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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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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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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…
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We have health insurance, now fuck off…
As was forecast in in a previous post, we selected the Cigna Global Silver plan. Hopefully we’ll never find out how good, bad, or mediocre our new international health plan is. Wasting thousands of dollars on premiums and never using health insurance is a great outcome. A better outcome would be not buying health insurance…
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Travel Vaccination Magic 8 Ball
When you have a list of 27 places that you might travel to, the vaccination plan becomes a project of its own. Reading through CDC recommendations became complicated enough that I had to put together a tracking spreadsheet. It was either that or one of those serial killer tracking bulletin boards with strings and push…
Traveling Toward Fire
A Premature FI Experiment
