught his travel bug.
Now, I was determined to see the world. Having a family wouldn’t stop our dream either. We decided, even before trying to get me pregnant, that when we had a family, we would homeschool, because that would allow us to travel. The vision became of us working side by side, laptop-style, with a kid next to us reading a book (or writing his/her own blog).
The dream is finally coming true. Here we are homeschooling our daughter, and creating definite plans for living abroad in the future.
It wasn’t until a couple of months ago, however, that this became a reality.
I’ll tell you what lit the fire under my ass to take action in the next post.
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Digital Nomad Expat Prep: Google Alerts For Travel
One of the things I’ve done to research future expat destinations is setting up Google Alerts.
What is a Google Alert? As you can see in the image, a Google Alert is
“a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results – such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs – that match the user’s search term.”
Lifehacker says this about Google Alerts:
Google Alerts is one of Google’s hidden gems. It’s a really powerful tool to keep track of trends, interesting topics, or anything really new that appears on the web.
A Google Alert is easy to set up, and it’s a good way to monitor the web for desired topics being written about.
Once you set up a Google Alert you will get a daily email with links to articles on that particular alert for the day. For us, that’s various travel destinations.
For example, after Playa del Carmen (one of our chosen places to live) had violence in a nightclub last month :( I was able to easily follow the news on it with Google Alerts. As a result, I’ll follow the alerts for the next year to see how Playa fares but we’re also going to check other locations now.
Even though we aren’t leaving the United States for a while, Google Alerts gives me a better feeling of the places we’re interested in living.
Worldschool here we come!
Digital Nomadism here we come!
Adventure here we come!
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First Planning Steps For Our Family Living Abroad
I’ve mentioned before that we’re planning to eventually spend a lot of time abroad.
Sure, it’s still a long way off, but all this time allows me to research, research, research.
Things like: visas, projected costs (and savings!), housesitting, digital nomadism, finding the cheapest air travel, where to go, packing, and of course… can I bring my Instant Pot???
To assist, I created a “Travel” file in Evernote where I have the following notes:
- To-Do (things like renew passports, take a self-defense class, get “global entry” and more)
- Countries / Research (a long list of all the places we think would be fun)
- Airfare/Train (how to get cheap air including the travel hack of “chasing miles”)
- Packing (backpacks, carry-on, suitcases, first aid kit, clothes, herbs, food, etc)
- Technology (adapters, cell phones, VPN, laptops, and more)
- Accommodations (options, costs, etc)
Embracing minimalism will make this move abroad easier (and cheaper), so I’ve slowly donated and sold things. Admittedly, I get a surge of energy and excitement when I purge things (though not sure my husband or daughter share my thrill – sorry, Greg, about that bottle opener).
Learning from Minimalism experts, I ask myself two things when deciding whether to keep or get rid of something:
Would I buy this now had I not bought it before?
Considering those two questions is powerful in inspiring me to just let… it… go.
I will share what I learn about living abroad as I go. I hope it helps someone considering the same thing much as all the blogs I’ve read have helped me.