Or at least a slightly modified version, where you fly back to the US to do a short on-site contract gig from time to time, or (more recently) just work remotely when you need to.
Naturally, if you do this 40 years earlier than the folks in the article, you have a much higher tolerance for cheap living. I notice the article mentions nothing about living in a little hut on the beach in some random backpacker paradise for months on end to stretch out the finances. Or of hitching across the sketchier parts of those countries the State department advises you not to go to (though if they did, they'd probably get a lot fewer worried emails from their parents, so maybe that's an upside).
But yeah, as tech folk, we get the ridiculous three-fold advantage of being able to do 100% of our job remotely, being able to deliver measurable results from short (ie., sub-3-month) engagements, and commanding a somewhat higher rate (ie., 3-10x) than pretty much anybody else with the same amount of flexibility.
I find myself dangerously close to slowing down in my old age. (I actually bought a couch yesterday.) Hopefully some of the rest of you lot will get out there and take my place!
I do very much the same as you alluded to here, the only difference being that I am in tech project management (cue a gasp!) so remote pm roles really don't appear that often so I tend to do 3-6months contracting then head off somewhere cool for month or so.
This year I've managed to hit Australia's East Coast for a month, do central America for a month and take the best part of a month off for the Olympics. I call it itchy feet syndrome!
My girlfriend and I decided to do this last year. We didn't have a house to sell, but we sold our cars, put everything else in storage, and left to see the world. We've been on the road for about 18 months now, and it's been quite a blast.
Being able to remotely work from anywhere with an internet connection really opens up the travel opportunities. It also means that you can start traveling now, as opposed to waiting until retirement age when you have a bunch of cash saved up. This also lets you travel more cheaply, and do more physically challenging activities, like say, climbing mountains, scuba diving, running marathons, or whatever.
On the flip side, being in the software industry (with relatively high levels of income) also means that you're not forced to travel cheaply when you don't want to, and you can splurge on interesting once-in-a-lifetime experiences, or spend time in more expensive countries, without wrecking your travel budget.
We're very fortunate to be in an era (and industry) where this kind of travel is possible, and I hope more folks decide to take advantage of it, particularly while they're young.
You can have the best of both worlds. I started working (iOS consulting) and travelling two months ago and I save more of my earnings here than I did living in San Francisco. Today I signed a lease to rent a shared house in northern Thailand and my rent is $160/month for a place that would cost a small fortune at home.
I found that constantly being on the move is difficult to keep up for weeks at a time. So now I have a base from which to explore the surrounding countries.
There's a surprising number of expat tech workers in the city (Chiang Mai) but now I can sit in a cafe without overhearing social-local-mobile startup pitches.
I can't see this being a problem in most places. Most places will be a small deposit plus a month up front in places in Asia, Central America etc, however more developed places such as London, Syndey etc will be less tolerant / desperate for bookings.
The two most useful tools I've found when doing this is Tripadvisor and Airbnb, you can usually haggle a room from either of these longer term.
Most landlords here will let you lease a place for 6 months as a minimum. Most have no problem with renting to foreigners. I had to pay a deposit of two months rent and one month rent in advance.
If possible try to avoid English-speaking property agents as they charge a premium. The best approach, at least in this country, is to drive around with a native speaker and spot 'For rent' signs.
Yep, a double entry tourist visa. It's probably the largest drawback of being here as I have to leave the country after three months and come back; this literally involves taking a bus to the Burma/Laos border, walking across a bridge then walking straight back to the bus.
There are ways round it though. If you take a 'Learn Thai' course at an accredited institution you get a year long visa. A little more expensive though.
Some nice stuff in here, especially that about "trans-Atlantic repositioning voyages" which I'd never considered. I'm assuming they have investments totaling over US $2m to be pulling that kind of monthly interest?
It's astonishing that they could spend as much as they do (the picture has details) but I suppose requirements for a retired couple in their 60s is different to a 20-something serial relocator!
If you intend a full spend down (which I would recommend, if you want to give your kids money, do it while your alive) you don't need nearly as many assets.
With an 70 year old white female and a 66 year old white male, they have about the same life expectancy - around 13 years. With no growth / interest that's ~$936,000, with a reasonable return it's around $100,000 less.
I'd actually like to know more about these "repositioning voyages". I did some googling but it seems like it's a travel agent thing which makes me wonder if there's a decent website that I can get a look at prices on.
I was just talking to my parents about this. They're in their second decade of "retirement" (really just working a little less and volunteering a lot more in their case.) Many of their friends fulfilled lifelong plans to sell their homes and move to the lake or someplace warm or travel the world. Most of these friends are now back in town having missed the connections that they built over a lifetime. One couple even bought the house next to their old house so they could reconnect with their neighborhood. God bless people like the author and her husband, but most of us are sustained not by where we live but by lifelong connections to others.
Writing this from Sevilla, Spain, where my wife and I have been living for about 2 weeks.
We've just completed 2 years of a digital nomad lifestyle, having previously spent between 1 to 11 months each in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Tulum (Mexico), Portland (Oregon) and Edinburgh. Of course those are bases from which we've also visited Mallorca, Granada, Lisbon, Uruguay, Santiago (Chile), Mendoza, Mérida, Dublin and Paris. This is done while working on average 7-8 billable hours, 5-6 days a week, with some gaps in between for "touristy stuff."
All of the advice in the article about settling in to a new place rings true, particularly the internet connectivity situation. We've had difficulties in about half the places we've lived, but have also had the good fortune of incredibly considerate locals who have bent over backwards to assist.
Because we're both working, we decided to keep our house in Los Angeles and rent it out. We started with my friend acting as a property manager, but have since found that as long as we have a handyman, plumber and various other maintenance and repair people, the middleman only causes delays in communication. It's pretty amazing what can be done from the other side of the world.
We'll be in Europe until the end of January (as Americans, the Schengen agreement is a continual thorn in our plans), and haven't yet determined where we'll head next. Financially, the expensive part is hopping from place to place. If you can find somewhere whose tourist visas allow 6 months (UK, Mexico) or where you can pop across the border for a day and get it renewed (Argentina), you can cut down on a lot of expenses (and stress) by planting yourself for longer.
All that said, I highly recommend it. The opportunity to experience other cultures, learn a new language, and gain a different perspective on life is invaluable. Even for the process of winnowing your "stuff" down to what you're willing to carry with you while traveling for months on end.
It also has the side benefit of making you one of the more interesting people at any gathering you attend.
I tried this many moons ago and unless you have some sort of unique, valuable skill that new clients will put up with limited communications it will be really, really hard. I was able to gain clients in the city but after I left and the project finished I was left dry. Most of the nomads I've met already had a long standing, ongoing relation with their job (ie. the server admin that knows and ran the platform at one time, the webapp programmer that was in the office, built the stack, and now just updates it from time to time).
It was me working in some internet cafe somewhere in SE Asia versus the guy that can be down to their office for a face to face in 30 minutes. While there are successes on rentacoder and odesk these are the exception. Mostly you'll be competing against some guy with much lower overhead in a developing country.
After a while I realized that my objectives were orthogonal to the clients. I wanted to travel first and work second. They wanted the work done on demand and didn't care if you were 2 days away from your next port of call.
If you want to be a nomad, be a nomad first. That means taking whatever job you need to raise money. I've done app dev, translation, babysitting, bartending, ushering, and electronic repair. I've met ex-developers from the dotcom bubble who were now working as crew on a yacht.
Quit my job in December and been running my own business from the road since. Been to Dominican Republic, Jordan, did a 2 month road trip around the states and visited a few other places.
The great parts are flexibility, ability to travel, and low costs.
The much more difficult parts tend to be socially-focused rather than business-related.
Around 7 years ago, I went on a vacation to Japan and Korea and I had made more money after I came back from Adsense income. Decided I could do my job from anywhere and moved to Korea and been here since.
Interesting article. I'd love to hear from anyone who does this with kids (I would guess at a slightly lower moving frequency)? I grew up in several places as a kid (my Dad's an engineer) and I'd love to find a way to give my children some of the same experiences.
Also I'd really appreciate if those of you who work remotely at a good level of income could share how you go about finding gigs. Repeat customers? Retainers? Short term project to short term project?
I'd be interested in hearing alternative takes on retirement in general.
It'd be interesting to see if the idea of "retirement" gets disrupted and the economy moves from a primarily labor intensive (and physical ability oriented) to knowledge intensive (and mental ability oriented).
We're already seeing people work longer, but I wonder if the notion of retiring will go away or if people will keep working as long as they can keep thinking clearly & feel they can create something of value.
White-collar work has even more age discrimination for reasons that have little to do with mental ability. Blue-collar workers can keep going into their 60s. White-collar workers peak in earnings around 45 to 50.
For a variety of perverse sociological reasons, companies measure people on their decline curves and bad-case performance. Investment banking analyst programs exemplify this. You don't have to be smart or socially suave to succeed. You have to be average-- after a double all-nighter (and most people aren't).
This is twisted because if a company's well-managed, no one sees the right side of the decline curve. Ever.
Older people retain their general capability, and have a lot more insight and experience, so normal-case capacity doesn't decline for most, but they lose the ability and desire to participate in shared suffering for 14 hours per day.
Sixty-year-old blue collar workers can still keep going. It gets increasingly painful to do the work, but no one fires them until their bodies can't handle it any more (on average, around 70). On the other hand, sixty-year-old white collar workers who haven't played the game well will have to deal with younger bosses (a sign of career failure) and mounting age discrimination.
That was actually a joke. I don't personally have student loans, and no one can predict airfares 4 decades out.
Most of what I say that seems negative is actually morose humor. I know (and you probably know) that I'm a fair deal smarter (and many HN readers, including you quite likely, are as well) than the people trusted to run the world. I used to find it disgusting that world was run by such stupid people (with an occasional morally-bankrupt smart person in the mix). Now I find it hilarious. In a perverse way, I take enjoyment in watching powerful people fail at their jobs, with detailed insight into everything that I could do better. You can become envious when you see empty-headed smooth-talkers making millions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing, or you can see it objectively as an imbecilic but utterly comical incineration of resources. There's actually an upshot in that. If we ever tire (as a collective) of those sideshows and reallocate the resources, we can do some great things with them.
I'm positive in the sense that I see potential for humanity to be a lot better than it is. It doesn't even take that much, because things are so stupid (especially at the top of society) that small dabs of smartness can deliver immense improvements. Just being rational and decent to one another would take humanity light-years past where it is. The disturbing thing is that societies invariably form elites that are invested in keeping everything broken, and as people become more distractible, those elites become more entrenched.
For example, while the recent crop of "social media" startups has produced some interesting software, they've done nothing to unseat the existing corporate elite. Real "disruption" means that health insurance CEOs become unemployed, and probably go to jail on manslaughter charges. Now that I could get excited about. VC-istan is just a distracting side show to make liberal upper-middle-class kids thing they've got a shot at the big game, but it's a fun one to watch (and heckle).
That makes sense. FYI I deleted my comment because I didn't feel like it added anything.
I think you would actually like SF - there are a lot of companies building real software, and if there's any smugness, it's that you can work at what you love, make more money than the Wall St. folks, and do it in a t-shirt and shorts.
I appreciate that you took the time to write, I understand where you're coming from a lot better.
I worked for two startups that were duds (in different ways) but I like the idea of startups. I like what we can do as technologists, but have much less affinity for a lot of what we actually do. There's so much, across the industry, that is just waste.
The problem of the wrong people making decisions is almost certainly ancient. Shakespeare called it "the insolence of office" (Hamlet). I like the idea that people can stand up and try to change it. Unfortunately, I don't see VC-istan as being that. From what I've seen (which is not everything) I'm not inspired.
They're around 70, so depending on how much they want to leave for their offspring, losing money might not be a problem. If they sold their house for $1.2 million (not uncommon in some parts of California), they could continue their current lifestyle into their 90's without touching other assets.
Basically, their health will most likely fail before their money does. It's sad that biology currently dictates such things, but it looks like they're enjoying every minute of the time they have left.
Or at least a slightly modified version, where you fly back to the US to do a short on-site contract gig from time to time, or (more recently) just work remotely when you need to.
Naturally, if you do this 40 years earlier than the folks in the article, you have a much higher tolerance for cheap living. I notice the article mentions nothing about living in a little hut on the beach in some random backpacker paradise for months on end to stretch out the finances. Or of hitching across the sketchier parts of those countries the State department advises you not to go to (though if they did, they'd probably get a lot fewer worried emails from their parents, so maybe that's an upside).
But yeah, as tech folk, we get the ridiculous three-fold advantage of being able to do 100% of our job remotely, being able to deliver measurable results from short (ie., sub-3-month) engagements, and commanding a somewhat higher rate (ie., 3-10x) than pretty much anybody else with the same amount of flexibility.
I find myself dangerously close to slowing down in my old age. (I actually bought a couch yesterday.) Hopefully some of the rest of you lot will get out there and take my place!