How To Upgrade Your Lifestyle and Lower Your Cost-of-Living so You Can Travel More

Introduction: Welcome to Badass Digital Nomads, where we're pushing the boundaries of remote work and travel, all while staying grounded with a little bit of old school philosophy, self-development, and business advice from our guests.

Kristin:    You know, critics of remote work say that you need meetings and face-to-face interaction in order to get things done. But we all know that communication and community are two of the most important factors for success in a location independent lifestyle. So every time you listen to an episode of this or any podcast that you find value in, I challenge you to share the wealth. Take a moment to think of one person in your professional or personal network who might benefit from listening in. Then share it with them and tell them why. Doing this will help you absorb and apply the info that most resonated with you from the episode, putting it into practice in your own life while delivering value to someone you care about. And with that, let's get on with today's show.  

Kristin:    00:02:17    So I will start with, with a theme of today's live stream. And the theme is on how to travel more. So how to drastically increase the quality of your life by decreasing your lifestyle. Oddly enough, it seems counterproductive, but hear me out. So one of the things that happens, well, which we all, which we all know because we're all adults here, is like once you get through the traditional school system, you get to the work system. So we go from being like, it's almost like in jail, <laugh>, like as little kids we start as, uh, going to preschool and then going to kindergarten and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, elementary school, high school, and then we go to college or we go into the workforce and then we, or college, then the workforce, whatever combination of things that you do. And then you just start working and you start trying to like do the things that your parents were doing while you were in school <laugh> before.  

Kristin:    00:03:28    So it's like this cycle. And the reason that everybody is working is because this is just like part of the human experience, right? If we didn't have to work, we would still want to do something because otherwise you would just be bored and go crazy. But what happens is that once you get into the workforce and start making money, you also enter the rat race, which is something that's not good for anybody, even maybe the people at the very top, because the people at the very top aren't necessarily happy. Usually they might have more money, more power, they also have more stress. I'm not saying everybody, but a lot of them. And, um, maybe more health problems or things like that. Like they're still affected in a negative way by stress despite having reached the pinnacle of the rat race. So, okay, we know that the rat race is a flawed system, but until now there hasn't been another alternative.  

Kristin:    00:04:31    But today's alternative, which is what I talk about every single day, <laugh>, is working remotely in some way, shape or form this remote work revolution, digital nomad revolution. So how does that relate to being able to travel more and increasing your quality of life? Well, when you're in the remote workforce, the rat race is no longer present in your daily life and it no longer matters. That means you don't have to care. You really literally don't have to care what anyone thinks. <laugh>. It's like you're isolating yourself. I don't wanna say isolating yourself. I'll say insulating yourself from the bullshit of the rat race. So by stepping out of the rat race, you don't have to care about what kind of clothes you have, what brand of anything you have, what kind of car you have, because there's no res reserved parking place to park your fancy car in front of the office.  

Kristin:    00:05:42    You pretty much, when you go remote, you completely dissolve and eliminate this social structure of the rat race. And if you think about it in your life, if none of that shit was relevant anymore, how would the quality of your life change? It would probably go up a lot. It would free up a lot of mental energy, emotional energy, and obviously, um, your finances would improve because besides not having the typical expenses of commuting to work or buying your lunch or buying five coffees a day, or, um, having to pay for gas or your wardrobe or wasting time, because time is money. So wasting hundreds or thousands of hours a year doing things that you don't wanna do, it's like all of a sudden when you incorporate remote work into your lifestyle and your personal life and your professional life, your quality of life just astronomically increases.  

Kristin:    00:06:50    Like it gets to this level of freedom that is almost, it's like infinite basically, because instead of having to climb the rat race, you just step out of it. So imagine the amount of energy that you spend throughout your career trying to do something, climb the corporate ladder, uh, whatever it may be that's related to, to the rat race. And then what if you just stepped out of it and you were like, no, I don't care about that anymore. Um, what kind of mental and financial and physical resources would that free up for your life and in making such a huge change, what would the effects be? Because, you know, as that old saying goes, if you like, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, but what if you all of a sudden did things 180 degrees different then what would the result be on your life?  

Kristin:    00:07:58    And that's something that I've been pondering this week. Um, it's funny because I saw, I follow a lot of digital nomads and remote freelancers and people like that on Instagram, and they don't know me, most of them, but anyway, sometimes I'm watching their stories and I comment on their stuff and they're probably like, who is this girl, this remote work cheerleader who's like stalking my stories, but I saw this guy, I forget his name, I think he is a programmer or a, a startup founder or something. Same thing, right? And he had posted a story in like a sky club or it was some VIP or some airport lounge and then also on a business class flight. And I just had this epiphany, like it hit me that he was just nonchalantly posting it because it was part of his, his daily life. But you know how you can tell the difference between, um, when people are bragging and when they're just actually sharing what's going on in their day?  

Kristin:    00:09:06    So this guy was, um, he was show, he was showing that, and I realized it was just a normal part of life. So when you, to get to the point, when you exit the rat race, you are genuinely doing these things and living your life jet sitting around the world, whether it's in business class or on top of a bus or whatever, because you genuinely want to do it and you genuinely enjoy it. And it's just a natural part of your daily life. And there's nobody to impress when you work from home. The only comparison you have is yourself or your goals or maybe somebody who inspires you, but it's just such a healthier lifestyle than being surrounded by a bunch of people that maybe you only like some of them or half of them, or you're biting your tongue at work because you don't wanna say the wrong thing or you don't respect some of the people that you work for or that you work with, or you don't have anything in common with them.  

Kristin:    00:10:17    You don't see eye to eye on your life philosophies or even the business strategy that your company's pursuing or whatever it is, it causes this internal conflict. And so, yeah, when you don't have to worry about that anymore, you just, like, it loses its charge, it loses its power. Like the feeling of the rat race, having zero control or perceived influence over my life is just such a breath of fresh air that I, I find it hard to put into words. So that's why I'm trying to <laugh> do so right now. But this is what, okay, so how do you do this? You want to travel more, you want to become a digital nomad, or you just want to have more flexibility in your work life? Well, what is the first thing that you do? And right now I'm doing this digital nomad challenge where it's a a 30 day program with a different topic per week to helping people jumpstart their path to becoming digital nomads.  

Kristin:    00:11:21    And the week that's coming up is about travel and finances. And so this has been on my mind a lot, but you need to start living below your means. You need to start living now as if the rat race doesn't matter, as if people's opinions don't matter because they don't. And as if social status doesn't matter because these are things that Naval Ravikant, the CEO or founder of AngelList, he calls them stupid games. I, I think something like that. He says, if you play stupid games, stupid social games, you win stupid social prizes. I'm paraphrasing, but it's something along those lines. And he has 500,000 followers on Twitter. So obviously that is a stupid social prize, but it also is influence in some way. So, you know, social media has its pros and cons, but here's somebody who has a lot of influence and a lot of money saying that that is stupid <laugh>.  

Kristin:    00:12:28    You know, it's a stupid social thing to try to climb this, um, corporate ladder or one up each other with status games. So by no longer caring about that, what kind of things can you cut out of your life? What kind of expenses can you eliminate? And what kind of worries can you eliminate? Just think about that because once you do that, all of a sudden you have more money, you have more peace, you have more perceived time because all of a sudden your your time is not taken up completely with these other stupid things. And you can then, yeah, just save money and start to eventually, you don't even need to buy your freedom. You just need to realize that you have freedom, you have freedom of choice, and you have freedom of, of how you spend your money. So if you decide to no longer buy into the economic principles and spending habits of a very consumeristic society, and you decide that you are going to spend your time and money in other areas, you become rich in that moment.  

Kristin:    00:13:51    Nobody can take that from you. That is your decision. So it's shifting from like a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. Living below your means and giving yourself a bigger buffer for freedom is basically like giving a middle finger to keeping up with the Joneses. And all of a sudden that's not important anymore. So now you can just take trips that matter to you or start spending your time developing your business idea or your side hustle, or doing self-improvement work, el exploration, just getting to know yourself better. What do you like to do? What do you want to do? What would you do if you didn't care what anyone else thought or what anyone else's opinion was? So that's what's on my mind today, guys, because when you're a digital nomad, you're living your best life. Like you're living the life that's best for you, whether that means you're traveling or not, but it's knowing that you have the ability to travel when you want. You have the financial resources to travel if you want because you're not wasting it on bullshit <laugh>. And it doesn't matter who sees it, it doesn't matter if your friends see it, if your family members approve of it, it just matters if you're having a good time.  

Kristin:    00:15:23    Yeah, so a lot of people talk about travel hacking and travel hacks and booking cheap stuff, which is definitely very relevant, but I think the first way to set yourself up to be able to travel more is to cut back on on expenses that you don't need superfluous purchases. I'm just wondering, what are the long-term consequences of living against your natural will? Like what are the energetic or physiological consequences of doing things day after day that you don't believe in and that you don't like? Like that has to be pretty bad. I don't know if there's any science on this, but you know, when you hear something that you disagree with or you get mad about something, it, like, you feel this physiological response in your body. So if you are going to work at a job that you hate, then this isn't applicable to everybody.  

Kristin:    00:16:40    But if you actually do hate your job and you hate your commute and you don't care about it and you're just doing it for a paycheck, then what is that? How do you get out of that if you don't really like try to wake up because you are just in this pattern of like negativity where you are agreeing to do things that you don't wanna do or that you don't believe in, or you're working for people or a company that, that doesn't resonate with you. It just can't be good. So you, you need to get out of that <laugh> or obviously on your own time, but just think of it, start thinking about how it could be if you worked somewhere else or if you worked for yourself, or if you did it something a different way, instead of putting the pressure as like, I have to quit my job tomorrow, just start thinking about what would you do if you didn't have to work there?  

Kristin:    00:17:42    Putting things as a what if scenario is like a form of play, it's a form of it takes the pressure off. And as a lifelong recovering perfectionist and overachiever, I know what it's like to put a lot of pressure on yourself and to be really hard on yourself. But what if you didn't have a timeline? What if you just decided, you know, I don't wanna be in this rat race anymore. I don't believe that it's real. I don't believe that it's something I have to do. So what would I do if, uh, I was just going to leave this frat race as like a sunk cost and start over? What would I do? Because we can't change the past, but we can make decisions in the present that change our perception, that change our mood, and that have an effect on the future. But I saw a quote, it was in a book by David Wolf, he is a kind of a health guru.  

Kristin:    00:18:55    It said something about like, instead of being frustrated, what if you were fascinated or instead of feeling frustration, what if you felt fascination? And that goes really well with this scientifically proven concept of how to generate ideas. For example, ideation comes out of play brainstorming and, and varied results come out of a playful mindset, not a very serious mindset. And as somebody who gets easily frustrated, that really resonated with me. Like, okay, instead of frustration, fascination, and it's easy to remember and you will feel a lot of frustration when you're doing something new and you'll feel a lot of frustration when you run your own business. And you'll feel a lot of frustration when you are learning something that's difficult or when technology doesn't go <laugh> as as planned or as expected. And when you travel, when things go wrong or any time in life. So it's also interesting, like you guys are saying about working when you, when you don't have to or working more for appearances and things like this, it is different depending on your culture and which country you're based in.  

Kristin:    00:20:24    But also the cool thing about being an expat and living outside your home country is that you don't have that kind of perceived peer pressure to fit in in society because in a good way, the people, the locals there don't know you yet. And they really, they don't care, but not in a bad way. They just are all wrapped up in their local gossip circle in their local community. And so when foreigners come in and out, there's no pressure or expectations to be like fitting in somehow you're just not gonna fit in completely anyway. So I find that it's really nice to be able to live somewhere without having like the constant like societal pressure to do certain things, participate in certain things. And I'm not antisocial by any means. I mean, I, I like to recover alone by myself and just have time with my thoughts.  

Kristin:    00:21:35    But I am also quite outgoing, as you probably noticed, and I'm quite open. But being in Florida and seeing how many obligations my parents have to go to is like a reminder of what life is like and how many things you have to say no to, to say yes to yourself. So if you're living in a, in a place where you have a lot of responsibilities and a lot of demands on your time, just know that it's okay to say no. And that saying yes to one thing can mean saying no to a thousand other things. Money. Larry says, money allows you not to have to do things you don't wanna do. Exactly like Naval was saying in his podcast, money doesn't solve all your problems, but it solves money problems. And that's totally true. But once your basic needs are met, and once you have enough money to be financially comfortable and, and live life on your, uh, less expensive terms than they used to be, then you are completely free.  

Kristin:    00:22:46    So if you decrease the cost of your lifestyle, if you ignore the Joneses, if you decline to participate in the rat race, you are richer. Just, it just is like by default. You become richer in that moment, the moment you realize that. But you can grow your wealth by continuing to live below your means, by saving money, by declining, to spend money on things that aren't going to make you happy or aren't going to contribute to your life that are just on autopilot, those kinds of purchases. And you can also become more wealthier, uh, wealthier when you don't spend time in ways that don't fulfill you. So of course, sometimes we all have things that we need to do that we don't want to do. That's normal. Sometimes your friend needs you to be there for them and you're gonna drop whatever you're doing to be there, whether it's in person or on the phone. Sometimes you need to do chores, sometimes you need to run errands. Obviously we all have to do things that are just part of life. But having more resources, whether you're making more money or whether you're spending less, can just increase the quality of your life so significantly and decrease your stress immediately, even if you're in debt, you know, just knowing that you can change your behavior and you can start paying it off and you can cut back will just give you a sense of like ease.  

Kristin:    00:24:23    Yeah, modern society, it's, it takes a lot to undo the, the damage <laugh> of our, of our minds, our mindset and our assumptions. Because when everybody is given the same playbook, we start to think that that's real. Larry says, locals may not judge, but other nomads will. I have found many to be judgemental and big gossips. What what is happening in that situation, I believe, is that the nomad community is becoming like a physical community. The nomad community begins to operate with a social structure that is present in conventional life because people know each other, people know each other's businesses. People have traveled together, people become friends on social media. And so you start to build those social constructs that you don't have when you're just a vagabond. So I've definitely noticed that, and I think that that's probably just part of human nature, but we can step out of that also. So yeah, it's unfortunate, but I also think that sometimes the people that are really driving the drama aren't going to make it long-term in the digital nomad lifestyle. I think that they will burn out or they won't be able to sustain it.  

Kristin:    00:26:04    And that's just my opinion, but, or they'll just end up hurting themselves in the end. But I think that overall, the majority of people who are attracted to this lifestyle and like to travel and, and are open-minded and open to meeting like diverse people and, and having humbling experiences and having empathy for the world, they're going to act differently than maybe your group of friends from high school  

Kristin:    00:26:40    Or from work or something because you're choosing those people as people to interact with. But then also they are on the frontier of this movement and they left a situation that they didn't like that wasn't making them happy. So they were attracted to this lifestyle for a reason, for everybody. It might not be the best reason, but everybody is trying to find a better way to live life. And so I think that that by default attracts a certain type of person. But like anything, when you get a lot of people together, then there's going to be some clashes and some gossip and things, mo money, mo problems, <laugh> mo money, less old problems, more new problems. But if you can keep it all in in perspective, it's okay, but the more money you have, the more you don't wanna lose it. And I've been on all sides of that coin.  

Kristin:    00:27:47    And that also comes with the territory. Actually, something Naval said really resonated with me too. He said that he has made and lost a fortune multiple times, and I have as well, at least a fortune to me. He said that, um, I think it was his business partner screwing him over or somebody not paying him or things that happened outside of his control. And after working really hard on something and expecting to get paid, he didn't get paid and he had to start over. And that has definitely happened to me. But we can either wallow in it or just try to create better luck and try again. Because as old Winston Churchill says, when you're going through, hell just keep going. So when things suck and they're not going your way, you just have to live to survive another day and see what happens tomorrow.  

Kristin:    00:28:44    Okay, well first, last week we had a big week. I was on a podcast called Eat, drink Destination, eat drink, talking about eating and drinking. Who likes food <laugh>? Who likes drinking alcohol? No. Um, so that podcast is up. I should just share my newsletter with you guys. You can sign up for my newsletter if you want. I'm now sending out emails every week of cool things that I find and remote work tips. If you want to be the first to know about new stuff, then join Patreon. I to give a shout out, shout outs to Patreon patrons and join my mailing list.  

Kristin:    00:29:37    I'm doing, like I said in one of my emails that I'm copying Tim Ferris. It's like a five bullet friday because so much stuff goes on every week. So on this one, it has tips for single moms to start their own business. Um, it has the link to the interview with Katie McNulty, who is posting amazing videos of springtime snow in the mountains of Central Italy at Sunset. It's just absurd. It's so pretty. So if you wanna learn how she's been able to finance her travels around the world for six years, you can check that out. Um, and then speaking of pasta, I was on destination, eat, drink, podcast, talking about all of the best places in the world to find food or all of the, my favorite places and my favorite meals that I've had traveling to 60 different countries. So that's in there.  

Kristin:    00:30:40    Who saw the Estonia Vlog part two? I'm sorry, there were no ghosts in this one, but the vlog came out this week. And then I also put a travel tip, a new app that I found that I really love. Thanks for signing up to my list, Larry. I'm really excited. I've only sent out two emails so far, um, or two weekly emails so far, but I, I <laugh> went through and organized my Apple Notes yesterday. It took about two hours because I get so many ideas, I'm just constantly putting them in my notes app. And I came up with so much stuff that I was like, oh yeah, I forgot about this. I forgot that I wanted to share this or talk about this or buy this thing or research this thing. So now the best of the best is gonna go in my weekly email. Um, and there's so much amazing stuff coming. I can't wait to announce.  

Kristin:    00:31:39    I really like if I could, I, and I'm finding faster ways to do things. I sent out some messages to some digital nomad friends today. I am like, let me just hire you to do this because if I do it by myself, it will take forever. So I'm trying to work smarter, not harder to give you guys more stuff. The swag is coming soon. Larry Merch to everyone else. <laugh> Traveling with Kristin t-shirts are coming and I'm bursting at the seams with excitement about them and I just can't wait to share them with you guys. Okay, what else? Oh, yeah. Where are my, I would like to give a shout out to my patrons, Darren, Larry, Margaret, Susan Tanner, Teklordz and Walt. Thank you guys for supporting Traveling with Kristin content creation. I appreciate you. And if you want, we can stay tuned for a live hangout after this.  

Kristin:    00:32:48    I will post the link in Patreon. Okay guys, thanks for coming and hanging out on this Sunday. I hope that you got some value from today's rant and discussion. And if you're watching the replay, let me know in the comments, are you going to make any action choices about changing your life, rejecting the rat race, rejecting, keeping up with the Jones' mentality? And are you gonna cut back on your expenses so that you can travel more, be wealthier, and have more freedom? Let me know in the comments if you're not in the live chat. And if you're listening to this somewhere else, then shout out <laugh>. Okay guys, see you tomorrow and Tuesday at 12:00 PM for new videos on traveling with Kristin and youtube.com/digitalnomad. And don't forget to share my content with your friends who also want more freedom, fun, and travel in their lives. Bye guys. Bye. AFL, he says, thanks Kristin for another great live video. You are welcome. Ciao. Thanks for listening. Remember to leave a review and share this episode with someone in your network. And if you want more tips and advice on working remotely, make sure to sign up for my insider list @ travelingwithKristin.com/subscribe, where you can find links to download free resources like My Digital Nomad Starter guide. Of course, also subscribe to youtube.com/digitalnomad so you don't miss any of our weekly videos, Digital Nomad News or Live Streams. See you there.