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The Actual Cost of Expat Life in Costa Rica: A Family of Four’s Budget Revealed
Costa Rica is a popular expat destination due to a variety of appealing factors. These include easy entry requirements, beautiful surroundings, friendly people and low cost (allegedly). We spent two months in Costa Rica and would highly recommend it to anyone seeking an expat living situation. I have done posts recapping our budget and reflections…
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September Budget In The Red
I always get excited when budget time rolls around, and I was particularly interested in this month. September is the first full month we have spent in Japan, which is our most expensive location (not counting Guam). If I had been allowed to peek ahead to the result of any one month’s budget before the…
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August Gap Year Budget Review
We have concluded another budget month while slow traveling internationally on our family gap year. I’m excited to crunch the numbers and see how our projections are matching reality. It’s the chance to prove or disprove that this approach of slow travel is sustainable over the long haul. Either way it’s useful data. The month…
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International Cell Phone – The Simple And Verified Approach
A small but critical part of the research for international travel surrounded how to manage our cell phones. Our phone numbers are critical for all sorts of things. The least important of those is staying in contact with family friends. We could find ways to get in contact with them without our phones. The most…
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July Gap Year Budget
July is our first full month of travel and is our first chance to see if the financial aspects of this trip are going according to plan. We projected expenses for the places we are traveling using numbeo, but the accuracy of that in practice is a complete unknown to us. Being in Costa Rica…
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Did We Just Achieve FIRE?
Market Runup The US and international stock markets have been on a great run following the lows seen following the tariff announcement. With new record highs I wanted to check in on our progress toward at-home FIRE. At the time we left on our international trip, we were at FIRE for international travel but not…
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The Best Things In Life Are Free
Travel Log: Day 12 (7/9), Costa Rica Today was the undisputed best day so far in Costa Rica, thanks to a completely free activity (aside from a $3 Uber ride). This is exactly the antidote to yesterday’s failures. The place we went to is called “El Salto” or “The Jump”. It’s a small waterfall with…
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Failures and Volleyball
Travel Log: Day 11 (7/8), Costa Rica Failures It was a day of failures and lessons learned. Lesson #1 – We aren’t professional cleaners This lesson kicked off first thing in the morning with an email from our property manager saying the new tenants thought the kitchen and bathrooms weren’t cleaned sufficiently. We put a…
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Whirlwind Out The Front Door
With my employment ending, I expected to have ample time to leisurely prepare for the start of our international trip. I was entirely wrong about that. We would have been in an hours deficit had I stayed at my job any longer. JC and I were cranking through tasks almost non-stop over the last week.…
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Unemployed Loser Or Bitchin’ Individual Investor?
Today is my first day without a job since I was in high school. I turned in all of my work equipment, said all the final goodbyes, and very anti-climactically walked out of the building on my own. It felt a little bit like a jail break because I was sure that a company the…
Traveling Toward Fire
A Premature FI Experiment
