Hey, thanks for the reply. Surprised you remember me!
We stayed in Poland, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Bosnia & Herzigovina and are currently in Montenegro. We already booked Las Palmas and some of Morocco. We haven't done any WWOOFING or the like yet, but we are planning to do some volunteering using Workaway.info once we are in Morocco. We have already arranged it for 1.5 months in the Sahara Desert and in an animal refuge.
The max average spending target during normal times is 3% of the peak of a 90 day moving average. This is maximum, so anything less than that is better, since we want to have some margin of error. We have successfully and relatively easily been spending roughly around $23,000 or around 2% since retirement which I'm more than comfortable with. These numbers are just off the top of my head since I don't want to pull out my laptop now.
Yeah nomadic living can be very cheap. We are actually living much more frivolously than we were in Canada, but spending a lot less. This is almost exclusively due to accomodation costs. We save so much on accomodation versus rent in Canada that we can afford to spend much more on flights, meals out, etc, and still spend a lot less than we used to. We usually book on AirBnB and get the monthly discounts by usually staying for over 28 days. We also contact the host beforehand and they are often happy to give an additional discount because they appreciate long stays so much. Our accomodation costs have been anywhere between $350 to $650 per month.
I think we also are good at consistently shopping like locals for food. There are often big western grocery stores to shop in in Asia but we shop with the locals in the outdoor market places which have much better prices.
Any other big lessons? A lot. I think a lot of people struggle with what to do though. We haven't really had that problem. Part of the reason is because we are travelling obviously, but we also have a system for habits which I think is invaluable. We track our habits religiously and we identify new habits to form based on areas we think most require improvement. This provides a feeling of personal growth and development each day that many people only get from work. It also is directly benefiting us and not an employer. Another way we implement this is to write out first thing in the morning a rough plan of when we will do those habits. This prevents is from just mindlessly doom scrolling or something before even thinking about the habits we want to accomplish for the day. We track them at the end of the day using HabitNow apps on our phones and we focus on the ones that need the most improvement on that app.
Where are you at with your plan right now? Still saving up or you're living it currently? Any insights to share?