Nomadic folks – what did you do with any owned residences when you started traveling or retiring abroad?
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I’ve asked this question from a pure investment basis before, but I’m curious what other nomadic retirees have done.
We've been on the road for 4.5 years and we sold our primary residence before we left.
We knew we'd be gone for a long time (initially estimated 18 months - which is quite a laugh when we think about it now), so we didn't want anything to tie us physically or mentally to one place.
That's been one of the largest contributing factors to feeling totally free - that sense of "where you are is where you are". No rushing "home" to take care of residential issues: renters, maintenance, bills, etc.
Even apart from the potential physical maintenance, the primary residence also takes up mental resources. You're always thinking, planning and worrying about it, no matter where you are. It's an amazing feeling to only worry about a few bags and two motorcycles (we're overlanding around the world on motorcycles, BTW) and absolutely nothing else.
Another benefit to offloading our home was that it freed up a lot of capital, which we invested to partially fund our travels via dividends. We left in the midst of (still) one of the longest bull markets ever, so the capital has appreciated significantly. The flipside is that housing in Toronto, where we used to live, has also risen accordingly.
Normally investments outpace real estate, and the thinking was that since we were selling our place at the height of the "bubble", if and when we ever decided to move back, we could take advantage of a cooling market, or hopefully catch the RE market when the bubble burst.
Unfortunately, RE has continued it's skyrocket-trajectory since 2012 and while we're not priced out of the market, there's no way we'd dare enter the market at these prices. We thought the market was overpriced when it was 30-40% lower than it is right now!
We're still glad we sold the place, because in retrospect, we weren't ready to go back after 18 months. In fact, the high cost of living in Toronto has opened us up to living in other places in the world and we're having fun "window-shopping" for new and interesting places to live - either for a few months or perhaps longer.