5 Steps to Begin Traveling Long-term with Your Family

Summary

I’m excited to share 5 steps to help your family begin traveling long-term. These are things I’ve done myself that helped create a lifestyle that allows me and my family to travel the world indefinitely.

In the past 7 years, we’ve traveled to and lived in over 32 different countries, and our lives have been deeply enriched because of it. We’ve grown closer together as a family than I ever thought possible, and we get to spend the majority of our time doing things we love.

1) Determine if travel is right for you
Not everyone likes to travel, and that’s okay. It’s not always easy. But it’s one of the most life changing experiences I’ve ever had.

2) Realize that travel doesn’t have to be expensive
Yes, travel can be affordable. There are ways that you can travel and pay little or even nothing for accommodations. Consider house swapping, house sitting, staying in one place long-term, and visiting in the off-season.

3) Set up an income source to fund your travels
To fund long-term travels, think outside the box. An online business is not the only way to fund your travel lifestyle. You may be able to find a job that allows you to work remotely, or you can begin offering freelancing services in something you’re experienced in.

4) Reduce your possessions to the essentials
When we realized we wanted to travel, we decided to sell our house and almost everything we own. It took a few months to get everything done but it felt so incredibly liberating! Start by making an inventory of items you no longer use or need and begin reducing the clutter.

5) Decide where to go first and set a date
With the world open to you, it can sometimes feel intimidating to know where to go first. Think about the things that you want now in your first adventure and set a date. Then take small steps every day toward making your travel dream a reality.

Finally, remember that happiness does not come from goal achievement. Happiness is a habit we must cultivate every step of the way. One way to do that is by taking time to focus on gratitude for where you are in your life now.

In the coming weeks, I hope to put out more videos and content to address this stuff in more detail, and help you take the first steps toward living the life of your dreams. If you’ve found this content helpful, let me know in the comments below!

Listen to the audio:

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Transcript

Hi, I’m Brandon Pearce and I’m here in Nelson, New Zealand where I’ve been for the past three months or so with my wife and three daughters.

I wanted to create this video to share with you 5 steps that you can use to begin a life of long-term world travel with your family.

These are steps that I’ve used in my life. My family has now been traveling the world for seven years to 32 different countries. We’ve explored some of the world’s most inspiring natural wonders and manmade wonders. We’ve met people from all walks of life that have changed our lives. And we have felt more bonded and close together as a family than I ever knew was possible.

It wasn’t always like this for us though. Just 12 years ago, I was earning $10 an hour working at a call center, doing the same thing over and over again every day, just bogged down by the rat race of life.

I would see my kids on the weekends and in the evenings, but it just wasn’t enough. I felt stagnant in my personal growth. I knew that I needed to make a change, especially when I saw people in my life who I loved losing their stable jobs or even getting cancer and passing away at a young age, like my wife’s mother. It woke us up to the realization that life is short and the time to live is now.

So I decided to make some life changes. I started working on an online business that now brings in over $70,000 a month in income and employs over 20 people, all of whom work remotely from wherever they want, and allows me to live this lifestyle running my business in just an hour a day of my time.

Now I spend my time doing the things that I love with my family. Traveling the world and creating music, photography, and products that make the world a better place while teaching people like you how do what I’ve done.

So without further ado I want to share with you my five steps for beginning a life of long-term world travel.

Step 1: Determine if travel is right for you.

Not everyone enjoys travel. Not everyone wants to see the world. And that’s okay. But for me, it’s been a life-changing experience. I don’t know if there is anything that I’ve done that’s had more impact on my personal growth, my relationships, and my happiness than travel. Travel has showed me first-hand that not everyone thinks the same way and that’s okay.

Travel has given us a chance as a family to learn and experience things that we never would have imagined possible if we were living in the same life and doing the same things that we did before.

I am so grateful that I can share these types of experiences with my kids.

In just the last two weeks we were on a road trip around the South Island of New Zealand with some friends of ours who also happen to be nomadic family travelers. I felt like I was in a state of constant awe with the amazing scenery here in New Zealand.

There was a time we were in the middle of these glaciers, at Fox Glacier, with these enormous mountains and a rainbow appeared right over the entrance to one of the glaciers. My kids and I felt like we was just in some other world. This is just one highlight of one of our travel adventures.

I don’t know if these types of experiences are what appeal to you but they have changed my life. We have met people who believe things and think things that are totally different and do things a totally different way from what we’ve ever seen or expected before. It just helped me realize that there are so many beautiful people in this world and so many ways to be and so much to appreciate about being alive in every moment and I want to give that gift to my kids. If you feel inspired to travel, I want you to know that it is possible to do so.

Step 2: Realize that travel doesn’t have to be expensive

The second step to living a life of long-term world travel is to realize that travel doesn’t have to be expensive.

When we think of travel, so often we think of expensive one- to two-week vacations at a fancy resort. That is one way to travel and it’s fun to do that sometimes, but that is one of the most expensive ways to travel.

There are ways that you can travel and pay nothing for accommodations – through sites like Couchsurfing, or through home swapping, where you have your house and someone else has their house. Rather than paying each other, you just swap homes for a while and live that way and experience each other’s cultures. Websites to help you include HomeExchange and Love Home Swap.

There are also sites that allow you to do house sitting, where people will leave their house for months at a time and just want someone to take care of their plants and their pets. You can take advantage of those opportunities as well.

If free isn’t your thing, you can save a lot of money on accommodations by staying longer. If you pay a nightly rate you are going to pay a lot more money than a weekly rate, which is a lot more money than a monthly rate, which is a lot more money than a yearly rate. Imagine the difference!

For example, in Bali, we stayed in a house that was $650 per night and we were able to get that down to $3,500 per month. That’s a big difference just because we booked a longer-term stay. Likewise there was another house, also in Bali – it was a 3 bedroom house with a pool and a lovely view over the jungle – that we were able to rent for $450 a month because we committed to more than a year.

It’s amazing what places you can find and the low prices you can find if you book longer term or in the off-season.

There are several other ways you can save on accommodation, food, activities, and transportation – all of which I can share with you in other videos.

Right now I just want to drive home the point that travel does not have to be expensive.

We know families that are traveling with four or five kids and spending $700 a month – that’s it! – to travel the world with their family. There are so many ways to do it and it does not have to be expensive.

Step 3: Set up an income source to fund your travels

The third step is to set up an income source to fund your travels.

For me, I created an online business that services thousands of music teachers around the world and allows them to run their teaching studios more efficiently and effectively – and to connect better with their students. It’s a web app that teacher’s pay a monthly subscription to use. It’s called Music Teacher’s Helper, if you want to look it up.

It’s been a wonderful service that has changed many teachers’ lives and I’ve been really grateful that I could provide this service. It’s also allowed me, as I mentioned earlier, to fund this travel lifestyle.

Now creating an online business is a lot of work. It took me years to set up. Ten years later I am living this lifestyle, but it has been a long time coming.

An online business is not the only way to fund your travel lifestyle. There are people doing it through all sorts of means. You may even find that the job you have now may even be able to help you transition to working remotely so that you can do your work from another location.

You can also find lots of work on sites like Upwork in dozens of industries. It’s becoming now, with the technologies that are available to us, that so many jobs that you used to need to be present in an office to do can now be done online.

You’ll find everything from legal work to creative work, to design, programming,customer support, virtual assistance, and even taxes. Anything you can do (pretty much), you can do online and find through sites like Upwork. So that’s another way.

You can also teach online. You can create an online product, either digital or physical, and sell it through a site like Amazon or your own website.

There is also an option for people who are willing to work really hard at a higher paying job for a few months out of the year and then travel for a few months out of the year.

Other families will find that all is needed – remember it doesn’t have to be expensive to travel – if you just rent out your house, you can make enough money to fund your travel lifestyle. Depending on your house and the situation. If you rent it furnished as a vacation rental, often you can earn even more by renting it out on a site like Airbnb.

Step 4: Reduce your possessions to the essentials

Back before we started traveling, we had a middle-class house that was full of junk.

Our kids had closets full of plastic toys that they hardly ever used. I had a closet full of clothes and I only ever wore a small portion of them. We had boxes in the basement that we hardly ever opened. Things that we bought that we only used a couple of times then they just sat collecting dust.

I don’t know if that sounds familiar at all to you, but that is the type of consumerism that I think consumes us. I didn’t realize how much this was affecting me.

There is so much mental and emotional energy that goes into buying – researching, purchasing, maintaining, repairing, selling, and then worrying about an item getting stolen – just to take care of our stuff. Most of it is stuff we don’t even need.

This is how consumerism ends up consuming us.

I didn’t realize how much energy that took up and how extremely liberating it was to let it go.

Before we started traveling, we decided to sell our house and most of our possessions. We kept a few thing in storage, but sold pretty much everything. We have just been traveling with carry-on luggage for the past seven years.

And WOW! What a liberating feeling to be free of all of that burden and only have to worry about the stuff that I can carry on my back!

The freedom to just be able to pick up at any moment and go anywhere is like nothing I have ever experienced. It’s wonderful.

Look at the stuff in your life and identify what things you haven’t used in a while. If there is something you haven’t used for an entire year, you probably don’t need it. Maybe even if you haven’t used it for a month.

Make an inventory of the things you don’t need. Get rid of them, sell them, or donate them to charity and see how you feel.

Step 5: Pick a place you want to travel to and set a date

With the whole world open to you it may be a little intimidating or overwhelming trying to decide where you want to travel. I’ve experienced that, I still experience that! But having all of these options is also really exciting because there’s a whole world of opportunity there.

Whether you want warm weather or cold weather, a big, busy city with museums and lots of activities, or you want a quiet beach with nothing to do but relax and bask in the sun. You’ll want different things at different times of your life. Think about the things that you want now or that you are going to want next in your first adventure.

Do some research and figure out what it would take to get there. Figure out what life is like there. Start getting excited and building up momentum to get you moving toward your goal.

Then set a date. There are a lot of steps and a lot of things to do to prepare for a life of travel which we talked about in this video. So don’t set a date too short but don’t set it so far in the future either where you lose sight of the goal or forget about the energy of it.

Pick the place you want to go and set a date. Then start taking steps to get you there. Make a list of the things you need to do to prepare and then start checking them off. You’ll find that you are there quicker than you think.

Now, granted, I don’t know you personally. I don’t know your background or skills. I don’t know what country your passport is from. But if anything that I’ve talked about in this video has inspired you or made you desire to travel more with your family – if you think that you can do it – I encourage you to foster those beliefs and make it happen.

I didn’t even know it was possible for me to live like this 12 years ago. All I did was take incremental steps, moving step-by-step toward the goal and I did it. And if I can do it, and if I was determined enough to do it, and you’re determined enough to do it, you can do it too.

There is one thing I want to talk about before we go.

There is a tendency that I think all of us have to project our happiness into the future. We think our happiness will come from goal achievement. But lasting long-term happiness does not come automatically.

Happiness is a habit that we have to cultivate every step of the way.

There are many ways to do that, but I just want to focus on one of them right now. And that is to be grateful for where you are at in your life right now. If you can develop that habit, then when you get these goals, when you accomplish what you want, you will be happy at that moment but you’ll also be happy every step of the way. You will have developed that habit to maintain that happiness throughout your life.

So, those are the five steps to begin a life of family travel. I hope you have found them helpful and I hope to create more videos like this in the future going into more detail on some of these topics.

If you’d like to stay up to date on that, please visit my website at PearceOnEarth.com and fill in your name and email address and I will keep in touch with you.

I’d love to hear from you about what questions you have regarding travel or living a life of your dreams. What kinds of things do you feel are holding you back? What are you afraid of? What worries you? What things have you tried that haven’t worked?

Is there anything that I could help you with? Things that you would like me to cover in future videos? I’d love to hear from you about that and the things that I could help serve you with! So if you’d like to leave your comment below, I’d really appreciate it and I hope to see you soon.

Until then, live well and enjoy life now!